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The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People

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Summary

Mansour Nasasra argues that a current and renewed escalation in Israeli policies towards the indigenous Bedouin of the Naqab and Beersheba emerges from two longstanding, fundamental aims: Judaising the Naqab, and putting an end to persistent Bedouin claims to their historical land and rights (The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People, PDF p.1 / printed p.81). The repeated demolition of Al-Araqib, culminating on 27 July 2010 in the razing of at least 46 homes by the Israel Lands Administration with over 1,000 police, is his outstanding example, and the 2011 approval of plans associated with the Goldberg Commission and Prawer to relocate 30,000 Bedouin to urban towns is the current form of what he presents as an ultimate demographic solution: bringing more Jewish settlers in and expelling the majority of the Bedouin of the Unrecognized villages (PDF p.1-2, 21-23). Against the official narrative that the Bedouin had no historical attachment to the land, he applies Cobo’s definition of indigenous peoples, adopted as a form of Bedouin identity and resistance, and reconstructs from archives, oral history and his own field interviews a continuous record of dispossession: the Zionist founding vision of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann in the 1930s-1940s, expulsion from the western Naqab into the Siyaj enclosed zone under military rule (1948-1967) on promises of temporary removal, expropriation through the Mawat land category against the evidence of the 1952 Weitz committee, and six decades of Bedouin refusal to surrender their claims. That refusal — Bedouin Sumoud on the land, return to and cultivation of ancestral land, court claims and, after Al-Araqib, weekly demonstrations that unified the Palestinian Arab minority and took the case international for the first time since 1948 — is his second thesis: the Israeli government “has actually failed in its long struggle to resolve the issues of Bedouin unrecognised villages and Bedouin land claims”, and present Bedouin demands pose a threat to a settler society precisely because they insist on indigenous rights (PDF p.1-2, 18-23).

What the file is

  • The file is Mansour Nasasra’s article in settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), the special issue Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743; printed pages 81-107, PDF p.1 carrying printed p.81 and PDF p.27 carrying printed p.107, so printed page = PDF page + 80 throughout. The running head is Nasasra, ‘Ongoing Judaisation’.
  • The byline is Mansour Nasasra, Department of Politics, University of Exeter (PDF p.1). The Biographical Note (PDF p.24 / printed p.104) adds that he teaches Middle East politics and International Relations there, that his work is based on oral history interviews and archival materials from his doctoral research, and that he spent considerable time in the main Israeli, Palestinian and British archives.
  • Structure: an abstract (PDF p.1-2); the headed sections ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Settler States’ (PDF p.2-6), ‘Controversial Indigeneity: The Naqab and the Beersheba Bedouin Case’ (PDF p.6-8), ‘Colonising in Palestine’s Southern District (The Naqab and Beir al-Saba’ Region)’ (PDF p.8-11), ‘From Nakba to Military Rule: Mechanisms of Controlling the Bedouin’ (PDF p.11-12), ‘The Bedouin Narrative: Transfer from Their Native Land to the Enclosed Zone’ (PDF p.12-14), ‘The Early Stages of Expropriating Bedouin Land’ (PDF p.15-18), ‘Al-Araqib: Symbol of the Bedouin Struggle’ (PDF p.18-22) and ‘New Israeli Initiatives: The Struggle Continues’ (PDF p.22-23); then Acknowledgements and the Biographical Note (PDF p.24) and 78 notes (PDF p.24-27). There is no headed conclusion section; the argument closes at the end of ‘New Israeli Initiatives’.
  • Access basis: open-license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0), downloaded from the publisher’s figshare file given in url.
  • The text copy is clean and complete, with === PDF p.N === markers for all 27 pages; quotations were checked against it. Printed slips are kept as printed and recorded under Open questions.

Section by section

Abstract and introduction (PDF p.1-2 / printed p.81-82)

The thesis and its two aims are stated in the abstract (see Summary). Al-Araqib’s demolition “has emerged as a new and potent symbol of the ongoing struggle between Israel and the indigenous population of the Naqab”, and its struggle must not be seen in isolation: Bedouin sumud “has long proved to be an effective form of non-violent indigenous resistance”, the government has failed to resolve the unrecognised villages and land claims, and the Bedouin “did not surrender their land claims and rights”. Since the 2011 approval of “the Israeli government plans to expel 30,000 Bedouin (Prawer and Golberg Commissions)” — “Golberg” as printed — the conflict “have put the Naqab Bedouin case on the international map”; thanks to Al-Araqib and Bedouin advocacy, “for the first time since 1948 the Naqab Bedouin case reached the international community”. The paper’s announced order is settler-indigenous relations, contested Bedouin indigeneity, the founding Zionist vision and military-rule expulsion to the enclosed zone, and the current relocation of 30,000.

Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Settler States (PDF p.2-6 / printed p.82-86)

The concept ‘indigenous peoples’ came into scholarly use in the 1970s; Linda Smith calls ‘indigenous’ ‘problematic’, overlapping ‘First peoples’, ‘First Nations’, ‘People of the land’, ‘Aboriginals’ and ‘Fourth World Peoples’. With no agreed definition, UN Special Rapporteur Jose Martinez Cobo’s 1986 definition “has de facto been adopted”: peoples with historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies, distinct from the sectors now prevailing, non-dominant, and determined to preserve and transmit their ancestral territories and ethnic identity (quoted in full, PDF p.3). Ian Brownlie preferred ‘minority’ and made claims the core element — cultural and linguistic identity, protection of land rights in traditional territories, and political and legal self-determination — though the ‘minority’ label may itself affect access to self-determination. Richard Falk recognised indigenous claims for full self-determination: indigenous peoples’ grievances centre on encroachments on collective identity and so “represent a competing nationalism within the boundaries of the state”, challenging territorial sovereignty and unified ‘nationality’; new states in particular see themselves at risk. Benedict Kingsbury lists five fundamental claims — human rights and non-discrimination, minorities, self-determination, historic sovereignty, and recognition as indigenous peoples — and concludes the global concept is “unworkable and dangerously incoherent […]. But it is a concept of great normative power for many relatively powerless groups that have suffered grievous abuses”. Resistance, following Tully, takes two forms — struggling against the structure of domination, and attempting to modify the governmental system of control — through everyday words and deeds, exercising indigenous authority, and appeals to international law; the Australian Aborigines’ land-rights struggle and 1972 Aboriginal Embassy and the New Zealand Maoris’ self-determination are the worked examples. States resist recognition because, in Champagne’s words quoted, the “inherent counterclaim to political action, territory, precedence, and cultural autonomy brands the indigenous communities as antagonistic to the nation-state”.

Controversial Indigeneity: The Naqab and the Beersheba Bedouin Case (PDF p.6-8 / printed p.86-88)

Identifying the Naqab Bedouin as indigenous opens the question of the rest of the Palestinian community; the position taken is that “all Palestinians should be considered indigenous to the land”. Scholarly approaches consider the Naqab Bedouin indigenous, but there is no settled consensus: the concept deeply challenges “the official Israeli narrative insisting that the Bedouin had no historical attachment to the land”, is contested as inapplicable by Israeli scholars, and is contested by scholars who associate indigeneity with pre-urban attributes. Bedouin elders never used the term — they call themselves “‘urban al-saba’, the ‘Arabs of Beersheba’” (as printed) — and Salman Abu Sitta critiques ‘Naqab’ itself as inauthentic, pre-1917 maps not using it. Alexander Kedar agrees the concept applies in international law, and the Negev Coexistence Forum and the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages have considered the Bedouin indigenous peoples, while many Arab activists use ‘national minority’. Measured against Cobo, the Bedouin meet the criteria: pastoralism, wells, traditional agriculture, cemeteries, villages before 1948, their own language, laws, customs and Islamic beliefs, tribal belonging, a traditional economy, and present political and juridical work for recognition of ownership under traditional tribal law. They have joined the UN branch of indigenous people and been accepted — an initiative of activists, academics, lawyers, NGOs and Jewish-Arab organisations, not a shared community decision, and contested by some local leaders. Assimilation has partly failed: half the community rejected moving to urban areas, and town-dwellers keep separate tribal neighbourhoods and refuse to mix with other tribes — “Tribal space and refusal to mix with other tribes is an obvious way of protecting indigenous life.” The ‘ethnic group’ framing (Jakubowska, Cohen, Law-Yone) is presented as the state’s device to dissociate the Bedouin — ‘good Arabs’, ‘our Bedouin’, the ‘Bedouin sector’, served by separate agencies such as the Bedouin Development Authority and Bedouin Education Authority — from other Palestinians; Law-Yone rejects ‘indigenous’ because rapid sedentarisation makes it “technically incorrect to call them Bedouin”. Against it: the Bedouin are Arabs and Muslims whom Ibn Khaldun called ‘true Arabs’, and the author adopts ‘indigenous people’ expressly “as a form of Bedouin identity and resistance”.

Colonising in Palestine’s Southern District (The Naqab and Beir al-Saba’ Region) (PDF p.8-11 / printed p.88-91)

The last two years’ intensification has the two old aims at its heart, and those goals predate 1948: Ben Gurion and Weizmann presented the Naqab and Beersheba as a central objective of full colonisation from the 1930s. Ben Gurion’s letter to his son Amos of 5 October 1937 is quoted: “Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens, whenever and wherever they want […] we must expel Arabs and take their places […] and if we have to use force, we have force at our disposal not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev, and transfer them, but in order to guarantee our own right to settle in those places.” Early in the Mandate the Jewish National Fund and the Zionist Commission under Weizmann developed a Naqab land-purchase strategy; Weizmann in 1945 spoke of ‘the possibilities of irrigating the Negeb’ and settling ‘at least a million [settlers]’ there, conceiving a “vacant space” for ‘making the desert bloom’ that victimised the Bedouin; Efraim Karsh is noted as rejecting the reading that Ben Gurion wanted to evict the Arabs. Sir Frank Sanderson in the Jewish Chronicle in 1940 called the Naqab ‘an empty territory in Palestine’ and urged, in the quoted passage, that Jews colonise the wide and empty Negev rather than seek a “Lebensraum” elsewhere. Sir G. E. Kirk replied days later in The Daily Telegraph that the “Arab cultivator-herdsmen, who now inhabit the district to the number of several thousands, should be adequately protected”, comparing their claim to the rights of “the aborigines of Australia and New Guinea” — Kirk “did not regard the Naqab as a ‘wasted’ and ‘empty’ land” and referred to the Bedouin as an indigenous people of Palestine.

From Nakba to Military Rule: Mechanisms of Controlling the Bedouin (PDF p.11-12 / printed p.91-92)

After May 1948 military rule was imposed on the Bedouin and the rest of the Palestinian Arab minority who remained; territory accumulation for Jewish citizens is identified, following Yiftachel, as part of ‘the nature of the settler state’. The Naqab military governor in the late 1950s, Penhas Amir (as printed), said the aim was control (shlita) of the Arab population; Korn’s three methods are surveillance, administration and registration, and Abu Saad, following Lustick, gives segmentation, dependence and co-optation. The Ratner Committee justification was that the Arab community was not loyal and threatened by its ‘common interest with the Arab people across the border’; the regulations, professedly for public safety, state protection, public order and essential services, were maintained after 1967 for ‘security reasons’ and some remain in force. In the Naqab the majority of the Bedouin who stayed were evicted from their original land and concentrated in the siyaj zone northeast of Beersheba, the western Naqab becoming a closed zone (al-mantiqa al-muharama); the majority were never allowed to return. An IDFA report describes the military government’s Naqab work — patrolling, presence, daily contact, information gathering, registering hostile activities — with army units evicting Bedouin and travel passes intensifying supervision, used differently from in the Galilee or the Little Triangle; the Bedouin’s chief resistance was ‘non-cooperation’.

The Bedouin Narrative: Transfer from Their Native Land to the Enclosed Zone (PDF p.12-14 / printed p.92-94)

Al-Araqib epitomises living as Internally Displaced People since 1948. Tribes were terrorised into temporarily leaving on promises of early return, or told their land was needed for military use, and moved into the siyaj — often onto other tribes’ land, including land of tribes expelled altogether. Field research found the same story repeatedly. The al-Oqbi and al-Tori tribes of al-Araqib were forced out in 1951; a family member is quoted: “The aim behind concentrating the Bedouin in the ‘siyaj’ area, and convincing them to leave temporarily was all about land control. They claimed it might be weeks, or months.” Sheikhs met in tribal conferences and sent complaint letters; the tribes have waited “more than sixty years”, and the Al-Oqbi refused compensation and never gave up ownership. An interviewee’s tribe was evicted from Wadi al-Sharia’ in the western Naqab, whose Bedouin villages — Wadi al-Sharia’, Zummara, Huj, Jammama, al-Shalala — were mostly demolished; besides enclosure, land was denied by categorising it as mawat. Israeli archives document resistance: the Tarabin sheikhs complained on 25 November 1950 and in 1951 asked to return to cultivate, and military governor Michael Hanegbi refused, offering compensation. The Al-Oqbi’s formal letter to the Prime Minister argued they had been evicted in 1951, settled before 1948, that no settlements or kibbutzim stood on their land and that it was grazed by other tribes, so their alienation was arbitrary by the government’s own usual claims. The cases “show clearly that the native population did not submit to settler policies”.

The Early Stages of Expropriating Bedouin Land (PDF p.15-18 / printed p.95-98)

Under military rule the Bedouin lost most of their land; land “is the most important aspect of Bedouin life, as it is fundamental to people’s identity in the Naqab”. In the 1950s the state formally expropriated all Bedouin land, relying on Ottoman codes and the mawat category as “a common tactic of settler colonialism to continue the denial of indigenous land rights”: the Ottomans had enacted the codes to encourage registration but did not enforce them on the Bedouin, and Israel added the British ordinance of 1921 (‘the mawat law’), claiming the Bedouin never owned, registered or cultivated land and cannot produce Ottoman or British documents — though “many Bedouin have provided both Ottoman and British documents supporting their claims”. Lord Oxford, Assistant District Commissioner of Beersheba in 1943, is quoted at length: the British had no registration system in Beersheba and accepted traditional collective tribal ownership — “We did not oppose Bedouin land ownership, nor did we force them to register their land.” A January 1947 report on Khalasa, on ‘Azazma clan land, records Bedouin “keen farmers” adopting tractor ploughing and planting fruit trees. Israeli policy is called hypocritical on the archive’s own evidence: Hanegbi’s declassified 1952 letter records 19,000 Israeli Lira collected from the Bedouin as land tax in 1950/1951, “for each dunam to be recognized”, the same disputed land taxed under British and Israeli authorities. The 1952 Weitz committee reported to the Ministry of Justice that the ownership of the 11,000 remaining Bedouin “could not be denied” and that cultivation was regarded by them as ownership, yet proposed to ‘avoid recognizing Bedouin rights on their land even if they prove that they have cultivated it for a long and extended time’, to hold off opening a registration office in Be’er Sheva (opened only in the 1970s), to speed a land purchase law transferring formerly Bedouin-cultivated land to development authorities, and that Bedouin ‘should be compensated if they can prove land ownership’.

Al-Araqib: Symbol of the Bedouin Struggle (PDF p.18-22 / printed p.98-102)

Al-Araqib, a few miles north of Beersheba, is “the symbol of the Bedouin struggle over land rights and recognition”. Half of the Bedouin citizens of Israel live in 46 ‘unrecognised’ villages deprived of housing, water, electricity, education and health care — “100,000 persons who are part of the Palestinian people” — and, according to Falah, the rest in townships established in the 1970s by forced sedentarisation. Families ignored fines and penalties, returned to their historical land in tents or stone houses in ‘silent resistance’, visited and cultivated it with their children — cultivation as “the symbol of our land and past”, in the interviewee quoted — and from the 1970s took claims to the Israeli courts. Al-Araqib was demolished in 1951 and its residents ‘temporarily’ relocated on a promise of return after six months; the land stayed mostly vacant, villagers kept working it, and in the late 1960s most families returned to live there. Sheikh Sayah Al-Tori, “one of the leading symbols of Bedouin struggle and the head of the village of al-‘Araqib”, is quoted from 2009 interviews: “I have been waiting for more than forty years to be allowed to return to my land, but this dream has never come true.” Return is an act of ‘reviving’ the past — ‘even the children know that they have land elsewhere: they are taken to gaze at it on public holidays’ — also instanced by Twail Abu Jarwal. The Beersheba district court debated the village’s ownership for months and ultimately rejected the Bedouin claims; in July 2010, before the claims “had been finally adjudicated”, the state “reintroduced expulsion policies to eliminate the Bedouin ‘threat’, and ‘cleansed’ the Bedouin village of al-‘Araqib”. On 27 July at least 46 homes and other structures were destroyed by ILA officials with over 1,000 police; the village was razed, thousands of trees uprooted, generators, refrigerators and vehicles confiscated, and 500 people, mainly women and children, left shelterless and allowed to stay only in the village cemetery. Rebuilt and repeatedly demolished since, Al-Araqib unified a fragmented minority: demonstrations in almost every Arab town in the Galilee, the Triangle and the Naqab, weekly Naqab demonstrations, a Higher Arab Committee one-day strike in December 2011, a day of support in Sakhnin, Arab Knesset members joining in 2011-12, solidarity from Jerusalem including Mufti Ikrima Sabri, a significant part taken by local women, and interventions in the EU and UK parliaments, by Amnesty International, in Washington and in Geneva — “for the first time since 1948” (abstract) the case reached the international community.

New Israeli Initiatives: The Struggle Continues (PDF p.22-23 / printed p.102-103)

Successful sumud has not ended the contest: sixty years on, Israel remains concerned about ‘Bedouin control of state land’, and “the Prawer and Goldberg plans to expel and re-locate 30,000 Bedouin by forcing them to live in urban spaces can be linked to growing anxieties and to attempts to finally secure more land for settlements”; the cabinet approved “another large-scale plan for ‘cleansing’ the Bedouin community from the Naqab”. The Goldberg Commission, established by Ehud Olmert’s administration in December 2007 under former high court judge Eliezer Goldberg, was tasked with ‘finalising’ Bedouin land claims; against Bedouin demands to register 600,000 dunams (150,000 acres), its 2008 report recommended recognising half the claims on agricultural land currently occupied — around 200,000 dunams (50,000 acres), “less than a third of what Bedouin land claims have demanded since the 1970s”. The implementation team formed in January 2009 under Ehud Prawer offered less than 27 percent of Bedouin claims (the work prints the possessive with an acute accent, Bedouin´s, as noted in the reading notes); in late 2011 Yisrael Beiteinu, headed by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, urged cancelling the ‘offer’ altogether, with right-wing Knesset members and Naqab council leaders against dividing the Naqab. JNF US chief executive Russell Robinson’s concern about ‘losing the Negev’ is read as the anxiety to secure the Naqab for Jewish settlers: his ‘ultimate solution’ is 500,000 Jewish settlers to maintain the majority, and a 2010 Inter-Ministerial Committee plan would move 500 families of career soldiers to the Negev with subsidised land. Amos Oz called the Bedouin situation a ‘ticking time bomb’. Neve Gordon is quoted: ‘the razing of a Bedouin village by Israeli police shows how far the state will go to achieve its aim of Judaising the Negev region’. The state sees Bedouin sumud as a ‘problem’ and a ‘danger’, and their success in staying “has obliged the state to rethink its relations with the Bedouin”.

Acknowledgements, Biographical Note and Notes (PDF p.24-27 / printed p.104-107)

The Acknowledgements thank Bruce Stanley and Richard Ratcliffe and the anonymous reviewers. The Biographical Note is summarised under What the file is. The 78 notes supply the article’s apparatus: the international-law literature (notes 1-18), the contested-indigeneity scholarship (notes 19-30), the 1937-1940 primary quotations (notes 31-35: Ben Gurion’s letter, PRO CO 733/462/12, Karsh, the Jewish Chronicle of 9 April 1940 and The Daily Telegraph of 15 March 1940), the military-rule literature and IDFA files (notes 36-42), the oral-history interviews of 2007-2009 and the UN definition of IDPs (notes 43-52), the mawat note with Falah (note 53), the archival letters (notes 54-55: IDFA 1953/834-263; the Bani Oqba letter of 10 July 1960 in the Kibbutz Lahav Archive), the expropriation literature (notes 56-58), Lord Oxford’s interview (note 59), PRO FO 371/61868 (note 60), ISA GL 13904/14 (note 61), the Weitz report of 20 October 1952, ISA G 5742/10 (notes 62-63), Falah on the townships (note 64), the court claims (notes 65, 70), the 2009 interviews (notes 66-67, 69), Powell in the New Internationalist (note 68), Amnesty International of 12 November 2010 (note 71), and the 2010-2011 press and the author’s own Haaretz and Electronic Intifada pieces for Goldberg, Prawer, Robinson and Gordon (notes 72-78).

Key passages

  • “there is a current and renewed escalation in Israeli policies towards the indigenous Bedouin of the Naqab and Beersheba, and that this escalation emerges from two longstanding, fundamental Israeli aims: Judaising the Naqab; and putting an end to the persistent Bedouin claims to their historical land and rights” (PDF p.1 / printed p.81)
  • “Bedouin sumud (steadfastness) on their land has long proved to be an effective form of non-violent indigenous resistance” (PDF p.1 / printed p.81)
  • “the indigenous Bedouin did not surrender their land claims and rights” (PDF p.1 / printed p.81)
  • “all Palestinians should be considered indigenous to the land” (PDF p.6 / printed p.86)
  • “Tribal space and refusal to mix with other tribes is an obvious way of protecting indigenous life.” (PDF p.8 / printed p.88)
  • “I have chosen to adopt the concept of ‘indigenous people’ as a form of Bedouin identity and resistance and to raise the voice of the community.” (PDF p.8 / printed p.88)
  • “Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens, whenever and wherever they want […] we must expel Arabs and take their places” — David Ben Gurion, letter to Amos Ben Gurion, 5 October 1937, quoted by Nasasra (PDF p.9 / printed p.89)
  • “The aim behind concentrating the Bedouin in the ‘siyaj’ area, and convincing them to leave temporarily was all about land control.” — an al-Oqbi family member, quoted by Nasasra (PDF p.13 / printed p.93)
  • “We did not oppose Bedouin land ownership, nor did we force them to register their land.” — Lord Oxford, quoted by Nasasra (PDF p.16 / printed p.96)
  • “avoid recognizing Bedouin rights on their land even if they prove that they have cultivated it for a long and extended time” — the 1952 Weitz committee, as quoted by Nasasra (PDF p.17 / printed p.97)
  • “I have been waiting for more than forty years to be allowed to return to my land, but this dream has never come true.” — Sheikh Sayah Al-Tori, quoted by Nasasra (PDF p.20 / printed p.100)
  • “the razing of a Bedouin village by Israeli police shows how far the state will go to achieve its aim of Judaising the Negev region” — Neve Gordon, quoted by Nasasra (PDF p.23 / printed p.103)

Evidence the work relies on

  • The Biographical Note states the basis directly: oral history interviews and archival materials from the author’s doctoral research, with time spent in the main Israeli, Palestinian and British archives (PDF p.24). The interviews are credited in the notes by name, place and date: Nuri Al-Oqbi (July 2007), Abu Salim, Rahat (August 2008), Abo Omar (August 2008), Lord Oxford, Somerset (August 2008), Penhas Amir, Tel Aviv (2009), Sheikh Abu Ahmad, Al-‘Araqib (July 2009), Yousef (July 2009), Sayah al-Tori, al-‘Araqib (June and July 2009), Ammer Rahat (September 2009) (notes 37, 44-45, 50-52, 59, 66-67, 69).
  • Israeli archives: IDFA refs. 590/1961-60 (military government work and travel passes) and 1953/834-263 (the Tarabin complaint and Hanegbi’s reply) (notes 41-42, 54); ISA refs. GL 13904/14 (Hanegbi’s 1952 tax letter) and G 5742/10 (the Weitz report to the Minister of Justice, 20 October 1952) (notes 61-63); the Bani Oqba letter of 10 July 1960 in the Kibbutz Lahav Archive (note 55).
  • British archives and press: PRO CO 733/462/12 (Weizmann, 1945) and FO 371/61868 (the January 1947 Khalasa report) (notes 32, 60); the Jewish Chronicle of 9 April 1940 (Sanderson) and The Daily Telegraph of 15 March 1940 (Kirk) (notes 34-35); Ben Gurion’s letter to his son Amos of 5 October 1937, cited without an archive (note 31).
  • International-law and indigenous-studies literature: Cobo’s UN study (1986), Brownlie and Falk in Crawford (ed.), The Rights of Peoples (1988), Kingsbury (1998, 2001), Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Tully (2000), Schaap (2009) and Champagne (2003) (notes 1-18).
  • Naqab scholarship: Yiftachel (2008), Frantzman, Yahel and Kark (2012), Kedar in Adalah (2004), Jakubowska (1992), Cohen, Good Arabs (2010), Law-Yone, Abu Saad, Korn (2000), Lustick (1980), Lazar (2002), Meir (1997), Falah (1989), Shamir (1996) and Abu Sitta (2008) (notes 19-30, 36, 38-40, 53, 56-57, 64).
  • Contemporary reporting and advocacy for the final sections: Amnesty International (12 November 2010) for the 27 July demolition (note 71); Haaretz reports of 9 July 2010 (Segev), 27 July 2010 (Zrahiya) and 2 June 2011 (Khoury, Rinat and Zarchin) (notes 47, 49, 58, 70, 72, 76-77); the Jerusalem Post interview with Russell Robinson (12 January 2010) (note 75); Gordon in The Guardian (28 July 2010) (note 78); Powell in the New Internationalist (note 68); and the author’s own ‘Before you Expel the Bedouin’, Haaretz, 23 September 2011, and ‘Ethnic Cleansing Plan Passes Knesset’, Electronic Intifada, 1 October 2011 (notes 73-74).

Analysis

The article’s method is a synthesis of three kinds of material, each doing distinct work: the international-law literature on indigenous peoples supplies the frame and the criteria (Cobo, applied point by point to the Bedouin); the archives supply the dispossession record against the state’s own legal claim — most sharply the Weitz committee’s 1952 admission that ownership “could not be denied” alongside its recommendation to avoid recognising it, Hanegbi’s tax receipts on the disputed land, and Lord Oxford’s account that the British never required registration; and oral history supplies the Bedouin narrative of temporary eviction, waiting and return, in the interviewees’ own words. Its perspective is declared rather than concealed: indigeneity is adopted “as a form of Bedouin identity and resistance”, all Palestinians are held indigenous, and the state’s measures are named in the work’s own terms — ‘cleansing’ of Al-Araqib, a ‘cleansing’ plan, an ‘ultimate solution’ for the demographic concern. Its strongest internal support is the convergence of the three materials on the land claim: cultivation evidence from 1947, tax collection in 1950-1951, and the committee report of 1952 all predate and contradict the mawat argument the work describes. Its limits are in the same materials: the central contemporary figures — 46 unrecognised villages and 100,000 persons, 600,000 dunams claimed, 200,000 offered by Goldberg, less than 27 percent under Prawer, 30,000 to be relocated, 500 settlers’ families and Robinson’s 500,000 — are carried by single citations (Falah, Amnesty, the author’s own journalism, the cited press) rather than independently documented in the article; the demolition narrative rests on Amnesty and the author’s interviews; Karsh’s dissent on Ben Gurion is noted in a sentence and not engaged; and the indigeneity section reports a live scholarly and community contest — including Abu Sitta on ‘Naqab’ itself and Bedouin leaders who contested UN identification — that the work resolves by adoption rather than by adjudication. The chronology slips and citation irregularities recorded under Open questions are the work’s own and are kept as printed.

People, organizations, places and events

Mansour Nasasra, Jose Martinez Cobo, Benedict Kingsbury, Richard Falk, Alexander Kedar, Ibn Khaldun, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Michael Hanegbi, Lord Oxford, Joseph Weitz, Sayah Al-Tori, Ehud Prawer, Eliezer Goldberg, Ehud Olmert, Russell Robinson, Amos Oz, Neve Gordon, Ikrima Sabri, Negev Coexistence Forum, Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages, Bedouin Development Authority, Israel Lands Administration, Jewish National Fund, Yisrael Beiteinu, Goldberg Commission, Naqab, Beersheba, Al-Araqib, Siyaj, Al-Araqib demolition (2010)

Concepts

Indigeneity, Judaization, Unrecognized villages, Sumoud, Mawat, Settler Colonialism

How it relates to other sources

Open questions

  • “Golberg” for Goldberg (PDF p.2), against “Goldberg” throughout the rest of the work, including the commission’s establishment (PDF p.22) and notes 73-74; the abstract also prints “pursing” for pursuing and “on July 2010” for the Al-Araqib demolition date. “BEIR AL-SABA’” in the section heading (PDF p.8) against Beersheba and Bir al-Saba’ elsewhere.
  • Note 35 dates Kirk’s Daily Telegraph reply to 15 March 1940, while note 34 dates Sanderson’s Jewish Chronicle piece to 9 April 1940 and the text (PDF p.10) says Kirk wrote “a few days later” than Sanderson; the two note dates cannot both stand with the text’s sequence, and the work does not resolve it.
  • The Al-Araqib land case is described both as debated in the Beersheba district court and “ultimately rejected” (PDF p.20) and as demolished “before their long-standing land claims had been finally adjudicated by the Beersheba district court” (PDF p.20); note 65 says the families’ claims “are still with the Beersheba district court” and note 49 records the al-Oqbi case over 820 dunams as “recently heard”. The work does not reconcile the rejected / not-yet-adjudicated / still-pending formulations.
  • Bedouin elders’ self-name is printed “‘urban al-saba’, the ‘Arabs of Beersheba’” (PDF p.6); the first word is reproduced as printed and is presumably a slip or transcription for the Arabic for Arabs of Beersheba, which the work does not give in another form.
  • The cultivation quotation at PDF p.19 is attributed in the text to the author — “As I mention elsewhere” — while note 68 cites Libby Powell, New Internationalist; whose words they are is not settled by the work.
  • Names as printed that vary within the work: “Penhas Amir” for the late-1950s Naqab military governor (PDF p.11, note 37); “Yosef Weitz” in the text (PDF p.17) against “Yousef Weitz” in notes 62-63 (the wiki’s page is Joseph Weitz, from Said’s and other sources’ spellings); “Ammer Rahat” in note 52; “Abo Omar” in note 51; Kingsbury cited at p.106 in note 9 and p.414-415 in notes 1 and 11 for overlapping claims; Law-Yone at “pp. 183-183” in note 29; the editor of People’s Rights as “P. Alson” in note 10; “the Naqba” in note 57’s title for Abu Sitta’s article, against Nakba elsewhere. The Bedouin Education Authority parenthesis is unclosed at PDF p.8.
  • Figures the work gives once, on single citations: 46 unrecognised villages and 100,000 persons (PDF p.18, the 100,000 without a separate note); 11,000 Bedouin remaining after 1948 (PDF p.17, from the Weitz report as presented); 600,000 dunams claimed and 200,000 dunams in the Goldberg recommendation (PDF p.22); “less than 27 percent” under Prawer (PDF p.23, note 74, the author’s own article); 500 people left shelterless on 27 July 2010 (PDF p.21, following note 71’s Amnesty citation for the demolition itself). None is broken down further in the work.
  • The Higher Arab Committee strike is dated December 2011 and its Jerusalem demonstration call May 2011, in that order (PDF p.21); whether the sequence is chronological in the work’s intention is not stated.

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