By the time this text is printed, the residents of the Bedouin village of al-‘Araqib, a dozen or so kilometers north of Beersheba on the northern threshold of the Naqab/Negev desert, will have recorded the village’s 174th demolition. The largest of these demolitions, in 2010, involved almost a thousand Israeli policemen riding fleets of trucks and bulldozers, using clubs, tear gas, and rubber bullets to drive the residents forcefully out of their improvised ramshackle structures. At its most populous, the village numbered about four hundred people, mostly from the extended al-Turi family. Now only a small core of a dozen or so inhabitants remains, within the grounds of the old al-Turi cemetery, right next to the graves. The current demolition count started only in the early 2000s, but the first expulsions had already begun in 1951, three years after the end of the 1948 war, when the Israeli military turned its attention to the Bedouins and started expelling them, as it did with other Palestinians.
Almost ninety thousand Bedouins, some 90 percent of their population in the Naqab, were pushed over the Egyptian and Jordanian borders. The rest were scattered internally and concentrated in a limited area in the more arid parts of the desert. Since then, at irregular intervals that sometimes lasted months, other times decades, the original inhabitants of al-‘Araqib and their descendants have exercised their “right of return,”
— source palestine-studies.org | Eyal Weizman | Spring 2020