state. Aziz al-Touri, a representative of the village has asked why Jews are permitted to move to the Negev and live in kibbutzim, moshavim and isolated farms while that right is denied the Bedouin desiring to dwell in their own villages. The interviewers comment that the 1948 Palestinian exodus never ended. Land ownership The Bedouin families of Arakib say they own about 4,600 acres of the Negev desert, and that they paid property taxes to the Ottoman Empire and later to the British Mandatory authorities in Palestine. Community leaders say they were forced by Israel's military into settlements along the border of the West Bank in 1951, and that they have been pushed off their land whenever they have since tried to return. Israeli officials say the property was taken over by the state in the early 1950s because it was abandoned, and because its inhabitants were unable to produce deeds. They maintained that the Bedouins have been squatters who refused to pay rent; they cultivated land that did not belong to them, and were raising animals without livestock permits. Authorities claim that there has never been a permanent Bedouin settlement in the area. The Ottoman authorities permitted the clan members to graze their sheep and cows on this land, but did not give them ownership over it. According to the Israel Lands Administration (ILA), Bedouins began illegally settling in the area in 1998, and several dozen families built homes in the area in 1999 when it appeared the government was attempting to seize the land. The ILA offered to rent the land for 2 NIS per dunam, but the inhabitants refused to pay and "continued to infiltrate the land year after year." In 2000, an Israeli court order banned the Bedouins from entering the area. The ruling was disregarded, as Bedouins continued to move into the area and plant trees. In 2003, the ILA secured a court order to evacuate the residents, and the case went to the Israeli Supreme Court. In 2004, though one resident speaks of crop dusters poisoning the fields in the later 1990s, the Israel Land Administration used crop duster fumigation to destroy the residents' wheat crops. This practice was outlawed by the court in 2007 after the Adalah legal center for Arab rights in Israel filed a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court on behalf of the residents of Al-Araqeeb and Wadi al-Bakar. Tens