SBS Dateline | Israel s Mabo

Is Nuri el-Okbi a Bedouin version of Australia's indigenous land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo?

Professor John Sheehan, an Australian authority on native title compensation, certainly thinks he could be. He’s currently helping Nuri in his struggle to reclaim land taken from his family by the Israeli authorities 60 years ago.

Despite living in the Negev Desert for hundreds of years, long before modern-day Israel was even formed, Bedouin who want to live on their ancestral land are being accused by Israel of 'trespassing'.

Video journalist Amos Roberts travels with Nuri to the edge of the disputed land where he was born and which he’s not even allowed to set foot on. Nearby, Amos witnesses a village being bulldozed by Israeli authorities, then rebuilt by defiant locals - for the seventh time.

The Israeli government says the Bedouin do not qualify as indigenous people, and it’s just enforcing laws it inherited from the British and the Ottomans.

But Israeli geographer Professor Oren Yiftachel, who learned about the Aboriginal land rights struggle when he lived in Perth, accuses the government of declaring 'terra nullius in reverse'.

All previous Bedouin land claims have failed, but Nuri and his legal team hope that this will be their 'Mabo moment'.

WATCH - Click to see his story.

EXTRA - Follow the links on the right-hand side of the page for more from both sides of this story.

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