The tribe members claimed that they were fleeing a blood feud with other tribes and Egyptian police, but Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that the 800 were the “advance team” and that thousands more had been blocked from coming.
“I feel very close to the Azazmeh tribe,” Defense Minister Moshe Arens said Tuesday in Beersheba shortly after appealing to Bedouin youth in Lod to join the IDF. “But currently it is inconceivable that people enter the country without permission. Had they gone through the official channels…then we may have been able to organize it.”
Pini Badash, head of the local council of the Negev town of Omer, was glad to see them go. “This wasn’t the great Exodus from Egypt people made it out to be. It’s not our role to solve all the world’s problems, too.”
But Amnon Rubinstein of the far-left Meretz Party called the deportation morally wrong. “These people are persecuted [in Egypt] because their relatives serve in the IDF,” Rubinstein said. “By accepted criteria these people truly deserved political asylum.”
The Bedouins had been kept under guard at a fenced compound, where the Israeli army supplied them with food, water and medical care.
“They will be sending them to their deaths,” said Amar Abu Muamar, son of the head of the El Azazmeh tribe in Israel, who petitioned on behalf of his Egyptian clan members. Abu Muamar said the El Azazmeh Bedouins are involved in a blood feud with a much larger Bedouin tribe, the Tay’a.
Justices rejected the petition after hearing from State Attorney’s Office representative Yochi Genessin that the Egyptians have promised to guard the facility with hundreds of troops. The Egyptians also apparently have promised to mediate between the feuding tribes and put an end to the threat so that the El Azazmeh Bedouins can return to their homes in safety.
Yehuda Ressler, representing the El Azazmeh tribe, argued that the Egyptian members of the tribe are entitled to Israeli citizenship because they had been registered with the Israeli military governor between 1967 and 1979. Thirty-two family heads had worked for the IDF during those years.
Ressler said the Egyptian members of the clan were caught in the Sinai by chance when the territory changed hands in 1982. “The center of their life is in Israel because that’s where the center of the clan is,” he argued.