Rahat
About 10 miles north of Beer Sheva, Rahat is the largest of Israel’s seven legally recognized Bedouin towns. About half the Negev’s 150,000 Bedouin now live in these multi-tribal communities, where the government provides schools, utilities, and other required services, though not nearly enough for the mostly-unemployed residents. The other half of Israel’s Bedouin live in dozens of more widely scattered “unrecognized” villages, which means they receive no services at all.
Rahat’s 40,000 residents have plenty of mosques, their spires visible from the highway to the east. There are a variety of residential neighborhoods, each designated for members of a single tribe, though a newer neighborhood is intended to be mixed. There’s a shopping district with a large vegetable market, restaurants, and a range of stores from shoes to hair salons to electronic equipment.
Jamal, my host for the day, spoke to my class last week about his work on Bedouin community issues. He’s a young social worker who grew up in Rahat from the age of four after his family moved with their whole village when the government reached an agreement with the sheikh. It took ten years before they could move from the tent they erected into their large new house. The tent, now converted to a sturdier but still tent-like structure, remains for lounging outside.
In our drive around the city — Rahat is now too big to be a town — we stopped at one of the four high schools, where the principal told me Jamal, who later did graduate work at McGill University in Montreal, was an example to other students, many of whom now go on to university.
Despite the interest in advanced education, the unemployment and generalized poverty typical of Israeli Bedouin life have brought with them increased drug and alcohol use and other indications of a society dealing with forces over which it has no control. According to Jamal, the high school kids become used to going off to Beer Sheva on their own, to wander around the mall and do whatever kids to. They’re not accepted exactly, he said, but they go anyway. Most remain in Rahat after graduation, partly for ordinary family-related reasons but also because there aren’t many places in Israel they can move to successfully.
Even a trip to Beer Sheva is not easy. There’s no bus service either within Rahat or between Rahat and the rest of the country (which is why, when I told Jamal I’d take a bus to meet him in Rahat, he just said he’d pick me up instead). Residents must walk a couple of kilometers out to the main highway or take sherutim, private group taxis that don’t always operate. According to this article, earlier this year community organizers persuaded the bus company to send a bus into into, as it routinely does even for much smaller Jewish communities (I didn’t have to walk to the highway last night when I left Midreshet Sde Boker, for example; the bus came inside instead). According to Jamal, the Rahat bus has not yet arrived.
As we wandered around town, some things seemed pretty ordinary for a 40,000 person city.
Some things didn’t.
Some things remain mysterious.
And some things just remain.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Thanks Dennis, for putting Rahat on the cybermap. It is barely on any other.
It is more than scandalous that no bus service connects the Negev’s ’second city’ with Beersheva and the rest of the country. Rahat –the only Bedouin city anywhere in Palestine, and the poorest city by socioeconomic indicators anywhere in Israel. A hands-on campaign should be organized by progressive Jews hand in hand with their Bedou brothers and sisters to publicize this and force the hand of the power brokers who control Eged and the Israeli public transport to serve this community.
Rahat deserves a college of its own and efforts should be made to demand a mikhlala, where courses will be taught in Arabic. Rahat could become a model for another kind of Israel if only people could organize to effect real change. Today the city is a monument in steel, concrete and mud to the apartheid that festers at the heart of Israeli society.
Jews should be encouraged to begin by their own initiative to move to Rahat to help build a community of togetherness, ta’ayush.
Assistance is needed for the Azial Youth Centre in Rahat described by Nick in his article “The Nowhere People” http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-pretzlik200504.htm Assistance is needed for the youth group One Step Foward. Nick writes of the Azial Centre created by Mohhamed Younis: “It has a computer room with fifteen terminals, a well-stocked children’s library and a demountable stage for theatricals and puppet shows. The centre provides opportunities for fun, learning and personal development - a beacon of light in a bleak environment; a beacon whose beam is about to be intensified. Mohammed has a dream and he intends to fulfil it.
The Bedouin in the Unrecognized Villages are unable to come to the Azial Centre, so the theatre will go to the villages. A van must be bought, a driver employed, glove puppets stitched and operators trained. It will take time and needs funding and - given the resources available - it will not be easy. But I have little doubt that Mohammed’s dream will be realized.”
The well-meaning people at http://www.dukium.org , some in their large villas and comfortable academic posts, should be doing more to help the so many kids and youth of Rahat, nearly two-thirds of the city’s population.
75% of the kids in Rahat finishing high school do not get the bagrut, the 12th grade certificate they need to go on to college or university. New schemes have to be invented to address that problem. As Dr. Awad Abu Freich of Shatil recently noted in regard to Rahat: “The number of pupils who passed was lower than in 2003, so what is the Ministry rejoicing about?
I think that after 58 years of independence, the State should be worried about the fact that more than 70 percent of Bedouin children do not matriculate. What program does the Education Ministry offer to bridge these gaps? And if it does offer something, apparently it’s not good. Because the fact is that nothing has changed for many long years.”
( http://www.nif.org/content.cfm?id=2647&currbody=3 )
These are the hard realities. The present system of apartheid needs disinventing. The answer in blowing in the Negev wind.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
I mentioned A Step Forward in Rahat above. Here their website:
http://www.step4rahat.com/Organization.htm They deserve support, material and otherwise. They’re making a change in Rahat, among kids, women’s empowerment, and have been working now a number of years. Against all the odds.
The filmmaker and teacher Kamila Abu-Zaela whom Dennis mentions in another blog
http://blog.dennisfox.net/index.php/archives/2006/11/27/rahat-on-film-with-an-aside-on-cultural-change/ is a member of the Step Forward staff.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:10 pm
[...] fall, when I visited Rahat, the Bedouin city a few minutes north of Be’er Sheva, my host was Jamal Alkirnawi, a social [...]
August 16th, 2008 at 1:57 am
i want some photographs of rahat buildings and others for students projects in http://www.thinkquest.org competition.