Samah Salaime
+972 Magazine / November 13, 2025
By taking aim at Palestinian communities in Israel’s south, Bennett proves he offers little change from the most racist figures in the current government.
In late October, Naftali Bennett drove his SUV into the Naqab/Negev desert for a whistle-stop tour of Israel’s south. The former prime minister visited Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, spoke at a conference in the affluent Jewish town of Omer, and ended the day by filming a video brimming with racism toward the Palestinian Bedouin communities in the area, blaming them for virtually all of the country’s ills.
“They’re building a Palestinian state here in the Negev,” he said in the video, posted to his official social media pages, after having used his speech at the conference in Omer to warn: “If we do not act, we will wake up to an October 7 for the [Jewish] settlements of the Negev.”
“There is endless polygamy here where a Bedouin marries three Palestinian women from Hebron and their children are Palestinian [with] a Palestinian mentality,” his video continued. “You see a lot more Islamization than in the past; once, the Bedouin were secular. There’s no governance: traffic accidents, driving like crazy, racketeering. We have to put an end to this. Governance must be restored to the Negev. We will do it.”
Undoubtedly, Bennett’s tour of the south marked the latest step in a renewed push for the premiership, ahead of the next election scheduled for October 2026. Though he does not currently have a seat in the Knesset, he registered a party earlier this year under the name “Bennett 2026.” Recent polls place it second only to Netanyahu’s Likud, putting Bennett at the head of an opposition bloc that would stand a chance of being able to form a government if elections were held today.
A former director of the Yesha Council — a settler organization overseeing all Jewish municipal councils in the occupied West Bank — Bennett was once seen as being firmly on the right of Israeli politics, but he has successfully recast himself as a darling of the ostensibly liberal anti-Netanyahu camp. Still, clearly he is convinced that stoking fear of a “Bedouin monster” and offering the usual seasonings of incitement designed to whet the average Israeli’s appetite is what will pave his way back to the top of Israeli politics.
The desert heat must have clouded Bennett’s thinking: he seems to have forgotten that his brief stint as prime minister in 2021-22 was largely made possible by Bedouin votes from the Naqab, cast for the Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas who ended up joining the coalition. Moreover, Bennett’s agreement with Ra’am included the recognition of several unrecognized Bedouin villages in the very same region.
Indeed, every Jewish settlement built — or planned — in the Naqab stands either beside the lands of Palestinian Bedouin villages or directly on their ruins. The Bedouin are the native inhabitants of this land. They have lived here for centuries, and they are not going anywhere.
But of all Bennett’s outlandish claims, none was more telling than his assertion that the Bedouins were “once secular.” Since the foundation of the state, Israeli leaders have consistently portrayed the Bedouin of the Naqab as conservative, tribal, and religious. For a religious man like Bennett, this implies that a “secular Arab” is somehow more acceptable than a religious one. Would he make the same claim about Israeli Jews? That seems doubtful.
Some Jewish residents of the Naqab responded to Bennett’s remarks by reminding him that Bedouins, too, were among those murdered and kidnapped on October 7; that some helped rescue civilians fleeing the attacks near the Gaza border; and that Bedouin villages were badly hit by rocket fire from the enclave — in part because they lack bomb shelters and because the Iron Dome missile defense system often skips over both recognized and unrecognized Bedouin communities while protecting nearby Jewish towns.
“Anyone who wants to make cheap points on the backs of the Bedouins, probably the most disadvantaged population in Israel, is nothing more than a populist leader who wants to replace the populist leader who precedes him,” Dr. Haim Weiss of Ben-Gurion University wrote on Facebook after Bennett’s visit.
A demolition blitz in the Naqab
Less than a week after Bennett’s tour of the south, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir came on a visit of his own to launch “Operation Southern Hawk 3.” Despite what the name may suggest, this is not a direct-to-VHS action movie from the 1980s, but rather what Ben Gvir describes as a “war against trespassers on state land.”
Playing his favourite role of military governor cracking down on supposed “lawlessness” among Palestinian citizens of Israel, he arrived with Israel Land Authority (ILA) officials and police officers from the Yoav Unit — a heavily militarized police force responsible for enforcing state policy in Naqab Bedouin communities — armed with some 600 demolition orders. This time, the “innovation” was artificial intelligence: “Advanced AI systems were used to locate and identify early land seizures through aerial scans,” the ILA’s statement boasted.
Local Bedouin leadership organizations, which also denounced Bennett’s remarks and announced plans to pursue a legal investigation against him for incitement, condemned Ben Gvir’s campaign as part of a broader, systemic policy to Judaize the Naqab: to uproot its Palestinian population from ancestral lands and confiscate them for military and settlement projects, all under a deliberately misleading legal and media façade.
“This talk of ‘invasions’ is a distortion of historical reality,” the Steering Committee for Arabs of the Negev declared. “The Arabs of the Negev are the rightful owners of the land, most of whom were displaced in 1948, and over 90 percent of whose lands were expropriated. These operations will not terrorize the citizens or change reality. We will not leave our land, and we will continue our legitimate struggle for full recognition of our right to live in dignity on our ancestors’ soil.”
Despite their differing styles, Bennett and Ben-Gvir have found common ground in the Naqab. Both have declared war on the region’s Palestinians in hopes of winning votes by stoking racism and fear among Jewish-Israelis. Both also lack any genuine plan for the south, which is one of the most neglected and impoverished regions in Israel.
With over 170,000 registered voters, the Bedouin community holds strong electoral power in Israel — even if the right has long sought to suppress their turnout. A capable leader, one who does not brand potential allies as enemies on the way to the ballot box, would see the community as political partners of real influence.
Two years on from October 7, the Naqab is still undergoing a long, painful recovery. It deserves far better than Ben Gvir and Bennett.
Samah Salaime is a feminist Palestinian activist and writer
