The Bedouin inhabitants of Palestine, including those of today's southern Israel, have long been marginalized in mainstream scholarship. Recently, however, new literature has appeared, most notably work produced by native scholars covering a wide range of questions pertaining to history and politics. The Naqab Bedouins is one of those new scholarly works. It makes an important contribution to the field, and is the first to provide a comprehensive account, temporally and thematically, of the Bedouin communities of the Naqab area. The book extends from the very end of Ottoman rule (1900–1917) through to the present, though its bulk is on the years of Israeli military rule between 1948 and 1966. Within this period, Nasasra looks at state–society relations and documents a rich record of what he terms “Bedouin struggle” around questions of state making and governance such as policing, urbanization, displacement, education, cross-border relationships, and political participation.
The book argues for the significance of Bedouin history and politics to understanding the present conditions of the Naqab Bedouins in Israel, and more broadly to better study the relationship between state and indigenous peoples. Nasasra undertakes a subaltern approach to argue against prevailing assumptions that depict the Bedouin as passive victims and denies them agency in making their history. Thus, the author explores the various forms and actions of the Naqab Bedouins in defending their community and identity, and thus resisting state domination in various eras. For example, he shows how the Bedouin were active participants in the founding of the Ottoman Beersheba subdistrict by serving in the administration and by making donations to build schools. Most notably, the author demonstrates Bedouin participation and activism in the Palestinian national movement and struggle during British rule, mainly their role during the Great Arab Revolt (1936–39). The book's findings are groundbreaking in demonstrating the multiple identities of the Bedouin, including the local and the national, and their role in the anticolonial Palestinian struggle. Then, Nasasra discusses various developments pertaining to the Israeli rule including, the social destruction of the community, whose vast majority was expelled or fled the 1948 conflict, and the displacement and concentration of the remaining Bedouins into an enclosed zone to be then subjected to military rule until 1966. Despite the cruelty and oppressive nature of military rule, the author shows how Bedouin residents, among other actions, refused some military orders, wrote petitions to the Israeli authorities to pose various demands, and maintained cross-border relationships with their Bedouin fellows and families. Further, most of the Bedouin communities refused Israeli relocation and urbanization policies by insisting on building improvised homes and remaining on their lands. Nasasra reads these acts of resistance and survival practices as ṣumūd (steadfastness).
One of the strongest parts of this important publication is the breadth and diversity of the sources that the author collected and utilized. He draws on archival sources from various national and private archives in Britain and Israel. Alongside well-known archives in these countries, the author collected sources from less-known ones such as that of the Israeli Defense Forces Archives and the Kibbutzim (Israeli communal settlements) in the Naqab. Moreover, Nasasra contacted and interviewed several ex-Israeli military governors of the Naqab, as well as a senior British official who served in the Beersheba administration under British rule who provided access to his private collection. Finally, the voice of the local community is present throughout the book. Nasasra interviewed elderly Bedouin from the Naqab, including Bedouin refugees in Jordan. Some of his interviewees included Bedouin ex-policemen who served in the British-established police and camelry units (Hajjaneh).
Nasasra's focus on local responses to top-down policies (Ottoman, British, and Israeli) challenges the available scholarship and makes an important contribution to our understanding of state–indigenous relationships, and the history and politics of subaltern groups. However, in some parts of the book the author may have read too much resistance into the actions or nonactions of the local communities, and thus downplayed state power and oppression. Without undermining the value of communal survival techniques or nonviolent actions, there remains a need to distinguish when survival and mundane actions of nonviolence are the “outcome” of state power and oppression, or communal weakness rather than a “response” or a form of communal power and resistance against the state itself. The author could have further explored the blurry line between weakness and power, or resistance and survival.
The author also convincingly relates his analyses to scholarly debates about the nature of power and resistance to study the dynamics between the state and the indigenous Palestinian Bedouin. Rightly, Nasasra treats power as a relationship rather than a capacity or object, but he fails to treat indigeneity as a changing relationship of political subjectivity against settler colonial power. While Nasasra briefly addresses the recent scholarly debate around indigeneity, and the disagreements over the use of this concept in the Naqab Bedouin context, he more readily views the concept as an advocacy legal tool, thus reducing, in my view, indigeneity from a power relationship into a legal category. Relatedly, the author makes a brief discussion of Israel as a settler and ethnocratic state, which in my view should have been further explored and utilized throughout the book. This is especially surprising given that the author explored the colonial framework and its utility to the Naqab Bedouin case in previous work. The settler-colonial framework may better explain the multiplicity of subjectivities as well as identities of the Naqab Bedouins in Israel, and the nature of the colonial material and discursive power that is practiced against Palestinians and their space.
The Naqab Bedouins constitutes an important historical account, spanning three regimes, it allows us to observe the historical continuities and discontinuities in southern Palestine and later Israel. This temporal framework does have a cost. The author's choice of the chronological over the thematic option led to some repetition that could have been avoided, such as on questions of education or cross-border relationships. Further, the pioneering and deep analysis of the Israeli military period (1948–66) (Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9), came at the expense of other periods. In Chapter 10, the last substantive chapter, the author makes a serious temporal jump that addresses the post-Oslo period (1993–2016). This jump misses some crucial developments in the 1970s, namely the Israeli land title settlement, the filing of 3,220 Bedouin land claims, and the Israeli-appointed Albeck Commission, which coined the official Israeli legal position that denied all Bedouin land rights. This land conflict continues to structure the daily realities of the Naqab Bedouins and is central to Israeli–Bedouin relationships.
In sum, I strongly recommend this book. The Naqab Bedouin enriches a growing critical scholarship that challenges the long-used modernization framework and its tendency to focus on Bedouin culture, folklore, and tribal law over the modalities of resistance and identity in constant negotiation as articulated by Bedouin voices themselves. It will be particularly useful to students and professors of history, sociology, anthropology, and political science who are interested in the Middle East, Palestine, Israel, tribal and indigenous communities, and modern state making.
