Kher El-Baz

Summary

Director of Social Services in Segev Shalom, thanked in the acknowledgements of Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin and quoted in it at length on how Jewish Israeli society views the Bedouin (Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, PDF p.23, 170-171).

El-Baz (3 June 2007), on social change: “Ten years ago [in the late 1990s] men and women would never be seen sitting together in meetings in Be’er Sheva. Now this is happening all the time. It’s just hard to believe” (PDF p.181).
On “otherization” (3 June 2007; emphasis in the source): “The way Jewish society sees us is much worse than in the past”; airport security treatment of Bedouin “is not about security. They know it and we know it”; “No other community in Israel has tried harder to become part of Israeli society than the bedouin — to gain a sense of belonging. The Jews are drafted, but the bedouin will volunteer for the Army, just to belong” (PDF p.170).
He concludes (3 June 2007): “The Jews are using the fear of Arabs or Muslims to make life here miserable” — asking “do I, as a bedouin, have a right to feel like a human being or not?” and “Do they see us as citizens, or as enemies?” (PDF p.171).
In the Postscript (Miami Beach, 18 May 2009), El-Baz, still Director of Social Services in Segev Shalom, is Dinero’s source for the town’s latest news: Amir Abu-Mu’amar’s re-election in November 2008, the death of Sheikh Ouda in early 2008, the positions Segev Shalom had acquired in the labour force for the new Ir HaBahadim base — virtually all of them, in his account, low-skilled and lower-paying — and the nearly completed poultry processing plant, expected to employ perhaps 450 people by early 2010 (PDF p.233-234).

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