Did I say Bedouin? I meant Backward.

Filled with abounding excitement and some trepidation about the new life I was embarking upon in Israel, I climbed into a taxi at Ben-Gurion airport.  Conversation was immediately struck up with the taxi driver, who was shocked to learn that I was not your average tourist going round the religious sites but was going to live in the Bedouin town of Rahat, to work with the community there.  Immediately, his reaction was to warn me that I might find it difficult living there because, “the Bedouin are, how shall I put it…,” a long pause ensued as I felt him mentally search around for the politically correct word, “…retarded,” he eventually finished.

After this rather revealing taxi ride, I arrived in Tel Aviv for the weekend before moving down to Rahat, where the reaction of Jewish Israelis to my plans was pretty uniform; “don’t go there,” “it’s dangerous and there’s a lot of crime,” “besides, they’re not Western like us, they’re pretty backward.”  Maybe I was being overly judgemental but it started to feel like there was a common trend in the derogatory way that Jewish Israelis view the Bedouin Israelis.

After several months in Israel, I rather enjoy telling other Israelis about what I do because you can guarantee that the reaction will be unfailingly extreme and simultaneously comical.  “You live in Rahat?” they squeal in shock, “but what’s it like there?”  I feel like a nineteenth-century explorer revealing to a captivated British audience ‘exotic’ tales of my adventures in ‘the Orient.’  Then I watch as a group of Jewish Israelis start to discuss Rahat and one turns to another and asks, “have you been there?  I mean, not just driven through but actually been there?” as if we are talking about a far away and inaccessible land.  In reality, we are talking about a town that is actually within Israel and is only an hour and a half from Jerusalem and an hour from Tel Aviv.  Then again, it is an Arab town in Israel and not only is it an Arab town but it is a Bedouin Arab town.  Heaven forbid!

In another conversation of the same vein, a Jewish Israeli leans forward and tells me confidingly about how the Bedouin often break into Jewish Israeli houses, steal their belongings and are responsible for most of the crime in the Negev desert.  “It is hard for us [Jewish Israelis],” he explains, “because they cause us many problems.”  It is true that a higher proportion of crime in Israel emanates from the Bedouin community than from other groups but there is a total absence of questioning of self or society as to why this might be the case and what the State is doing, or failing to do, to alleviate the problem.  There is no examination of the State’s failure to provide Bedouin towns with economic infrastructure and employment opportunity so that their populations do not have to resort to begging and crime.

Indeed, the government has just approved a plan to evict 30,000 Bedouins, a sixth of the Bedouin population of the Negev desert, from their lands and settle them in the already over-crowded, ‘recognised townships,’ thereby further restricting their traditional lifestyle and reducing their land-holding and thus their livelihood.  Upon discussion of this news, a Jewish Israeli laments, “the government is trying to help them by moving them into modern towns but they don’t want to go.  I just don’t understand it.”  There is no criticism of the State’s political, socio-economic and cultural discrimination against the Bedouin.  There is only recrimination and rejection of the Bedouin society and way of life as a whole.

But then as I travel to the West Bank, I find Palestinians there asking me the same questions as Jewish Israelis and equally sympathising with me that it must be hard to live with such a “backward” group of people.  Now, banish those notions of Palestinian solidarity and unity against the Israeli enemy.  Such fancies are fictions that do not reflect the reality where Palestinian Christians are divided from Palestinian Muslims, Palestinians from Arab Israelis, Bedouins from other Arab Israelis and Palestinians, Arab Israelis in the North from those in the South, and so on and so forth.  For most Palestinians and Arab Israelis, the Bedouin are at the bottom of the pile, a retrogressive remnant of a former age from which other Arabs have evolved.  I wonder if I asked Palestinians with this viewpoint what they think of Israelis or Europeans who see them as “backward,” whether they would agree that this is an acceptable position or whether they would reject this as another example of racist ethnocentrism, where the  West attempts to enforce   its cultural ‘superiority’ and homogeny upon the rest of the world?

By the time I get back to Rahat and my Bedouin boss tells me that Bedouin customs are “seriously backward,” I throw my hands up in the air in exasperation.  I expound upon the idea of political correctness and the assumptions that underly viewing one society or group of people as “backward.”  She cannot, however, get her head around the concepts of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism (due in large part, no doubt, to my laboured attempts to explain these concepts in broken Arabic) and just shakes her head at me and says, “strange the ideas you have in the West.  We just say things as we see them.”

In a country and a region where racism and sectarianism are more prevalent and more openly tolerated, perhaps it is not surprising that language is employed so bluntly and derogatorily to discredit a whole group of people.  But still, every time I am told about how “backward” the Bedouin are, my European, liberal sensibilities cannot help but be simultaneously amused, shocked and appalled by the use of such terminology and its attendant assumptions and prejudices.  I must remember to go back to Britain and to tell the traditionalists, the monarchists and the conservatives how backward they all are for wanting to hold on to their traditions.

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Are you pro-Arab, Or are you pro-Jew?

As I drag my bags out of Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv and haul them into a taxi, my taxi-driver says, “you are English, yes?”  Yes.  “Good, I have a joke for you.”

So God takes Moses to look over the holy land and says, “look Moses, this is the land I propose for you and your people, what do you say?”  Moses replies, “well God, the Israelites are a democratic people so let me go and ask them and then I’ll give you our reply.”  Off goes Moses and in the meantime, a little devil whispers into God’s ear, “but you’re being so generous; the land is so green and beautiful, it’s got the sea, mountains, everything.  Why are you giving the Jews all of this?”  God replies with a wry smile, “don’t worry, wait and see who I’ve given them for neighbours.”

My first few hours in the ‘Holy Land’ full of unholy deeds and already I’m involved in a game of pick and chose, Arabs or Jews.

I continue my journey down South to the Negev desert, where I jump into an unregistered shuttle bus to the Bedouin town of Rahat.  Looks of surprise pass between the Arab driver and his Arab passengers upon seeing a white girl get into the minivan.  “Where does the Jew want to go?” one of them asks the other in confusion.  They turn to me and ask me something in Hebrew.  “I don’t speak Hebrew, just Arabic,” I reply and quickly, my story is revealed.  “So much the better,” they exclaim grinning.  Then another Arab gets into the front of the van and eyes me suspiciously.  “Don’t worry,” the driver quickly reassures him, “she’s a friend of the Arabs.”  A broad smile spreads across the new passenger’s face and the journey continues with unbounded Arabic babble about the conflict, Israeli oppression and the unadulterated Anglo-American support for the occupying power.  This pattern of conversation is more or less repeated every bi-weekly bus trip to Rahat, with me being pitted as ‘the Jew,’ until it is revealed that since I am not and only speak Arabic, I must, ipso facto, be ‘a friend of the Arabs.’

Once in Rahat though, on the rare occasion that I happen to see a Jewish Israeli passing through the Arab-only town, a glimmer of recognition shoots from them to me; ‘another Jew,’ I can see them thinking.  Recently, a Jewish Israeli even waved at me from across the street, clearly thinking I was ‘like him.’  Now, not only am I not ‘like him’ because I am not Israeli, or even Jewish, but mainly because I would never wave at someone just because they were the same ethnicity or religion as me, particularly in my own country.  I am trying to imagine going to Newham or Southall, predominantly non-white areas of London and waving to a ‘fellow white,’ but somehow I just can’t picture it!  The U.K. may have major problems with social cohesion but thankfully we are not quite at the stage of identifying with people purely because of their ethnicity or religion.

When discussing almost any political, social or cultural issue within Israel, you will inevitably descend into talking about two ‘very distinct’ groups; “the Arabs” and “the Jews,” with little regard for the various strands amongst these peoples.  I have heard this reductive terminology so many times that, unacceptably, it seems to have become acceptable language when dealing with these polemics in Arabic.  Indeed, sometimes I inadvertently find myself slipping into this sort of language in English; “ah yes,” I nod sagely, “but the Jews are committing terrible atrocities against the Arabs.”  What?!  Crusading war tunes suddenly blare in my ears, as the complex intricacies of race, religion and nationality are reduced to a binary world view of Arabs versus Jews.

And as I find myself at the metaphorical crosspoint between the ‘Arab’ and the ‘Jewish’ world, I also find myself being questioned by an Israeli army guard at a military checkpoint between Israel and Palestine.  The soldier is looking none too pleased about my travelling with  Arab friends and asks me with narrowed eyes, “so, do you only help the Arabs or do you also help the Jews.”  That’s it; several years of civil society activism and human rights work in various countries across the globe reduced to one simple question; are you pro-Arab or pro-Jew?  Note, it is not even are you pro-Palestine or pro-Israel, it is a question based on even cruder ethno-religious lines.  There is only one answer, there is no in-between.  So while the Israeli soldier leans forward, waiting expectantly for my answer, George W. Bush sits on my shoulder and whispers, “you’re either with us or against us.”  The colourful tapestry that includes subtle, interwoven threads of pro-Palestinian Jewish Israeli activists, Arab informants to the Israeli State, Orthodox Jews who refuse to serve in the army and reject the State of Israel’s legitimacy due to its seizure and settlement of the Holy Land by force, is reduced to two homogeneous warring factions; Arabs and Jews.

Until Hamas and other like-minded extremist groups recognise the right of the Jews to live in Israel and until Israel stops occupying Palestine and oppressing Palestinians both within its own internationally recognised boarders and outside these boarders, in the Palestinian Territories, there can be no hope for social cohesion between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East or for a region where people are defined and aligned by more than just their ethnic and religious affiliations.  So as you pack your bag for the ‘Holy Land,’ along with your guidebook and your sunglasses, you must also be prepared to pack your answer the most asenine of questions; are you pro-Arab or are you pro-Jew?

The Forgotten Arab Minority of Israel

When I told people at the beginning of this year that I was moving to Israel, they were surprised, since last year I had lived, worked and studied in Syria.  “Switching sides?” I was asked.  “Moving over to the enemy,” they joked.  Then when it emerged that I was moving out here for work, the immediate assumption was that I must be going to live on a kibbutz.  Now, had I said that I was moving to the Palestinian Territories, I have no doubt that the response would have been very different; people would have supposed that I was going as an activist against Israeli occupation or to work towards ‘bringing peace and democracy’ to the region with one of the innumerable NGOs that flood the West Bank.  It seems that if you are working in Israel, you must be working with the Jewish population and if you are working in Palestine, you must be working with the Palestinians.  There is no cross-over.

“No, no,” I clarified, “I’m going to work with the Israeli Arabs.”  The common reaction was one of surprise and disbelief; “there are Arabs in Israel?  But it’s a Jewish State.”  Repeatedly I would explain that there remained an Arab minority in Israel which had not fled to other Middle Eastern countries in the 1948 war that saw Israel gain its independence and approximately 750,000 Palestinians flee the county in what is known to the Arabs as ‘al-Nakba,’ the catastrophe.  In fact,” I would continue, “this sizeable minority constitutes one fifth of the total Israeli population, some 1.6 million people out of a total of 7.7 million Israelis.”  It seems that everyone is aware of the plight of the Palestinians inside Gaza and the West Bank but nobody has even heard of those still inside Israel.

It is important to point out here that there is some disagreement as to how we should refer to these Arabs still living in Israel.  Originally, before the creation of Israel, they were Palestinians living in Palestine, which stretched from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.  Now, however, they cannot be Palestinians because they reside in the new state of Israel and not in the what we have commonly come to see as Palestine, namely Gaza and the West Bank.  They cannot, therefore, be Palestinian Israelis because this is a contradiction in terms, giving them two nationalities.  So, for political reasons, they are Israeli Arabs, a hard burden to shoulder.

Since they are Israeli, they are cut off from many of their Arab brothers and forbidden from going to most Arab countries, such as neighbouring Syria and Lebanon, even if they have relatives there as a result of al-Nakba.  Meanwhile, many Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank view them with suspicion and jealousy; suspicion because they live in Israel, working with Jewish Israelis and collaborating with them on a daily basis; and jealousy because there are 1.8 million refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, who abandoned their homes during the 1948 and 1967 wars, and who now live in cramped, squalid and poverty-stricken refugee camps, whilst Israeli Arabs retain their lands and are afforded many rights that the Palestinians are not.  Despite this, the Arab Israelis are, of course, not really a part of mainstream Israeli society because instead of being Jewish, they belong to a hostile race that surround and threaten Israel.  And so it is that Arab Israelis stand alone, isolated and forgotten amidst the struggles for Palestinian independence and Arab liberation from despotic dictators.

“Ok, so you are going to work with the Arab Israelis but what are you going to do there?”  “I am going to work for the advancement of human rights there.”  “No, no,” came the common reply, “they have human rights there.  Israel is like Europe.”  Now, anyone who thinks that they ‘have human rights’ here, clearly hasn’t been here and if they have, they either haven’t left the confines of their comfy air-conditioned bus – old city of Jerusalem – four star hotel tour, or they are ignoring a reality they don’t wish to see.

Arab Israelis are subjected to many of the same discriminatory laws and policies as Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem, such as, house demolitions, the denial of building permits, inadequate municipal funding and insufficient or non-existent public services.  Indeed, just walking through Arab neighbourhoods and towns in Israel, you may feel like you have entered an entirely different, less economically developed country; a country where rubbish is dumped in the middle of the town or lies uncollected for days, where loose and dangerous electric cables hang from utility poles, where schools are rundown and overcrowded and where green spaces and playgrounds barely exist.  This, of course, is in total contrast to Jewish neighbourhoods and towns, which appear to have public services of a similar standard to France or Spain.  Instead of prioritising its existing citizens and aiming to narrow the discrepancy between their living standards, however, Israel gives preference to non-Israeli Jews across the world by actively promoting their immigration to Israel and providing them with, inter alia, financial grants, income insurance and attractive financial housing schemes if they make aliya.  Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees from 1948 are refused the right to return to their lands in Israel and continue to languish in refugee camps across the Middle East.

The rights abuses committed by the Israeli authorities against its Arab citizens are most pronounced with regards to the Bedouin in the Negev desert.  These people, who traditionally used to roam freely across the desert, have now been pushed into 3% of this area in Israel since most of the desert has been claimed as State land, thereby denying the Bedouin access to their ancient grazing lands.  They have been forced to settle in ‘recognised townships,’ which have limited land space, as well as a lack of commercial infrastructure.  This means that the Bedouin cannot continue their traditional livelihood, based on farming livestock, but that they equally have little other means of securing an income.  Inevitably, this has led to an existence of poverty and despair.  Worse still, those Bedouin who have refused to give up their historic lands and move to the ‘recognised townships,’ remain in what are termed as ‘unrecognised villages.’  There are 45 of these so-called ‘unrecognised villages,’ which have populations ranging from 500 to 5,000 people.  Some 85,000 Bedouins in total are therefore subjected to repeated house demolitions and the refusal by the Israeli authorities to provide public services, such as schools, water, electricity, waste removal and medical clinics, because officially, these villages, along with their people, do not exist.

Let us now compound these rights abuses and put ourselves in between the rock of racist Israeli policy and the proverbial hard place of a highly traditional, patriarchal society.  Bedouin women are not only relegated to the position of third class citizens by the Israeli authorities (after the Jews and the ‘recognised’ Arabs) but they are also reduced to the lower ranks of society by their own communities.  Traditional gender-discriminatory practices, such as forced marriages, domestic violence, ‘honour-killings,’ polygamy and the denial of education, still remain relatively common amongst the Bedouin here, despite the fact that all of these customs are illegal in Israel.  As is to be expected from a government that does not care for its Arab minority, such practices more often than not go unpunished.  Israeli authorities consistently fail to enforce the law in these matters, feebly claiming that these are cultural issues in which they cannot interfere.

And so al-Nakba continues.  Maybe Zionist militias are no longer mobilizing to massacre the populations of entire Arab villages, as they did in 1948, but Arab villages continue to be razed and their populations dispossessed and displaced.  The ethos behind these current and historic policies remains the same; to make life for Arab Israelis in Israel so unbearable that they are ‘encouraged’ to move elsewhere.  In other words, the aim of the Israeli authorities is insidiously to purge Israel ethnically of its Arab population so that Israel can be what it was always ‘supposed’ to be, a Jewish State.