essential services, including the development of necessary infrastructure such as schools, roads, hospitals, and sanitation and electric networks are also severely impeded or denied all together. Such discriminatory policies also extend to the Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel who live in villages in the Naqab. In 1965, Israel passed the Planning and Building Law 5275-1965, which designated these Palestinian villages as ‘unrecognized villages’.51 The Israeli government denies unrecognized villages access to basic services, such as water, electricity, telecommunications, sewage systems, healthcare, education and proper infrastructure. This is in stark contrast to Jewish-Israeli communities established in the same area, which are given automatic recognition, services and support despite the fact that they are often built without the required permits.52 Historical Connection between Natural Resources, Services and Forcible Transfer “Services, natural resources, the Oslo Accords and forcible transfer are very much connected, and this connection did not start with Oslo. Upon reading Ilan Pappe’s [Israeli historian] book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, you have a very vivid description of what was happening before 1948, during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s when Zionists first came to Palestine. Ilan Pappe describes how they would be invited to Palestinian homes, and while one would be having tea with the Palestinian family, another would be outside examining the land. The principle of the Zionist plan from the very beginning was all about having as much territory as possible with the least number of people, and this requires forcible displacement. They used British maps [from the British Mandate] and explored the land to determine the locations of the natural resources such as water for agricultural land. This formed the basis for the 1947 UN Partition Plan [which was never realized]. During 1948, the Zionist military plans were decided according to the locations of natural resources and the existing [Palestinian] population. In 1967, immediately after the war, military orders were enacted which set the legal framework for the occupied territory. They declared this territory as 51 BADIL, “Al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine’s Southern Bedouin,” al-Majdal Magazine, Autumn 2008-Winter 2009, 27, available at: http://www.badil.org/en/publication/periodicals/almajdal/item/6-al-naqab-the-ongoing-displacement-of-palestine’s-southern-bedouin.html 52 Mossawa Center, The New Wave of Israel’s Discriminatory Laws: The Legal Status of Palestinian Arab Citizens of Israel over the Last Decade, September 2014, 31, available at: http://www.mossawa.org/ uploads/4864.pdf 23

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