Israel’s agriculture ministry has reached an agreement to relocate the majority of families in the Bedouin Azzama tribe from their current residences to a recognized settlement near Be’er Sheva.

The Jerusalem Post provided some details of the agreement:

According to the agreement, the tribe of Azzama, made up of 900 families, will be given the option to move to a designated area for resettlement.

The families are each to be given a plot of 0.4 to 0.5 hectares (1 acre), under the condition that they move within 45 days. At the end of this period, residents who refuse to resettle will face enforcement measures.

According to the report 486 of the families who make up the tribe have agreed to resettlement. Those who do not move within the designated time will be evacuated.

After protests forced the government to shelve the Prawer-Begin plan for integrating the Bedouin into society, responsibility for working with Bedouin and revising the plan fell to the agriculture ministry. At the time, Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir said that he wanted to “gain the Bedouin’s trust and negotiate with them” before agreeing on a new plan. The recent agreement was concluded after two years of negotiations.

In recent months The Tower Magazine has offered a series of in-depth looks at different aspects of the Bedouin situation. Liam Hoare wrote about the challenges facing Israel in the Negev in the September 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine. One of those challenges is how to strike a balance between integrating the Bedouin into society while allowing them to retain their rural way of life. In the January 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Akiva Bigman looked at the opposition to resettlement plans for the Bedouin and observed that the opposition to Israeli plans is “exclusively political in nature, designed to undermine Israel’s sovereignty and portray it negatively.”

The Tower Magazine’s photographer, Aviram Valdman, vividly captured life in Segev Shalom, one of the officially sanctioned Bedouin settlements in the Negev, in a photo essay appearing in the March 2014 issue.

[Photo: deror_avi / WikiCommons ]