Bedouin Day

On Thursday morning I awoke at an ungodly hour to meet the Dorot crew for our regularly scheduled seminar day. This Thursday had been lovingly christened "Bedouin Day" and was exactly that.

We first traveled to Wadi El Na'am, an unrecognized Bedouin village south of Beer Sheva, where we received a tour from an environmental organization that works with the Bedouin community. Wadi El Na'am was truly third world, and the situation of Bedouins (who are Israeli citizens) in unrecognized villages in the State of Israel is truly disheartening. After lunch we met with Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, the first Bedouin woman in Israel to earn her PhD. Sarab was really able to articulate the dynamics, especially gender relationships, within the Bedouin community. Our day ended in Rahat, the largest recognized Bedouin village in Israel, where we met and talked one on one with young Bedouin woman about their lives there.

The situation is hard to grapple with. The Bedouin community was here long before the establishment of the State of Israel, but their claims to the land, which has oftentimes been in their family for hundreds of years, are disputed because the Bedouins do not have paper deeds. The government persuaded, in some cases, and forced, in others, hundreds of thousands of Bedouins to leave their lands (and, in essence, their entire Bedouin culture) in exchange for a condensed community with all the advantages of modern living -- houses, running water, electricity, transportation, health care, education, etc. The Bedouins that refused to leave their land live in truly horrible conditions, which is only exacerbated by the health issues they experience due to the chemical plants the state has built in their area. And the Bedouins who now live in the cities created for them for the government have sacrificed their land and culture for only part of what was promised to them. Rahat, for example, has minimal public transportation, no insurance office, and only one post office for it's 30,000 residents.

It begs a lot of questions about our right to the land and our responsibility to all the citizens of the State of Israel.

Bedouin day officially ended as the sunset and we sipped the last drops of delicious Bedouin tea. But in reality, the next few days should have been called Bedouin Weekend.