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Abstract
The question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widely diffused ‘right to culture’ stance on one hand and a critical, constructivist one on the other. By taking up Tsing's metaphor of ‘zones of friction’, (2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations about Bedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece of land in the Negev desert, which is contested between the Israeli authorities and Bedouin representatives. As an imagined inhabitant of the area, ordinary citizens such as Mustafa are fashioned by activists and political tourists in highly culturalist or romanticized ways – images that are distant from the shifting self-representations of Mustafa himself. This case shows how the current emphasis on the ‘right to culture’ creates both new sites of contestation and new spaces for collective action.
Acknowledgements
The personal names of ordinary people who make an appearance in this article are pseudonyms, as are the names of minor localities. I thank the following persons for their comments and critique: Avinoam Meir, Yaakov Garb, Pnina Motzafi-Haller, Cristina Papa and Scilla Luciani. However, I am solely responsible for the contents of this article. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork realized between 2006 and 2007 thanks to a doctoral fellowship (PhD Programme in Methodologies of Ethno-Anthropological Research, Universities of Siena, Perugia and Cagliari), and in 2010–11 thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship (Blaustein Institutes for Desert Environmental Research and University of Perugia).
Notes
1. Political tourism, similar to political theatre, constitutes a specific form of engagement with sociopolitical challenges and has become increasingly significant as a global cultural phenomenon. In the Israeli-Palestinian space, there has recently been a boom of political tours with staged encounters whose images travel around the world, for example through social media (Koensler and Papa Citation2011).
2. This case is not related to the story of El-Aragib, an Arab-Bedouin village in the Northern Negev, whose demolitions and reconstructions between 2009 and 2011 have gained major visibility in Israeli, Palestinian and international media, including documentary productions.
3. Citizens of Arab-Bedouin origin were granted full Israeli citizenship in 1967, rendering them legally equal to all other Israeli citizens. In the early 1950s the authorities created a reservoir-like area (siyag or ‘closed area’) where most Arab-Bedouin groups were transferred and registered according to tribal affiliation. Later, in the 1960s this policy was replaced by a settlement with initially seven so-called ‘Bedouin cities’, whose numbers have been continuously expanded. According to Yahel (2006), the authorties offer to all Arab-Bedouin citizens’ plots to build homes for free or for very favourable conditions. Most previous landowners, however, preferred to stay in so-called ‘unrecognized’ localities, filing land claims. Through the settlement programme, those who did not own land have now been able to upgrade their social status, challenging implicitly the traditional power structures (Ben-David and Gonen Citation2001).
4. Although all citizens of Bedouin origin are overwhelmingly presented in public discourses and academic writing unproblematically as ‘Bedouins’ or ‘Arab-Bedouins’, based on my fieldwork between 2004 and 2010 and in line with the research of Parizot (Citation2001) and Dinero (Citation2010), I estimate that more than half of these citizens actually have significant periods in their lives where they would not identify themselves as ‘Bedouin’ but with different categories of belonging such as ‘Palestinian’, ‘Israeli’, ‘Arab’ or other. This finding also concerns the articulation of ethnic rights and culture.
5. In a speech delivered in Munich, British Prime Minister David Cameron declared the ‘end of multiculturalism’ in Britain on 5 February 2010, elaborating on the ‘failures’ of this approach.
6. The history and motives of the conflict about this piece of land have much wider ramifications that cannot be explained in full within the limits of this article. For instance, while some family members moved to Central Israel in order to work at construction sites, other moved to the reservoir-like area (or syag) in the Negev. In 1976 some members who lived in Central Israel wished to return to the Negev and requested a plot of land in a government-planned town for Israel's Arab-Bedouin citizens. However, since then various difficulties and bureaucratic restraints have resulted in the fact that the requested plots of land are not ready for building. In the meantime, those family members who came back to the Negev settled on the outskirts of the town on the land of a different extended family. When tensions arose between both family leaders, experienced local leaders and CSO activists took this as a chance to start a more visible attempt to claim back the ancestral land inhabited by their forefathers.
7. See the web-blog http://smartsoft.maktoobblog.com or http://electronicintifada.net
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alexander Koensler
ALEXANDER KOENSLER is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Blaustein Institutes for Desert Environmental Research of Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel), in conjunction with University of Perugia (Italy).