An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba
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Abu Bader’s words, narrating her tribe’s dispossession of their historical lands in 1948, describe the same reality of Bedouin villages in the Naqab after almost seventy years, where Bedouin are still being expelled from their villages by force. Abu Bader’s voice reflects the cry of Yaa‘qob Abualkeaan’s mother; he was killed by Israeli police in January 2017, when they were demolishing his home. These female voices narrate the same story: forced expulsion from their lands, denying their historical attachment to the place and presenting them as invaders that need to be re-organized within the Israeli state. Both these voices represent the continuing Nakba in the Naqab, that began in 1948 and continues to affect the Naqab intensively. But it also represents the strength of these women in resisting and facing their forced dispossession, by reviving their attachment to their lands and passing it to their children, as a dominant factor in defining their territorial identity.
As I was writing this chapter, the Palestinian Bedouin village Umm Al-Hiran in the east Naqab was being demolished and its inhabitants were being expelled. On this same land, Khiran, a new Jewish settlement, was about to be established. Its residents are religious Israeli-Jews, motivated by the ideology that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews. Demolishing homes, confiscating land, expelling Palestinians from their villages and replacing them with Israeli settlements did not end with the 1948 war; nor is it happening only in the West Bank. These practices of displacing Palestinians from their land, physically and consciously, are happening here and now, in the Israel of 2017, and most intensively in the Naqab, among Bedouin Arabs, where the Nakba literally did not end.
The Bedouin in the Naqab suffer from ongoing displacement. Umm El-Hiran is only one of forty-five Bedouin villages in the Naqab, some of which pre-date the 1948 war. Half of these villages are not recognized, regardless of their age, and are under persistent threat of demolition and their inhabitants’ eviction.
I would like to present voices that are silenced in both the national Palestinian and Zionist discourse. These are the voices of Naqab Bedouin women from the 1948 generation and their daughters (two generations of the Nakba) and their resistance to the ongoing displacement that Bedouin society has suffered for the last seventy years. My claim is that in these oral and spatial practices, implemented for years by these women, they establish a territorial identity among their children. These practices include narrating their historical experiences in their lands, visiting their historical lands, naming their villages with historical names and continuing a resistance discourse during their exclusion from the space. I will argue that through these strategies, these women establish their sense of belonging to the place, physically and consciously, and educate their children to be owners of the land. These voices reflect how women are re-telling Naqab history and reclaiming their past. This study attempts to assess the shaping of their children’s territorial identity.
My research is based on in-depth interviews with Bedouin women as part of my PhD thesis (Aburabia 2013). These women live in recognized and unrecognized villages.1 They have experienced both life on their lands and being uprooted from it and are able to testify first-hand. The informants’ core is a group of the 1948 generation, joined by their daughters and other women from the tribe during the interviews. They tell each other the historical narrative, and this participation reflects how their tribal narrative is shaped and constructed collectively according to their tribal structure.
My methodology is ethnography based on extensive fieldwork in the Naqab (2005‒2009). I also conducted observations, visiting women’s houses, meeting them on social occasions, to collect data through informal conversations with them and their families.
My methodology is based on a qualitative research paradigm called “grounded theory”. This approach uses fieldwork as the main resource to shape theory, and uses interviews to achieve new theoretical insights from the bottom up (Shaked 2003; Spector-Marzel 2010). These methodologies allow these voices to be exposed and documented as oral history, by analysing how these women describe these events as influencing their lives. This methodology relies on a post-colonial feminist approach (Mohanty 1991, 2002; Narayan 2000; Vickers and Dhruvarajan 2003; Spelman 1988) that allows researchers to document Arab women’s lives in a way that matches their reality more closely. Particularly when working with illiterate women, these narratives challenge the representation of their lives from orientalist and outsider Westernized perspectives, resisting how knowledge is constructed on behalf of Third World women (and Arab and Muslim women in particular), strengthening the idea of their inferiority. This discourse claims that knowledge about Third World women has been constructed as monolithic and unified, relying on universal and ethnocentric views based on clear power relations between the West and its “Other/s”.
These women are thus presented as oppressed, lacking in ability, veiled, isolated, controlled by patriarchy, tradition and religion, with no respect to their differences in status, ethnicity or geographical location. This ethnocentric orientalist approach focuses on “saving” such women, using issues like circumcision and honour killings as the main representations of these women (Abdo 1997; Mohanty 2002; Kandiyoti 1996; Johnson-Odim 1991; Cooke 2001). Using post-colonial feminist methodologies allows me to glance into the private space of Bedouin women and expose their social dynamics.
ISRAELI STATE DISPLACEMENT MECHANISMS: BEDOUIN DISPLACEMENT
I will first introduce the Israeli state displacement mechanisms used to remove Bedouin in the Naqab as part of an intensive process of Judaizing the space. These express the clear agenda of the state to concentrate the Bedouin in fewer spaces and control their movement, meanwhile establishing new Jewish settlements on these same lands. These processes dispose Bedouin on two levels: physical removal from their lands by legal means, and a disconnection of consciousness, portraying them as nomads with no meaningful link to land, and in need of civilization.
The second part relates to Bedouin women from the 1948 generation and their daughters, showing how they establish a sense of place by strengthening their links to their historical lands and passing these on to their children via oral and spatial practices. These voices challenge the Zionist historical discourse in Israel that excludes Bedouin from the Naqab space, as well as the image of Bedouin women in the academic and public space. This chapter seeks to reveal the dynamic inter-generational lives of Bedouin women, who are active within their tribal spaces to resist their expulsion from their lands, by strengthening their direct and continuous links to them. I aim to stress their significant unique activism as historical agents, within private spaces and among their family members, as an important part of the struggle over the space.
I will begin by describing the main mechanisms used to exclude and dispossess Bedouin from and of the Naqab space; I will also discuss historical discourse, legal, planning and academic practices.
The 1948 war played a significant role in reshaping geographical and tribal reality in the Naqab space. This is expressed in the reduced number of Bedouin and drastic changes in social structure. Before 1948, Bedouin were almost exclusive residents of the Naqab, numbering 90,000‒100,000 people from ninety-six tribes. After 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel, most of them were expelled or escaped to Jordan, Gaza, Sinai and the West Bank. The Naqab population dropped to 11,000 people from seventeen tribes, most of them belonging to the Al-Tayaha tribes (Ashkenazi 1957; Abu-Ras 2006; Al-Aref 1933; Ben-David 1972, 1986; Morris 1997; Falah 1989).
One of the main mechanisms used to control Bedouin in the Naqab (as implemented in all Palestinian societies in Israel after the 1948 Nakba, was military rule, from 1948 until 1966. Bedouin were concentrated within fixed borders in a specific geographic space called “the siege area” located between Arad, Bir Alsabe’ (Beer Sheva) and Yeruham. The remainder of the tribes left in Israel were removed by force to this area (Yiftachel 1999). Their mobility was limited to this area; they were disconnected from residual Palestinian populations left
in Israel; and, above all, they were prevented from returning to their lands. As land is a fundamental component in defining social structure (due to the fact that land ownership is a precious source of power within Bedouin society), this had a huge effect on the inner political and social structure of the community.
Alongside the military regime, the state implemented legal and planning means to dispossess Bedouin. The legal system in Israel is active in constructing the Zionist project as a moral narrative that aims to salvage the land from nomadic, un-civilized Bedouin, presented as primitives who do not belong to any given space. This process has made Bedouin invisible in the eyes of the law (Yiftachel 1999; Fenster 1991; Shamir 1996). Bedouin were presented as opposing the law, especially when their ownership of land was based on traditional oral legislation passed from one generation to the other (implemented by these tribes for years). In contrast, the Israeli legal arguments are based on specific documented dates and times, operating on the basis of systematic expropriation of land in the Naqab. In addition, the state has adopted old laws and regulations, among them the Ottoman mowat law (1858) and the Dead Lands Ordinance (1921). This means that all the lands of Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab are now classified as uncultivated, and therefore pass into state ownership (Yiftachel 1999). Similarly, the 1953 Land Acquisition Law confiscated a great deal of land, regardless of the possession of ownership documents.
Another mechanism used to weaken the relationship of the Arab Bedouin with their lands is urbanization, namely the establishment of seven Bedouin towns in the Naqab: Tal Al-Sabea, Rahat, Kuseife, Arara, Segev Shalom, Hura and Laqia. The purpose was to concentrate the most Bedouin in the smallest space, thus vacating their lands for the construction of new Jewish settlements. These towns were established without proper design, relying on Bedouin agricultural culture. Today, these towns are in great social distress, and suffer from poverty, unemployment, crime, social tensions and lack of economic infrastructure. Approximately 50% of the Bedouin Arab population lives in these towns, and others continue to live as they did before the establishment of the state, still waiting for planning regularization. These communities are not recognized by the state of Israel and so lack economic and social infrastructure. Their inhabitants are under constant pressure, including the destruction of their homes and spraying of their crops to force them to leave their land (Nathanson et al. 1999; Lithwick 2002; Almi 2003; HRA 2004). For years, government programmes have been formulated to re-settle the Naqab (Negev) Bedouin.2 To limit the movement of Arab Bedouin in the region and accelerate their concentration in the permanent settlements, special bodies were established, including the Bedouin Administration, “Green Patrol”, the National Unit of Building Inspection at the Ministry of the Interior and a police unit (Rotem) whose function is to focus on crime among the Arab Bedouin in the Naqab (Yiftachel 1999; Svirski and Hason 2005).
At the same time, academic research has also shaped the image of the Arab Bedouin in the Naqab as lacking any affinity to land, constructing them under two orientalist categories of knowledge: Nomadism (Epstein 1933; Ashkenazi 1957; Ben-David 1986; Bar-Zvi and Ben-David 1978; Marx 1956, 1967, 1974); and Modernism (Bar 1980, 1985; Dinero 1997; Jakubowska 1992; Soen and Shmueli 1987; Meir 1997). These categories portray them as ahistorical, nomadic and primitive: a society that needs to be civilized by Israelis, who will “save” them from their own culture (Aburabia 2014).
Research analysis suggests that in this period the Bedouin were excluded from historical discourse in general, and discourse about the Nakba in particular. From 1980 onwards, academics (especially from Israeli-Palestinian and Jewish backgrounds) began developing a new critical discourse,3 arguing that government policy has deepened the plight of Arab Bedouin by misidentifying their social and cultural needs, and that evictions and relocation of Bedouin relates to the Zionist agenda to Judaize the Naqab. It is clear that academic research is another institutionalized mechanism (along with planning and legislation) used to establish their dispossession. This physical and cognitive exclusion structures their image as invaders that harm the space in legal, planning (spatial organization) and ethical ways.
Shining light onto Bedouin women’s voices from the 1948 generation and their daughters challenges this discourse by stressing their voices as they struggle for their historical link to their lands, re-claiming their affinity to the place and by that resist their exclusion from it. These voices express their historical experiences and especially their links with place, which are being silenced and ignored in academic research and public discourse (Aburabia 2005, 2013).
COLONIAL AND COUNTER-COLONIAL INDIGENOUS DISCOURSES ON THE NAQAB: BEDOUIN WOMEN’S VOICES
Bedouin Arab identity is based on land, agricultural economics and cultural practices stemming from tribal territory. This represents their independence and sovereignty, and shapes their collective identity (Aburabia 2005; Yiftachel 2003). Thus, following the words of Hall (1996), who claims that identities arise from the story of the self, combining the personal world within the collective space, respect for cultural forms and social practices (Holland et al. 1998), land has profound implications for Bedouin identity. Their sense of identity is based on collective tribal affiliation, associated with established tribal land. Consequently, land is a key component that defines gender identity and status for Bedouin Arab women and gender narrative as it is reflected in the Naqab. This identity is being rebuilt through spatial practices, revitalizing the memory of the past and the connection to land. These spatial practices, including the narration of the past, visits to their historic lands and marking the place, are part of building a sense of place among them and their children, strengthening their links with the land, and the revival of consciousness and the physical return, while constructing a sense of dislocation and emotional alienation from where they live at present (Aburabia 2013). These visits usually take place during the spring, around the time of their expulsion from their land. They describe how and where they used to live, and how and where they used to cultivate the land.
Sense of place among Bedouin women in the Naqab: return visits to the ancestral lands
The idea of “return” (Al Awdah) in a Palestinian context has been extensively studied and characterizes Palestinian identity. It embodies an aspiration to return to the lives, villages, neighbourhoods, houses and orchards from which they were uprooted (Kimmerling and Migdal 1993). This expresses the longing of the peasant to return to his land, honour, home and identity (Robenshtein 1990). Returning to the place stands for integrity, continuity and eternity (Issa 1997), and is fed by return visits. As my studies show (Aburabia 2005, 2013), “return” is a significant component in the identity of the second generation, particularly in view of ongoing dispossessions. The next section will discuss a variety of ways in which the idea of “return” strengthens their links with their land. These include visiting their lands, narrating their lives, and marking the remains of the past there.
Spatial practices include substantive procedures and symbolize a sense of comfort, home, safety and sanctuary, emphasizing the “ancestral land” that women construct (Stewart and Strathern 2003). The link between people and place is defined as a “sense of place”, a geographical term indicating the meeting point of our history with a place, socially, culturally and economically (Young 1986). Through various spatial practices, women feel they are “saving” the physical place through the iteration of detailed memories that illustrate how things were in the past (Slymovics 1998). This is often highly sensory, for example smelling fruit trees and performing physical tasks:
We explain to them ... that we would sit on our land, here we used to live, here was the field well where we used to bring water, this is the mountain where we used to cut wood, shepherd the herds ... we explain to them how our life had been. We need to inform our children, boys and girls, that this used to be ours. (Abu Bader)
This reflects rooted attachment of Bedouin to their historical lands which they continue to preserve aft
er almost seventy years, by visiting their historical lands, and telling their children about their lives there.
We visit in the place ... we go there … and explain to our children: here it used to be the land of that tribe, and here the land of another tribe … and we used to live here. Here used to be our home, we show them [the place] and we walk their and look for remains. (Abu Amra)
According to Murphy (1995), the interaction between the individual and a landscape includes mapping an ancestral landscape and an emotional connection to it. Memory is directed at the ground, while the patriarchs represent the people who lived there. This view is rebuilt and transmitted through ancestors to future generations. Their emotional identification with the landscape is a bridge between present experiences and the ancestors’ experiences. This is illustrated by Alazazmah: “My father said the tree will not give fruit if it is not rooted.” Alazazmah makes a symbolic comparison between man and a tree uprooted from the land in which it belongs. Belonging, then, is a sense that contains both past and present experiences, incorporating memories, relationships and future aspirations in relation to the place (Fenster 2004).
They [the children] ask us: how you used to live here? We explain them about our life in the past in our lands, they feel pain when we visit the land, we tell them: we used to live here, and here is our land. (Al Oqbi)
The concept of the place has been extensively studied in the Palestinian context. This conceptualization is conducted through visiting former homes, encountering traces of the past and commemorating it, convincing their children that these memories belong to them (Fenster 2007; Ben-Ze’ev 2005; Halbwachs 1992; Slymovics 1998). Visits to ancestral lands transfer abstract stories to a concrete space and the use of memories makes Palestine a more concrete entity, familiar to them despite many years of exile (Kanafani in Slymovics 1998: 114).