Bedouin-Arab Society in the Negev/Naqab (original) (raw)
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Special Issue on Bedouin-Arab Society in the Negev/Naqab
In this special volume we focus our sights close to home, and examine how issues that plague minority populations residing in the periphery-acute deprivation, cultural marginality and systematic exclusion-play out in the Israeli Negev region among the Bedouin community. This is literally our own backyard. As Israelis, as residents of the Negev and as editors of a journal published at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, we and many of the contributors to this volume live our lives, teach, work and raise our families in one of the poorest regions of Israel, where impoverished Bedouin towns are established in the midst of dispersed shanty towns (referred to in Israeli formal speech as unrecognized villages).
State rule and Indigenous Resistance among Al Naqab Bedouin Arabs
Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities, Vol. 8 (2), pp. 3-24., 2008
In this special volume we focus our sights close to home, and examine how issues that plague minority populations residing in the periphery-acute deprivation, cultural marginality and systematic exclusion-play out in the Israeli Negev region among the Bedouin community. This is literally our own backyard. As Israelis, as residents of the Negev and as editors of a journal published at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, we and many of the contributors to this volume live our lives, teach, work and raise our families in one of the poorest regions of Israel, where impoverished Bedouin towns are established in the midst of dispersed shanty towns (referred to in Israeli formal speech as unrecognized villages).
A widely diffused, engaged approach understands human rights as an opportunity to enhance moral progress. Less visible has a critical realm of research that reveals the often-ambiguous social life of human rights discourses. This article draws on a specific case study from the intricate issue of how activism for Arab-Palestinian Bedouin citizens in Southern Israel engages with the global human rights discourse. It follows the implications of mobilization, focusing on events related to a campaign against house demolitions in informal, unrecognised settlements. The case shows how human rights discourses tend to silence the agency of political subjects, victimizing and patronizing those who seek emancipation. The ethnographic insights emphasize the role of a range of carnivalesque and spontaneous acts of resistance, which subvert the patronizing implications of the human rights language.
The Arab Bedouins are a cultural group with a special lifestyle that is currently vanishing. Inhabiting the Negev/Naqab Desert for centuries, the Bedouins lived under regimes including the Ottoman, the British and since 1948 the State of Israel. In recent years, the Bedouins have gone through political traumas and cultural transformations, which included eviction from their traditional lands, rapid modernization and forced migration and urbanization. This book analyzes the historical and recent developments among the Bedouin community relating to land rights and housing issues in Israel. In addition to addressing the special cultural and social accounts of the Bedouin community, the book provides international legal analysis and comparative case studies that will cover a range of aspects. These cases will represent key areas of current debate among legal scholars and human rights advocates, such as the recent declaration on indigenous people’s rights, traditional property rights for...
Between Rights and Denials: Bedouin Indigeneity in the Negev/Naqab
The paper examines the nature of indigenous identity among Bedouin Arabs in the Negev/Naqab, Israel, against a background of conceptual, legal and political controversy. It traces theoretically and comparatively the rise of indigeneity as a relational concept, deriving from colonial and postcolonial settings. The concept is shown to be part of the globalization of human rights struggle, with a potential of the indigeneity discourse to empower colonized and exploited minorities, as well as provide a platform for transitional justice. The heart of the paper provides a rebuttal of several arguments made by a group of scholars associated with the Israeli state, named here "the deniers", who have worked to reject Bedouin (and general Palestinian) claims for indigenous status, thereby denying their entitlement to a range of human and communal rights. The paper offers a systematic examination of historical and geographic evidence and reveals that "the deniers" have raised several relevant questions and dilemmas. However, these do not undermine the typical indigenous characteristics of the Naqab Bedouin Arabs. Research shows clearly that Bedouins belong within the group of indigenous societies according to accepted international definitions and norms. This understanding obliges the Israeli state to protect Bedouin Arabs from further removals, dispossession and marginalization; as well as correct, where possible, the profound damage caused by their past dispossession, eviction and marginalization.
Indigenous (In)Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev
2012
he indigenous Bedouin Arab population in the Naqab/Negev desert in Israel has experienced a history of displacement, intense political conflict, and cultural disruption, along with recent rapid modernization, forced urbanization, and migration. This volume of essays highlights international, national, and comparative law perspectives and explores the legal and human rights dimensions of land, planning, and housing issues, as well as the economic, social, and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Within this context, the essays examine the various dimensions of the “negotiations” between the Bedouin Arab population and the State of Israel. Indigenous (In)Justice locates the discussion of the Naqab/Negev question within the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and within key international debates among legal scholars and human rights advocates, including the application of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the formalization of traditional property rights, and the utility of restorative and reparative justice approaches. Leading international scholars and professionals, including the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are among the contributors to this volume.
Anthropological Quarterly, 2017
A 2005 amendment to Israel's Public Land Law and the 1994 National Health Insurance Law (NHIL) are two policies that highlight the complex relationship between the Israeli state and the Negev/Naqab Bedouins. While the Land Law sanctioned house demolitions and the erasure of Bedouin villages, the NHIL granted Bedouins access to healthcare and increased their visibility within the medical system. In this article, I draw on these contradictory policies of inclusion and exclusion to argue that the treatment of Negev/Naqab Bedouins as equal citizens within Israel is contingent on state officials' seeing only particular aspects of this community. Crucially, this means that state officials actively make invisible the unequal and exclusionary politics that marginalize Bedouin citizens. While the case of the Bedouins in Israel is a specific one, I suggest that attending to how state officials make particular individuals, communities, and histories invisible clarifies how states, both in Israel and beyond, maintain the state's ideology of equality despite a hierarchy of privilege. It is through the production of invisibility that neglect and exclusion come to be justified and obscured,
THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE HUMAN RIGHT 129 TO A FUTURE IN PALESTINE
Soft Power
Reflecting on the Palestinian experience, this article discusses the requirements of ensuring a development of human rights that exceeds the growth of their abuse allowing them to play a role in reshaping the world through fostering emancipatory processes. It looks at the human rights system in the current global context, the caveats of human rights, their limitations, potential in their historic context, current conditions, and their perspectives concerning enabling emancipation. The article makes the claim that sufficient basis exists in the human rights concepts, system, and history to overcome the current limitations and counter their battering through their further development on a basis of human solidarity. Such a transformation can warrant a future for human rights in Palestine.