Bedouin walk with their camels near the Israeli city of Arab, in the Negev desert. (Inbal Rose, Maan Images)

While Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas were wheeling and dealing at Annapolis, several Israeli government ministries and security agencies were deploying their combined resources in a massive operation aimed at Israel's southern Negev Desert.

While the eyes of the world are on the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is in the middle of a campaign to complete the displacement of Palestinian Arabs who are also Israeli citizens.

The indigenous Bedouin are the target, and their lands are required by the state in order to complete the implementation a master plan for the Negev.

The plan relegates the Bedouin to ghetto enclaves while allocating huge swathes of territory for Jewish suburban development and agricultural communities.

The Negev is the final frontier inside Israel, the last tract of largely undeveloped land in the state.

Israel has virtually completed the dismemberment of Palestinian lands in the center and north of the country, and now is consolidating the "Jewish redemption" of the southern desert.

These Bedouin lands are coveted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) which has published plans to move large numbers of Jews to the Negev.

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To make way for new JNF communities, the "unrecognized" villages of A-Tir, Um Al-Hiran, and Twail Abu Jarwal were destroyed during 2007 in military-style operations involving large forces of police and soldiers, displacing hundreds of families.

The Interior ministry has also sent airborne crop dusters to poison the Bedouin fields with broad-spectrum herbicides. The feared Green Patrol, a paramilitary unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, conducts these operations.

There are over 150,000 Bedouin in the Negev desert, with well-established territorial rights dating back to the Ottoman Era.

However, immediately after the founding of the state in 1948, the government began to confiscate land and move the Bedouin to ever decreasing areas, while allocating state resources for the development of new Jewish-only towns and agricultural settlements.

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