Land and Work: Negev Bedouin Struggle with Israeli Bureaucracies

Introduction The governments in the Middle East have always tended to treat the Bedouin as second rate citizens. Even today many government spokesmen argue that the Bedouin contribute little to the region's national economies, that they live apart from the settled population and produce only for their own subsistence (see, for instance, the articles in Arab League 1965 (1); Abou Zeid 1996). The Bedouin's nomadic way of life is viewed as little more than an attempt to opt out of civil obligations, such as military service and payment of taxes. By settling the Bedouin, governments hoped to make them more productive and more governable. As they were thought to practise a subsistence economy (see, for instance, Cole 1975: 145), the economic dislocation and loss of production caused by settlement was often ignored. On the contrary, the officials believed that as settled peasants the Bedouin would at last enter the market economy. The preconceptions of the government officials as to the nature of the nomads affected their settlement policies: they tended to concentrate on housing groups in permanent villages and on converting them to agriculture. During the nineteenth century governments made numerous attempts to forcibly settle Bedouin. For a while these projects seemed to work, but as soon as the authorities averted their watchful gaze, the Bedouin resumed their pastoral way of life (Sachau 1883: 264). This should have been self-evident, for animal husbandry requires larger inputs of labour and capital than farming, and generally yields higher incomes (Abu-Rabia 1994: 107-127). King Ibn Sa'ud clearly knew this, when he settled his Bedouin militias (ikhwan) in agricultural colonies from 1912 onward. He intentionally deprived the men of their pastoral resources in order to make them dependent and pliant. They were meant to rely on regular subventions paid by the state in return for military services (Kostiner 1991: 230-32). By the 1960s most of the inhabitants of these settlements had returned to a pastoral way of life (Cole 1975: 124). A more effective, and no less harmful, policy was applied in Syria and Iraq; it allowed chiefs to acquire large tracts of tribal pasture and convert them to agriculture. This left the poorer members of the tribe little choice but to become sharecroppers of their chiefs, while wealthier ones continued their profitable pastoral activities (Stein 1967: 105-108; Abujaber 1989: 177-196). The oil-rich post Second World War Gulf states did not need to engage in forcible sedentarisation. A different economic constellation had transformed the issue of Bedouin control. Most Bedouin men sought work in the oil industry, which offered higher rewards than animal husbandry. Their families back in the tribal territories maintained a permanent home base, to which the men returned during leaves. The women and children remained `at home' and continued to raise animals as a hedge against unemployment and other expected mishaps. While the income from wage labour was good, animals were not put up for sale (Asche 1981: 138). But if the men lost their jobs, they would return home, revive the alternative economy and make a living out of it (this has been shown for South Sinai; see Marx 1987). Most tribesman were enrolled in the National Guard, and thus received another salary. Periodically they were called up for short training periods and were thus at the beck and call of the authorities. In the sparsely populated countries of the Gulf, land became valuable only when particular resources, such as oil wells, urban infrastructures and services, were attached to it. Therefore the State could impound large areas, at little cost to itself, and mm them into military installations, oilfields or tourist sites, such as nature reserves (see Chatty, in this issue). In the absence of a local infrastructure of capital, knowledge and skills, foreign investors and tourists were expected to make a large and rapid contribution to the economy. …