It was a scene made for television news. A long row of black-uniformed officers in riot gear across the desert plain, flanked by mounted police.

Stones thrown and dune buggies bursting in, covering the protestors in a curtain of sand. Suspects being grappled to the ground. It would make for compelling viewing that evening. And would be very unrepresentative of what had actually transpired over the past 24 hours.

On the one side are the Bedouin Al-Attrash tribe that claim their historic grazing areas are being taken from them and a lack of planning permits forcing them to build illegally. On the other, Israeli authorities and lobby-groups accusing the Bedouin of invading state-lands, turning down generous government resettlement proposals and general lawlessness.

Just the previous night, motorways across the northern Negev were blocked by stone-throwers and a reporter’s car was set alight.

Actually, the violence was extremely short. Police and villagers at Sawa grappled only for a few minutes. A handful of stones, a few stun grenades and it was over. The police took off their helmets and waited around for lunch.

Some of them were Bedouin themselves and were soon chatting amiably with the villagers. Ostensibly, the confrontation was over the Jewish National Fund’s plans to plant trees to the west of the village. In reality, it was a series of empty gestures that both sides knew would change nothing on the ground. They were just going through the motions.

The row of tiny saplings planted that morning by JNF workers, themselves Bedouins from a neighbouring tribe, were unlikely to last more than a few hours. No one had much doubt that the moment night fell and the police disappeared, the locals would uproot them. But they really weren’t the point.

JNF, together with the Israel Lands Authority, were claiming an Israeli stake to the land, which the Bedouin claim belonged to them for generations but have failed to convince the courts.

To make the whole situation even more absurd, this is a year in which JNF doesn’t normally plant trees.

It is shmita, the seventh year in which the Torah decress the land is to remain fallow and untended.

But JNF have obtained a special rabbinical dispensation to plant these trees, as they apparently needed to “guard” the land. Haredi politicians were unimpressed and criticized JNF nevertheless.

The environmentalists of Israel’s Society for Protection of Nature have also attacked the move, claiming that the trees are unsuitable for the desert ecosystem. But none of this would have made the headlines this week if it wasn’t for the unique makeup of the new Israeli government, in which the leader of small right-wing party is prime minister thanks to the votes of an Islamist party.

There’s nothing new about clashes between Bedouin, police and planning authorities in the Negev.

What’s new is that for the first time the Bedouin have political power, through their representatives in the coalition – Ra’am lead by Mansour Abbas, one of the government’s chief architects.

Mr Abbas’ political career depends on the government staying in power long enough for the funding he has secured for the Arab community to materialise and the plans to fight crime and solve planning issues have effect.

But politics sometimes force party leaders to act against their real interests and he had little choice but to threaten the coalition by withholding Ra’am’s votes this week. If not, his rivals in the Joint List could attract valuable votes next election.

Likewise the right-wing ministers in government, especially Housing Minister Zeev Elkin and Interior Minister who are in charge of development plans need to prove to their constituencies that they haven’t “gone soft” by sitting in coalition with Islamists.  

By Wednesday night, a compromise seemed to have been worked out. JNF was to suspend work but not cancel the plans. Elkin claimed that they hadn’t planned to continue the “planting” anyway beyond Wednesday. It was a sham of a compromise but so was the entire saga.

As was the attempt by the opposition, especially Likud, to try and use the crisis for its own political ends. On Tuesday a group of Likud MKs, egged on by their leader who tweeted that “for the first time in 73 years a senior member of the Israeli government is opposed to planting trees in the land of Israel. Shame on you Bennett.”

Mr Netanyahu seemed to have forgotten that it was his own government which back in May 2020 had first suspended the JNF work due to fears of tension with the local residents.
At the time it was Labour party leader and Business Minister in the Netanyahu government who had raised concerns and the prime minister agreed to halt.

No-one even noticed at the time. It simply wasn’t seen as an important matter, certainly not at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. But now as leader of the opposition, and with the fifth “Omicron” wave crashing down on Israel, things must look very different. But the coalition, for now at least, seems to be holding.

“To be honest, I don’t want Ra’am to leave the government,” said one Bedouin activist off the record.

"Every Israeli government has failed to sort out our problems in the Negev and I’m not sure this government can either, but at least with Ra’am on the inside, we can improve things here and most importantly, we can get a hearing.

"Look at all the journalists, they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Ra’am.”