Via Ma’an News, Israel is close to carrying out plans to forcibly displace tens of thousands of Bedouin Palestinians in southern Israel, demolishing their villages, and erecting new Jewish settlements in their place.

Israel’s Prawer Plan calls for the relocation of 40,000-70,000 Bedouin, the demolition of about 40 villages, and the confiscation of nearly 200,000 acres of land in the Negev Desert. …According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the plan will destroy the communal and social fabric of tens of thousands of Bedouins, condemning them to a future of poverty and unemployment.

For those who don’t know, the Negev Bedouin are a group of Arab tribes that have lived in Palestine for centuries. Many of them were displaced in the 1948 war, but large numbers still remain in southern Israel. The Israeli state has long subjected them to abuse and denied them access to “basic services and infrastructure, such as electricity and running water.”

I am absolutely baffled as to how anyone can look at the Prawer Plan and not acknowledge Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing.