The last session of the School for Peace mixed cities change agents course took place in the Negev. The meeting started in the Bedouin town of Rahat at the offices of New Dawn in the Negev. There the participants talked to Jamal Al-Kirnawi about the organization’s activities. Specifically, they heard about its activities that promote co-existence and education among youth in Rahat.

The meeting also included a lecture by Oren Yiftah’el about the policy of land and land planning in Israel, as it affects mixed cities. He spoke about the concept of nationalization and privatization of land: The two stage process involves first nationalizing Palestinian lands, then privatizing them. He presented a large number of cases of Palestinians who found themselves victims of this process.

After the lecture, Rabah Al-Ammour, one the program participants, gave his colleagues a tour of Rahat. This included a meeting with a resident who is being evicted from the land he lives on in order to make way for a new neighbourhood in Rahat.

Finally, the group visited the unrecognized Bedouin village of Al-Araqib. In recent years, the village has been demolished by the government over a hundred times. In Al-Araqib, the group met with Sheikh Siyah Al-Touri and his son Aziz, who presented the history of the village and demanded that Israel halt its growing racism.