Indigenous (In)Justice

The New York Times reported this story about the demolition of the Palestinian Bedouin Arab village of Al-Araqib in the Naqab (Negev),¹ southern Israel, on August 25, 2010. Less than a year later, in April 2011, the village had been demolished and rebuilt 21 times. According to Israel’s police spokesman, “the homes had been ‘illegally built’ and were destroyed in line with a court ruling issued 11 years ago” (BBC News, 2010). The intensity of the demolitions and the entrenched positions of the Israeli government and the Palestinian Bedouin Arabs over the village’s existence made Al-Araqib a symbol of the...