Neve Midbar Regional Council
Neve Midbar
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|
|---|---|
| District | Southern |
| Government | |
| • Type | Regional council (from 2012) |
| Area | |
| • Total | 32,700 dunams (32.7 km2 or 12.6 sq mi) |
| Population (2014) | |
| • Total | 7,000 |
Neve Midbar Regional Council (Hebrew: מועצה אזורית נווה מדבר, Moatza Azorit Neveh Midbar, Arabic: المجلس الإقليمي واحة, Majlis Iqlimi Newe Midbar) is one of two regional councils formed as a result of a split of Abu Basma Regional Council on November 5, 2012. This regional council is situated in the northwestern Negev desert of Israel and populated by the Negev Bedouin.
There are four recognized communities in the Newe Midbar Regional Council:
These communities are populated by almost 10,000 people (as of 2013), Bir Hadaj the largest of them.
There is also a number of "diaspora" Bedouin living in unrecognized villages and thus not eligible to municipal services, whose number is unknown.
Prior to the establishment of Israel, the Negev Bedouins were a semi-nomadic pastoralist society that had been through a process of sedentariness since the Ottoman rule of the region. During the British Mandate period, the administration did not provide a legal frame to justify and preserve lands’ ownership. In order to settle this issue, Israel’s land policy was adapted to a large extent from the Ottoman land regulations of 1858 as the only preceding legal frame. Thus Israel nationalized most of the Negev lands using the state’s land regulations from 1969 and designated most of it for military and national security purposes.
The 1948 UN Partition Plan, which was accepted by the Jewish leaders, envisaged most of the Negev (including most of the ancestral Negev Bedouin territory) as part of a planned Arab state, with the Jewish State of Israel situated to the north in areas with an existing Jewish majority. However, after the rejection of the UN plan by the united Arab nations, their subsequent declaration of war on Israel, and their eventual defeat in the 1948 Palestine war, the Negev became part of Israel and the Negev Bedouin became Israeli citizens.
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