Summary
The process, as Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin presents it, by which the Negev Bedouin — cut off by forced resettlement from their traditional spatial, social and economic connections and not integrated into the Israeli collective — have been drawn toward the Arab and Muslim worlds, expressing identity increasingly in Muslim terms in the public sphere (Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, PDF p.147, 166).
Details
- In Segev Shalom’s surveys, “Muslim” rose as a primary identity label from 8.8 percent of respondents in 1996 to 22.2 percent in 2000 and 49.6 percent in 2007, while “bedouin” fell from 75.4 percent to 19.0 percent over the same period (Table 5.1) (PDF p.157).
- Stated regular mosque attendance/religious participation rose from 48 percent in 1996 to 69 percent in 2007 (Table 5.3); the text gives the 2007 figure as “nearly 75 percent”, held as printed beside the table on the source page (PDF p.158).
- Behaviours Dinero lists as solidifying the connection — mosque attendance, Polygyny, veiling in full Hijab and niqab, and omra and haj participation — all increased substantially over the decade to 2007, aided by global media (El-Jazeera, El-Arabiyya) and improved relations with Arab states (PDF p.167).
- Layish (1984, as cited) documented the same movement among West Bank Bedouin in the early 1980s and concluded, in Dinero’s quotation, “above all what brings the Bedouin closer to orthodox Islam are the exigencies of the modern state” (PDF p.166).
- Sheikh Salam Abu-Kalif, Imam of Segev Shalom’s central mosque since 1992, gives the parallel local account (28 June 2007): in 1983 there were no mosques in the Negev Bedouin community, some ten were built around then, and schooling and literacy drive the younger generation’s wish to connect to the Quran (PDF p.166-167).
- The Islamic movement’s involvement in local Bedouin politics, evolved in the 1980s and fully developed in the 1990s (Marteu 2005:280, as cited), is both a cause and an effect of the process, furthering an Islamicist, nationalist agenda in cyclical fashion (PDF p.168).
- More educated men, and residents with higher incomes, were more likely to favour the Islamic parties over Jewish/Zionist parties in 2007 (p=.02 and p=.00), while more educated under-40s were less likely to frequent the mosque (p=.01); Dinero cautions the party preference need not indicate wholly increasing orthodoxy (PDF p.145).
- Abu-Saad et al. (2000:59, as quoted) supply the mechanism Dinero adopts: “those unable to identify with the national corporate identity of the state [will] ultimately seek out other corporate identities with which to identify, such as the Islamic movement and Palestinian nationalism” — though Palestinian nationalism, he finds, is not strongly expressed in Segev Shalom (PDF p.166).
Related pages
Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, Bedouin identity, Segev Shalom, Hijab, Polygyny, United Arab List