Hura, or Houra (Hebrew: חוּרָה, Arabic: حورة) is a Bedouin town in the Southern District of Israel. It is located near Beersheba and beside the town Meitar. The town was established in 1989 as a part of solution offered by the state for the consolidation of Negev Bedouin population, and was declared a local council in 1996. In 2024 it had a population of 23,034.
Hura is one of seven Bedouin townships in the Negev desert with approved plans and developed infrastructure (the other six are: Ar'arat an-Naqab (Ar'ara BaNegev), Lakiya, Shaqib al-Salam (Segev Shalom), Kuseife (Kseife), Tel as-Sabi (Tel-Sheva) and the city of Rahat, the largest among them).
History
Prior to the establishment of Israel, the Negev Bedouins were a semi-nomadic society that had been through a process of sedentarization since the Ottoman rule of the region.
During the British Mandate period, the administration did not provide a legal framework to justify and preserve land ownership. In order to settle this issue, Israel’s land policy was adapted to a large extent from the Ottoman land regulations of 1858 as the only preceding legal framework. This enabled Israel to nationalize most of the Negev lands using the state land regulations of 1969.
Israel has continued the policy of sedentarization of Negev Bedouin imposed by the Ottoman authorities, and at first it included regulation and re-location - during the 1950s Israel re-located two-thirds of the Negev Bedouin into an area that was under a martial law.
The next step was to establish seven townships built especially for Bedouin in order to sedentarize and urbanize them by offering them what were stated to be better life conditions, proper infrastructure and high quality public services in sanitation, health and education, and municipal services. This was seen as particularly important since the birth rate of the Bedouin population in Israel is among the highest in the world - it doubles its size every 15 years. Not...
