Here is American journalist Max Blumenthal’s deeply perceptive, moving account of his recent travels through the Negev Desert, where the Israeli government is poised to implement a plan for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities and “concentrate” them in state-run, reservation-style townships.

Former Bedouin homes, Negev Desert.  Image: Occupied Palestine.

The Prawer Plan will extend to Bedouin Israeli citizens the same treatment that Palestinians have endured for decades.  It is grimly reminiscent of South Africa in the depths of apartheid, and North America through several centuries of ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples.

Max Blumenthal: “The Prawer Plan is only one element of the government’s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).”  This from the state that claims to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’  Hence Blumenthal’s choice of title: The desert of Israeli democracy.

Please read his account here.