Naqab

Summary

The southern district of Palestine — the Naqab and Beersheba (Bir al-Saba’) region, also printed Negev and Negeb in the sources quoted — whose ongoing Judaisation and whose indigenous Arab Bedouin people’s struggle for recognition of their land and rights are the subject of The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People (2012) (The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People, PDF p.1, 8-9 / printed p.81, 88-89).

Salman Abu Sitta is recorded as critiquing ‘Naqab’ as an inauthentic term for the Bedouin: pre-1917 maps do not use it, though British archives refer to ‘Negeb’ (PDF p.6-7 / printed p.86-87).
Bedouin elders called themselves the ‘Arabs of Beersheba’ (as printed, ‘urban al-saba’) rather than using either ‘Naqab’ or ‘indigenous’ (PDF p.6).
From the 1930s the region was presented by Ben Gurion and Weizmann as a central objective of full colonisation of Palestine; the Jewish National Fund and Zionist Commission developed a land-purchase strategy there, and Weizmann in 1945 spoke of irrigating the Negeb and settling at least a million settlers in it (PDF p.9).
After 1948 the majority of the Bedouin who remained were evicted from the western Naqab, which became a closed zone, and concentrated in the Siyaj northeast of Beersheba, losing most of their historical land through the Mawat classification and the mechanisms the article reconstructs (PDF p.11-12, 15).
At the article’s writing, half the Bedouin citizens of Israel lived in 46 unrecognised villages in the Naqab and the rest in state townships of the 1970s; the current plans would relocate 30,000 Bedouin, against demands to register 600,000 dunams (PDF p.18, 22).
For the district’s 1948 depopulation as other sources record it, see Beersheba.

tags
aliases	Negev, Negeb