With the establishment of Israel in 1948, military government was imposed on regions inhabited by the Palestinian-Arab majority, including the Palestinian Arab-Bedouin tribes of the Naqab (Negev). The justification was that the Arab... more
With the establishment of Israel in 1948, military government was imposed on regions inhabited by the Palestinian-Arab majority, including the Palestinian Arab-Bedouin tribes of the Naqab (Negev). The justification was that the Arab population who remained in Palestine, and became citizenry of the newly established state, perceived to pose a threat to Israel's security. The article examines the establishment and dissolution of the tribal courts in the Naqab during the military government period by means of a critical analysis of official archival documents and newspaper reports published at the time. These sources reveal the power structure and the security considerations for the establishment of the tribal courts in the Naqab. Additionally, the article shows how the case of the tribal courts sheds light on patterns of action employed by the military government and the Israeli political system from 1948 to 1966, and the policies implemented towards the Arab-Bedouin population in the Naqab.
Collaborative governance (CG) brings together representatives of all sectors for the purpose of reaching consensus-oriented decision making. We explore the reliance on local CG in minority society. As the closest tier of government to... more
Collaborative governance (CG) brings together representatives of all sectors for the purpose of reaching consensus-oriented decision making. We explore the reliance on local CG in minority society. As the closest tier of government to citizens, local government plays a crucial mediator role between citizens and the state. This is especially important in the case of minorities. In this chapter we focus on local attempts to increase women employment in the Southern Israeli Arab-Bedouin village of Hura. Given low socioeconomic conditions, we find that local authorities reliance on collaborative governance in minorities’ towns plays a crucial role in the attempts to mediate between stakeholders and exceed beyond the provision of basic tasks and responsibilities.
The struggle between Zionists and Palestinian Bedouin over land in the Negev/Naqab has lasted at least a century. Notwithstanding the state’s continuing efforts to concentrate the Bedouin population within a small swath of land, scholars... more
The struggle between Zionists and Palestinian Bedouin over land in the Negev/Naqab has lasted at least a century. Notwithstanding the state’s continuing efforts to concentrate the Bedouin population within a small swath of land, scholars have documented how the Bedouin have adopted their own means of resistance, including different practices of sumud. In this paper we maintain, however, that by focusing on planning policies and the spatio-legal mechanisms deployed by the state to expropriate Bedouin land, one overlooks additional technologies and processes that have had a significant impact on the social production of space in the Negev. One such site is the struggle over the right to education, which, as we show, is intricately tied to the organization of space and the population inhabiting that space. We illustrate how the right to education has been utilized as an instrument of tacit displacement deployed to relocate and concentrate the Bedouin population in planned governmental towns. Simultaneously, however, we show how Bedouin activists have continuously invoked the right to education, using it as a tool for reinforcing their sumud. The struggle for education in the Israeli Negev is, in other words, an integral part of the struggle for and over land.
Frederic Boissonnas travelled across Egypt during the interwar period. The photographic expeditions covered the land from the sand dunes and oases of modern Western Desert of Egypt to the Red Sea Mountains and Sinai Peninsula, and as far... more
Frederic Boissonnas travelled across Egypt during the interwar period. The photographic expeditions covered the land from the sand dunes and oases of modern Western Desert of Egypt to the Red Sea Mountains and Sinai Peninsula, and as far as Nubia in the south. With the spirit of an experienced traveller who is stepping into explored lands in the late travellers age, Boissonnas succeeded to reintroduce the traversed landscapes and its people through a classical eye in modern time. His travels showed passion to the desert monastic communities. Most of Egypt’s physical geography was well-mapped at the time by the Anglo-Egyptian Survey of Egypt post the Great War. Unlike the early travellers, Boissonnas traversed Egypt through an established railway network, automobile roads, caravan routes and steam boats, all visualised on an unusual classical travel map with modern transport lines. Nevertheless, many of Boissonnas’s photographs documented unconventional landscape perspective, while others reflected conventional pilgrims’ and travellers’ scenes with unprecedented aesthetics. The glass plates are invaluable. They survived the odds of humanity, unlike their counterparts of the “Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai” in 1868-69 CE (lost in Southampton Ordnance Survey headquarters in WWII) and the plates of the “American Colony of Jerusalem” in late 19th-early 20th centuries CE (lost in the Levant in1948 War)―a reminder of the current lost heritage in the region. Frederic Boissonnas’s complete collection had brought to life the state of the landscape in 1920s-30s CE before it was about to change once and for all.
The Naqab Bedouin have faced—historically and today—various Israeli settler-colonial practices and discourses aimed at erasing their status as natives of the land. Israeli representations of the Naqab Bedouin often stereotype them as... more
The Naqab Bedouin have faced—historically and today—various Israeli settler-colonial practices and discourses aimed at erasing their status as natives of the land. Israeli representations of the Naqab Bedouin often stereotype them as roaming nomads without any links (and consequently rights) to the land or to other Palestinian communities. Naqab Bedouin women's oral and embodied traditions constitute an important challenge to such settler-colonial representations. Women's songs, oral poetry and performances contain important historical counter-narratives, and they also function as embodied systems of learning, teaching, storing, and, to a certain extent, transmitting this community's indigenous memories, knowledges and ways of being.
The Naqab is increasingly and deservedly a site of interest within Palestine studies. The edited volume The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives (2014) significantly advances the present wave of critical knowledge production... more
The Naqab is increasingly and deservedly a site of interest within Palestine studies. The edited volume The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives (2014) significantly advances the present wave of critical knowledge production building on the foundational works of authors including Aref al-Aref, Ismail Abu-Saad, Ghazi Falah and Oren Yiftachel, and against the genre of orientalist and Zionist literature on the Naqab. A small community of predominantly young and Naqab-based scholars are leading concerted efforts to create this space of critical scholarship on the Naqab, of which this volume represents a central and significant effort. As such, this volume is essential reading for any researcher, practitioner or individual interested in Palestine and the Naqab, working with Naqab communities or critical knowledge production.
The article addresses the political power of nomadism, based on the paradoxical igure of the Bedouin. Through two Bedouin communities (from Western Sahara and Naqab in Palestine) persecuted by the colonial States of Morocco and Israel,... more
The article addresses the political power of nomadism, based on the paradoxical igure of the Bedouin. Through two Bedouin communities (from Western Sahara and Naqab in Palestine) persecuted by the colonial States of Morocco and Israel, the text strives to auscultate the disquieting aspects of nomadism as was foretold in the 14th century by Ibn Khaldun. Regarding Naqab, the article uses the analysis of three photos of Fazal Sheikh that document the relationship between colonization and climate change. From the perspective of heteronomous ethics, nomadism allows us a glimpse into the promise of other methods of inhabiting, away from possession and accumulation. Key words: bedouin, nomadism, State, community, inhabiting, heteronomy
This special issue presents articles on the topic of the politics of representation of the Naqab Bedouin both historically in the Ottoman and British periods, as well as in Israel today.
ABSTRACT Taking Israel’s National Health Insurance Law as a point of entry, in this article I probe how notions of equality and citizenship, secularism, and religion become entangled in the experience of Negev/Naqab Bedouins, who are... more
ABSTRACT Taking Israel’s National Health Insurance Law as a point of entry, in this article I probe how notions of equality and citizenship, secularism, and religion become entangled in the experience of Negev/Naqab Bedouins, who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I show how Jewish citizens have come to represent the secular and modern citizens in the region, while Bedouins, although mandated and claimed by policy and providers to be the ‘same’ and ‘equal,’ are always already imagined and characterized as other. Universal health care and the daily manner in which biomedicine is practiced in southern Israel provides an avenue for examining the Jewish valences medicine carries in southern Israel, Israel’s boundaries of inclusion, and the connection between biomedicine and secularism.
