Frictions as opportunity: mobilizing for Arab-Bedouin ethnic rights in Israel

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Frictions as opportunity:mobilizing for Arab-Bedouinethnic rights in IsraelAlexander Koensler

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Frictions as opportunity: mobilizing for

Arab-Bedouin ethnic rights in Israel

Alexander Koensler

(First submission December 2011; First published May 2012)

AbstractThe question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalizedethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widelydiffused ‘right to culture’ stance on one hand and a critical, constructivistone on the other. By taking up Tsing’s metaphor of ‘zones of friction’,(2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations aboutBedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece ofland in the Negev desert, which is contested between the Israeliauthorities and Bedouin representatives. As an imagined inhabitant ofthe area, ordinary citizens such as Mustafa are fashioned by activists andpolitical tourists in highly culturalist or romanticized ways � images thatare distant from the shifting self-representations of Mustafa himself. Thiscase shows how the current emphasis on the ‘right to culture’ creates bothnew sites of contestation and new spaces for collective action.

Keywords: activism; ethnic rights; friction; politics of claims; Negev; Israel.

Introduction

Until a few years ago, Mustafa was employed as a truck driver, drivingback and forth between the Southern Israeli Negev desert and the GazaStrip. Since becoming unemployed due to the closure of the Gazaborder, he has had a lot of free time. During my ethnographic fieldworkbetween 2006 and 2007, Mustafa became one of my closer contacts. Heloved to bring me to a Burger King restaurant in Be’er Sheva, thecapital of the Negev, and I visited him occasionally at his makeshifthome on the outskirts of a government-planned so-called ‘Bedouintown’. Here we chat often in front of his HD-TV screen, where MTVstars, Al-Jazeera correspondents and Israeli military officials competedto shape local visions. As an Israeli citizen of Arab-Bedouin origin and

Ethnic and Racial Studies 2012 pp. 1�21, iFirst Article

# 2012 Taylor & FrancisISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlinehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.681677

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.681677

a member of the Palestinian minority in Israel, his shifting and complexself-identifications have always been very conflictual to most publicrepresentations of Arab-Bedouin ethnic identity in the Negev, both bygovernment and non-governmental actors.

I met Mustafa for the first time in the rubble of demolished shacksand buildings on the contested land, which I call here Abu Saf. AbuSaf is considered by the Israeli authorities a prestigious reforestationproject and by civil society organizations (CSOs) an informalBedouin village. However, Abu Saf is far from being a village asmost people would imagine it: for instance, nobody lived therepermanently. Between 2006 and 2009, Abu Saf became a hotspot forsolidarity visits and political tourism1 for a wide range of differentactors. Reflecting the increasing visibility of the conflict over Arab-Bedouin land ownership in the Negev, various flows of people, fundsand discourses have been channelled through this place. In themeantime, the shacks and tents of Abu Saf have been demolished bythe police and reconstructed by activists more than ten times (Figures1 and 2).2

This article presents the case of Abu Saf to examine the way in whichvoices and imaginaries about Bedouin ethnic rights are produced. Thefirst part introduces the background debate with a special focus on the

Figure 1. A reconstructed building in front of signs of previous demolitions onthe contested land of Abu Saf (March 2007)

2 Alexander Koensler

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ethnic representations of Arab-Bedouin citizens in Southern Israel.Two polar positions can be identified: a culturalist position and acritical, constructivist stance. I argue that both positions can benefitfrom a more sophisticated and ethnographic view of how imaginariesand knowledge are produced in specific settings. The second partinvestigates how ordinary people like Mustafa are fashioned in avariety of ways by the flows of activism around Abu Saf: as a ‘genuine’Bedouin, who is deeply rooted in his ancestral lands of Abu Saf; as aheroic active anti-Israeli resister; as the passive victim of a humanitar-ian case; and, almost always, as a member of an imagined localcommunity. Nevertheless, the friction of these differing interpretationsfunctions as an effective vehicle for the emergence of new politicalalliances. Anna L. Tsing (2005, p. 6) explains:

As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneousand unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of cultureand power. . . . Friction is not just about slowing things down.Friction is required to keep global power in motion. It shows uswhere the rubber meets the road.

Figure 2. Activists reconstructing Abu Saf after demolition by the police (April2007)

Frictions as opportunity 3

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Claim politics and the cultural renaissance in the Negev

Questions of cultural belonging, ethnic rights and the articulation ofclaims are a quickly evolving and frequently contested issue. Over thepast few decades, a ‘cultural renaissance’ has revitalized many‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ cultural settings and has re-framed theself-understanding of many people throughout the world (Kuper 2003;Cowan 2006), including the contemporary Arab-Bedouin society inthe Negev (Frantzman, Yahel and Kark 2012). The challenge of howto deal appropriately with minority or ethnically framed claimstouches deep concerns about collective belonging, justice and rights.In contrast to the diffusion of anti-essentialist stances in academia,Kamala Visweswaran (2010) defines ‘new culturalism’ the recentlyrevitalization in public discourses of the idea that cultural differencesare definite and thus divisive. Public discourses and activist represen-tations of the unresolved conflict over land and the access to resourcesbetween some governmental institutions and Arab-Bedouin represen-tatives in the Israeli Negev are a case in point. Conflicts over landrights and access to resources originated in the early Ottoman Empireand were both related to an increasing internal social stratification ofArab-Bedouin society and the extension of Ottoman administration inperipheral areas (Kressel, Ben-David and Abu Rabi’a 1991). However,with the foundation of the state of Israel, the population of Arab-Bedouin origin has become subject to a programme of settlement andresettlement, in the first years through force, and presently througheconomic incentives.3 The mainstream literature on the Bedouin�stateconflict considers the Negev desert as a peripheral area with about aquarter of the Negev population to be of Arab-Bedouin and Arab-Palestinian origin. Also, Israel is characterized by multiple overlappingsocial fragmentations (Bulmer 1998); there is a wide consensus that themost disadvantaged citizens of the Negev are those who live in‘unrecognized’ Arab-Bedouin villages (c.f. Yiftachel 2003; Dinero2010). While a few of these villages are located in isolated placesand their foundations date back prior to the independence of the stateof Israel in 1948, most are located in peripheral urban areas aroundthe main road axis, constituting a new form of urban proletariat(Parizot 2001). However, only half of the estimated 200,000 citizens ofBedouin origin live in these villages (Dinero 2010). The other half livein governmental towns, whose number has been over the past decadeextended from seven to twelve, but the planning procedures for somehave not yet been completed, and therefore the status of many of theirdwellers is not yet clearly defined.

Over the past decades a complex set of CSOs has emerged in Israel,contributing successfully to a growing visibility of the question ofArab-Bedouin ethnic difference and rights (Laskier 2000), as part of


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an increasing visibility of ethnic minority claims of Palestinian citizensin Israel (Agbaria and Mustafa 2011). Negotiations over the access toresources between CSOs and government representatives, in particularland rights and public services, are increasingly phrased in a languageof ‘indigenous rights’ (Frantzman, Yahel and Kark 2012), ‘ethnicrights’ and cultural difference (Figure 3). The mainstream vision ofmany organizations and activists who deal with the issue evokes, oftenunproblematically, terms such as ‘tradition’ and ‘custom law’ (cf.Dukium 2006; Manski 2007). As a significant voice on the issue,political geographer and Negev-based activist Oren Yiftachel (2003,p. 21) explains that ‘Bedouin Arabs still living on the land wish tomaintain their traditional lifestyle and resist migration into the sevenplanned towns.’ However, it is often disputed and remains unclearwhat is meant by ‘traditional lifestyle’ for most Arab-Bedouin citizensin terms of daily practices and on what basis they wish to maintainsuch a lifestyle. My aim is not to take issue with the broader analysesof these works, but to critically investigate several implicit assumptionswith regard to how the relationship between rights and culture isarticulated. As we will see, such an investigation may avoid some of thepitfalls that increasingly characterize the mobilization for socialjustice.

At the same time, an increasing body of scholarship has emergedthat rethinks the idea of a clear-cut and static Arab-Bedouin culture inthe Negev. This knowledge is based on different approaches aimed tode-essentialize the collective representation of Arab-Bedouin culture,underlining complex shifting cultural representations (Ben-David andGonen 2001; Parizot 2001; Fischer 2006; Meir 2009). In a broadersense, these works are part of a relative recent tendency to highlightthe dynamic and heterogeneous character of identities in the Israeli-Palestinian space, where rigid oppositions (including those of traditionand modernity and the West and Islam) are, to a certain degree, blownup or underpinned in daily interactions (Rabinowitz 2000; Koensler2008; Garb 2011). This scholarship is in line with the assumption thatMustafa’s life story is not uncommon. In the Negev, scholars havewidely acknowledged that a distinction can be made between‘urbanized’ and ‘rural’ Bedouin (Meir 1997), or Bedouin and theirassociated farmers (fellahin) (Ben-David and Gonen 2001). In thisperspective, the inhabitants of the ‘unrecognized’ villages are con-sidered often to be the more ‘traditional’ Bedouin who have the rightto be protected in cultural terms. Moreover, an increasing number ofArab youngsters in the Negev no longer identify with the moreorthodox categories of Arab-Bedouin culture as voiced in mainstreampolitical discourses (cf. Yonah, Abu-Saad and Kaplan 2004). Inactivist discourses, simplified or reductive ideas of Arab-Bedouin


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belonging seem to announce a revival of essentialist concepts asopposed to describing empiric realities.

As a social anthropologist, I am primarily concerned with theunderstanding and analysing of the production of knowledge andinterpretative categories by tracing complex, multi-sited networksthrough an empirically grounded ethnographic attention to micro-political events (Fischer 2009), including the social construction of

Figure 3. Banners phrased to emphasize cultural difference. Demonstration forBedouin rights in Tel Aviv (June 2007)


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features that underlie the articulation of ethnically framed rightsand claims. The tension between the life history and shifting self-representations of Mustafa and the public articulation of ethnic rightsconstitutes an empirical case of the value of this perspective. WhenMustafa moved to his current home on the outskirts of a state-planned‘Bedouin town’ and lived off Israeli social services, he said he became‘interested in religion and the Koran’. Occasionally we joined localpolitical rallies of the Islamic movement. Previously, as a truck driver,he lived in a Jewish kibbutz near the Gaza border, where he ‘dideverything’, referring to his dissolute lifestyle. It is possible that hiswild love life and stories of drug use were just fantasies, or perhapstime had changed his memories, but his narrative of ‘becomingreligious’ shows a clear shift in his self-understanding. These elementsshow an altering of multiple identifications and a continuing shift ofself-understanding. In other words, what constitutes Arab-Bedouinculture in the Negev is not self-evident, but must be negotiated andconstructed.4

Ethnic rights and social justice: polar positions

The interplay between shifting identifications of individuals and morestatic external practices of categorization, as evident in the articulationof public claims about Abu Saf, takes us to the heart of some of theliveliest debates within ethnic studies. Two polar positions appear toexclude one another: a first stance considers a clearly defined ‘culturalidentity’ as the most efficient vehicle for mobilization against margin-alization, while a second stance calls for a critique of ‘strategicessentialism’ (Spivak 1987). The former, which is tightly connected tothe liberal model of multiculturalism, often considers culture to be anobject of rights (cf. Kymlicka 1995; Champagne and Abu Saad 2003).The latter critically investigates the premises of mobilization in thename of ethnocultural diversity (cf. Kuper 2003; van Meijl 2006). Thefirst stance is based on the presumption that the affirmation andrecognition of cultural identity itself already constitutes an emanci-patory element, while the second stance outlines that cultural diversityhas often been instrumentalized by reactionary political forces. Therevitalization of the discourse of indigenous and ethnic rights in theNegev is an emblematic example of the first approach.

The relatively unproblematic political use of terms like ‘culture’,‘rights’ and ‘tradition’ in mainstream multicultural discourse has beenincreasingly criticized from different angles, not only in the context ofthe Bedouin�state conflict. According to some constructivist critiques,the cultural renaissance is not necessarily accompanied by a sub-stantial redefinition of its theoretical foundations, which often remainunclear. Jane Cowan (2006, p. 15) highlights the contradiction


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regarding the way in which the concept of ‘culture’ is currentlyemployed in writing on multiculturalism: ‘The conundrums surround-ing the ‘‘right to exist’’ concept reveal a remarkable innocenceregarding the debates in social sciences, with respect to the theoriza-tion of subjectivity and conceptions of the relations between structureand agency, power and society.’ The culturalist stance, in accordancewith the liberal theory of minority rights, does not necessarily deny theinternal heterogeneity of social groups and usually acknowledges acertain degree of cultural hybridity. However, when it comes tominority, ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ cultural claims, the concepts ofculture employed by these advocates often become more rigid, staticand exclusive. The recent infamous declarations of the British primeminister regarding the ‘end of multiculturalism’ may indicate what hasgone disastrously wrong with this approach.5

At a more abstract level, the culturalist stance considers ethnocul-tural diversity as an intrinsic value. Political philosopher Kymlicka(1995) maintains that the ‘right to culture’ should be ideallyaccommodated through the allocation of collective rights, includingpolitical autonomy over territory, and the right to exception on thebasis of ethnic traditions from state laws. In line with this position, thestruggle for collective rights in the name of ethnic minorities hasgained a growing visibility over the last few decades and has becomeintersected with the emergence of the global human rights discourse,with a range of international, national and local organizationslobbying for ethnic rights throughout the world.

The second stance, which is often inspired by the constructivist turnin social sciences, moves away from the ‘groupist thinking’ thatcharacterizes multiculturalism, transnationalism and the ‘new cultur-alism’. Most notable is the debate initiated by Adam Kuper (2003, p.390), who highlights the common premises of indigenous claims andthose of extreme right-wing parties in Europe, both based more or lessimplicitly on a ‘blood and soil’ ideology. Kuper (2003, p. 395) pointsout that ‘[w]herever special land and hunting rights have beenextended to so-called indigenous peoples, local ethnic frictions havebeen exacerbated’. However, culturalist critiques of the constructiviststance have highlighted the persisting deep historical injustice regard-ing the living conditions of many indigenous groups.

Beyond the polarity

Rather than resolving this discussion, my goal is to grasp theproductive moment in these differing directions. Both of thesedirections can benefit from a more detailed ethnographic perspectiveon how imaginaries and ideas emerge around specific key events,practices and places. Who speaks out in the name of Bedouin culture


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and why? How circulate ideas of activists, organizations and spokes-persons about what needs to be done in the public domain? Whichvoices are silenced? How are those images connected to the experiencesof the people who are supposed to benefit from this activism? Urginggreater ethnographic attention with regard to the practices andperformances involved in knowledge making, Ingold (2008) underlinesthe importance of considering ‘knowledge as an ongoing process’rather than a certainty. In the following paragraph, I describe eventsfrom an ethnographic case study realized between 2006 and 2007 thatfollows the articulation of ethnic rights around Abu Saf. As mentionedabove, the buildings have also been demolished by the Israeli policeand reconstructed with the help of different factions of activists overten times. In addition, the area is not inhabited by anyone. In a widersense, these circumstances do lead me to question concepts such asArab-Bedouin ‘community’ or ‘culture’, which is often uncriticallyused in classical mainstream literature (Marx 1967). Thus, theethnographic contribution lies not in the attempt to describe thecharacteristics of social groups, but to look at how specific actorsshape specific events in complex fields of social forces. Methodologi-cally, this attempt combines classical long-term participant observa-tion in Abu Saf as a ‘hotspot’ of activism with the effort tosystematically follow its wider connections and repercussions in localpolitics, personal life stories of activists, ordinary citizens and CSOofficials, as practised in ‘multi-sited’ ethnography (Fischer 2009). TheBedouin�state conflict is not a unique case where the circulation ofimages around specific events and places of mobilization ‘create[s] newsites of contestation, belonging, identification and struggle’ (Isin 2009,p. 371). These processes also offer insights into how new opportunitiesemerge through these contradictions and ambiguities.

Demolitions and reconstructions in Abu Saf: shifting oppositions

In the following paragraph, I take up these elements by illustrating theway in which Mustafa moved to the centre of attention of varioushuman rights and coexistence groups in the course of the demolitionsand reconstructions of Abu Saf. For example, during the holiday ofTu’bishvat, an activist group from Jerusalem had travelled to theNegev for a solidarity visit. Because Tu’bishvat is a Jewish holiday thatis associated with planting, the tour included the planting of olive treesin solidarity with the inhabitants of Arab-Beduoin villages. Mobilizedby news of an increasing number of demolitions of unrecognizedvillages, the group proposed a guided visit to what was described as arecently demolished village. When their minibus arrived at Abu Saf, Istood with Mustafa to one side, observing the tired faces and offeringhelp to unload the trees. Significantly, none of the visitors asked the


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Arab-Bedouin citizens present questions. Although the area wasexplicitly presented unproblematically as a ‘demolished village’ and a‘local community’, the place turned out not to be inhabited by anyone.Shacks and tents were set up in the area, mostly by local Jewish andArab activists, in the hope that later on a ‘local community’ would jointhem to reclaim ancestral Bedouin land.6 Shortly after a welcomespeech, one of the organizers from Jerusalem explained to me in aninterview:

We know that we can’t do much, but we want to leave a sign andmaybe change the politics of this very right-wing government. It’s apity, today is Tu’bishvat, a holiday, so there are no media with us.Israel is putting the Bedouin in some kind of ‘‘shanty towns’’, butthey don’t want to live like that. They want to stay with theiranimals, so why doesn’t Israel give them land?

First, it must be noted that in this statement, the solidarity visit wasframed as a wide-ranging problem between right- and left-wingnational politics and not as a specific local question where ‘Israel’and ‘the Bedouins’ are presented as monolithic, personified actors.As I have shown above, Mustafa, despite this statement, did not‘want to stay with animals’ in the area. He preferred to live in amore urban setting, maintaining a wide range of relations withmainstream Israeli society. Thus, his intricate and dynamic life storyis obscured behind the more rigid polarities between ‘Bedouins’ vs‘the state’. At the same time, Mustafa did not oppose the activism;his silence allowed the activists to take their pictures and reaffirmtheir pre-constituted opinions about the local reality. This situation isemblematic of a series of similar encounters that I documentedduring my fieldwork (cf. Koensler 2008; Koensler and Papa 2011):the partial and fragmented perception of specific local events byvisitors is interpreted according to prefixed categories that are incontrast to the complex local situation. Most strikingly, visitors didnot note that the place is not inhabited. As a consequence, the storyof home demolitions becomes a mobilizing tool for activism with awide range of different goals.

Shortly afterwards, one elderly participant approached Mustafa.She asked to take a picture of how she planted a tree jointly with alocal Bedouin on the dusty hill. The bodily experience of travelling,‘observing through one’s own eyes’ and ‘being there’ are importantelements for solidarity activism � elements that become central aspectof knowledge-making. That same evening, after everybody left, I wentwith Mustafa to a Burger King restaurant at a nearby shopping malland later to his ‘real’ home to watch television. The striking image ofthe ‘village dweller’ who wanted to ‘live with his animals’ turned out to


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be the inhabitant of a relatively normal suburban home in a relativelynormal so-called Bedouin city.

New alliances, new conflicts

This tension between complex local conditions and its reductiverepresentations is also evident in other contexts. For instance,involving more ‘local’ people from the informal or unrecognizedBedouin villages is a constant preoccupation of the political groupsand organizations that represent Arab-Bedouin interests. Significantly,Arab-Palestinian citizens from Galilee (Northern Israel), Jewishacademics or citizens from recognized Bedouin towns mainly runthese organizations. Only rarely are Bedouin citizens from unrecog-nized villages involved. Attempts to involve such ‘local’ Bedouinsfailed for several reasons, which were not necessarily connected withthe work of the organizations themselves. Interactions betweenactivists and ‘local’ citizens may provide a more detailed picture ofthe type of problems that can emerge regarding the mobilization ofethnic rights in the Negev. Approximately four months before thesolidarity visit, I witnessed how Mohammed, a respected leaderamong Mustafa’s extended family and a retired Israeli schoolteacher,showed up in the office of a Negev-based advocacy organization. Hecame to ask for help regarding the allocation of legal building plots ina nearby town. The officer advised the leader to ‘struggle for his landrights’. This struggle, he explained, has to be carried out with a ‘loudvoice’ and not through combina, a local expression for resolvingadministrative problems through personal contacts and informalpractices. Also the CSO officer did not have time to gather detailedinformation on the case and, to verify the objectivity of these landclaims, it was agreed to struggle for the land of the contested area inAbu Saf, framed as a ‘return to the ancestral land’. At that time, anumber of members of Mustafa’s family were unemployed and lived inextreme marginal conditions. In their free time, they contributed tosetting up buildings in the area. These constructions were made ofrecycled materials, corrugated iron, polystyrene, wood and a caravan.However, the idea to ‘return to the ancestral land’ found only veryweak support among most of the members of the extended family.This is not a single case. In my interviews with mostly well-educatedyounger Arab-Bedouin citizens, many expressed their distance fromthe way in which traditional Bedouin life should be performedaccording to many activist models.

Shortly afterwards, the authorities demolished the constructions,since they were considered illegal and within the limits of a protectedarea. After nearly all of the ten demolitions that took place between2006 and 2007, I met a diverse set of political actors in the rubble,


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including a women’s puppet theatre group, two journalists from theFrench newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, groups that were con-nected to the Muslim Brotherhood, metropolitan artists, a film-makerfrom Tel Aviv, an international foundation officer and volunteers fromthe British Embassy. In this way, the story of Abu Saf functioned as anextraordinary vehicle for the articulation of political claims fordifferent groups and political actors.

For example, after one of the first demolitions in Abu Saf, acoalition of small political and human rights groups organized a so-called ‘Big day of reconstruction and activism’. Liberal, left-winggroups set up a project called ‘The travelling tent’, which was financedby an international relief organization. The tent, according to theoriginal concept, was planned to be moved through a series ofunrecognized Bedouin localities, serving as a discussion forum forkey issues such as ‘women’, ‘human rights’, and so on. Now the tentwas decorated with external signs that included Hebrew, English andArabic words reading ‘Home destroyed �Family destroyed’, ‘Thechild asks: do not destroy my home’ and ‘The Negev Arabs protestagainst home demolition and the non-recognition of their villages’.They appeared as clear messages against a dusty background.Interestingly, these signs were put up by Islamist-inspired activists,who also promoted the event in their blogs. An informal collaborationbetween humanitarian organizations and religious-motivated Islamistactivism, despite differences in the goals, objects and strategies,produced new forms of synergy among the different actors. Althoughpreviously unknown, news about Abu Saf subsequently circulated at aglobal level in blogs, mailing lists, newspapers, television anddocumentary accounts. However, the complex life problems ofindividuals such as Mustafa were only partially addressed in thisprocess and the area stayed uninhabited. Only rarely did somebodystayed overnight in Abu Saf: once two sixteen-year-old youngstersslept a night in the tents; and another time a film-maker from TelAviv stayed over. Most members of extended families such as Mustafashowed up only occasionally and mostly when visitors were an-nounced. However, Abu Saf functioned as a platform for a wide rangeof other activities that were related with contrasting values, goals andideas about what needed to be done, including indigenous land rights,humanitarianism and anti-Zionism. New actors and alliances withpreviously unknown spokespersons emerged, creating both new zonesof friction and new opportunities. The fragile alliance betweenIslamist-inspired activism and liberal, left-wing groups is an intriguingcase in point. These new alliances also reinforce the conflict betweenIslamists and the state, and, at a more insidious way, between Mustafaand the visiting activists.


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‘Like the first kiss’

Around the set of various narratives and imaginaries that emergedaround Abu Saf, one particular strain deserves in-depth attention: thetendency to romanticize or idealize local forms of life. An Italiancooperation project officer who recalled his memories with greatemotional empathy serves as an emblematic case. He had been visitingthe Negev on various field trips. After an official interview I conductedin Jerusalem, while having a coffee, he stated: ‘I envy you for living inthe Negev. You know, the first time I was invited by the Bedouins, theylet me help to make the labane [a local dairy product]. When I put myarm deep into the big pot of yoghurt that felt, wow, something like thefirst time you kiss a girl.’

His bold statement shows how a specific imagery of Bedouin lifestylein places like Abu Saf can become an archetypical emotionalexperience. These emotions, I assume, also act as an importantmobilizing force for the extraordinary engagement of this officer withwhat is known as ‘the Bedouin issue’. The statement makes it clear thatnot only a few idealistic or backward activists rely on romanticizedimages, but also high-ranking decision-makers in key positions. Theseimages influence the flow of project funds and frame-funding guide-lines, and shape the way in which claims emerge in the public domain.This specific feature evokes emotional resources that other politicalactors are unable to evoke; they function as vehicles of mobilization forthe ‘Bedouin cause’ in a way that, for example, homeless people or drugaddicts are usually unable to provoke. As a sign of this overemphasis ofthe cultural aspects of the Bedouin�state conflict, a number of non-Bedouin Negev inhabitants have expressed their concern about ‘unfair’treatment regarding civic equality (Yahel 2006). During a public rallyon the occasion of Human Rights Day 2010 at Rabin Square in TelAviv, I found myself in the midst of a group of right-wing activists whoshowed up to claim, as one activist put it, that ‘also Negev farmers,Israeli soldiers and religious people do have human rights’. The genuineintentions of these groups can be questioned, especially considering theobjective power disequilibrium between Negev farmers and Arab-Bedouin citizens. These romantic images are some of the more powerfulvehicles for political mobilization.

However, the tendency to overemphasize the Bedouin culturalelements in the political struggle has not passed unobserved amongpro-Bedouin activists. For instance, a Jewish-American activist whohad participated regularly in solidarity visits in the Negev expressedher reservations during an interview in a downtown student pub inJerusalem:


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During the trip I had a strange feeling. It was a sense of non-equilibrium between, let’s say, fantasy and reality. I mean thatfantasy of being close to the people and the earth, this post-colonialfantasy of local authenticity, blah blah blah. This story! Manyactivists, I am afraid, exaggerate with their fantasy. Actually, overtime I have noticed that most Palestinians actually do not want thislifestyle. I don’t know, I don’t like the dynamics that often existbetween the Palestinian villagers and the international, cosmopoli-tan activists. There is a lot of frustration, anger and misunderstand-ing on the ground.

These critical remarks may indicate how, in an age of culturalrenaissance, the polarities between the ‘colonizer’ and the ‘subaltern’are increasing confounded. As Anthony Cohen (2000, p. 11) states:

The Aboriginal, previously subordinated, despised, deprived anddenigrated by the Colonial White Settlers, has now become theparadigm of authenticity in an age in which ethnicity is seen as aqualification for the restitution of rights long trampled and denied.

Local practices blow up rigid dichotomies

At the same time, the events in Abu Saf also functioned as a vehicle forthe emergence of claim-knowledge in other, contrasting ways. In manydiscourses related to activism of the diverse factions of the IslamicMovement in Israel, figures like Mustafa and other local Arab-Bedouin citizens have been represented as active resistance fighters,mostly in overly reductive terms of heroic agents against genericpolitical forces described as ‘Zionism’ or ‘Imperialism’.7 A significantelement regarding the friction between external categorization andmore complex self-understanding emerges in one form of interactionbetween activists of a faction of the Islamic movement in Israel andMustafa. One morning Mustafa informed me that a cement truck wassupposed to arrive from Hebron at the contested area. We decided towait together for the cement. We prepared tea and coffee on a fireamong the rubble of Abu Saf. Nothing happened. From time to time,Mustafa stood up and looked towards the dusty horizon. ‘Now I hearthem coming!’, he shouted out once. However, nothing happened forthe entire day. In the evening we returned to his home on the outskirtsof a government-planned town without any news. A few days later,Mustafa spoke of the promise that the activists would ‘send directlythe money, indeed’, but he had to wait again. A few weeks later,Mustafa was invited to Hebron to visit his contacts in the IslamistMovement. He returned the same evening and was proudly carrying agreen metal door that was decorated with verses of the Koran.


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For the different factions of the Islamic movement in Israel,reminiscent of the Muslim Brotherhood and allies of Hamas, it isnot unusual to provide social services in the informal Negev Arabvillages. ‘Solidarity visits’ after ‘home demolitions’ and public rallies inBedouin towns (Figure 4) are an important cornerstone in therepertoire of Islamist-inspired activism. After one of the demolitionsin Abu Saf, a blogger wrote on a webpage dedicated to the‘Palestinians of 48’:

Israel declares it suffers from terrorism, but isn’t it state terrorism toerase a whole village. What the Zionists forces did today, is an openwound in the Zionist face. Our immediate answer is to reconstructthe homes and the gardens.

However, there were neither homes nor gardens in the specific area inquestion; there were only the dusty traces of previous car races, therubble of the demolished shacks, and a bit of rubbish left over frommeetings. Another time, activists of a different faction of the IslamistMovement came to visit the contested area. They donated dozens ofolive trees to be planted in the village. Ironically, the Jewish Agency, aspart of the reforestation project in the area, had already started to

Figure 4. A public rally in a Bedouin town


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plant their trees in the surrounding area. The trees that were donatedby the Islamists, however, were partly moved by Mustafa and hiscousin to other locations, such as the gardens in their homes in theofficial governmental Bedouin towns. Similar phenomena are knownin the Israeli-Palestinian space as ‘competitive planting’ (Cohen 1993,p. 160�63), producing some of the more obvious paradoxes of the case.The clear-cut dichotomy between Israeli colonialism and Palestinianresistance is definitely blurred in the moment when Mustafa and hisfriends brought the ‘Islamic’ trees into the ‘Israeli’-planned towns. Inmost of the representations of Islamist activism, the agency of figureslike Mustafa is far from the romanticized images produced by liberalcoexistence or humanitarian activism, but their active elements remainalways subordinated to the rigid dichotomies that do not representdaily interactions. This dynamic seems reminiscent of what Zizek(2008) has descried as a form of agency that reinforces the perceptionof subalternity rather than overcomes it.

Waiting

But there were also wider implications in these frictions betweenexternal representations and more complex experiences on the ground.In my encounters with Mustafa, waiting became a central feature:waiting for cement, solidarity visits, demolitions, reconstructions, andin shopping malls. Waiting and ‘killing time’ were common themes. Inanother significant event, a friend of Mustafa advised me by phonethat the next day the police would come to demolish the shacks of thearea again. ‘How can you know in advance when the police willcome?’, I asked, surprised. He stated that some of his Islamist friendshad informal contacts in the Israeli police. He then added with a smileof someone who has experience: ‘They come on Wednesday, they arecoming always on Wednesdays.’ The next Wednesday, we waitedtogether for the police. However, nothing happened. A few journalistscalled and asked for information, but the police did not show up.While waiting, Mustafa and his cousins sometimes raced cars throughthe dusty valley, driving in wild loops through the dusty rubble. Thecars required significant repair and were apparently stolen, as one hadto connect two wires under the driving wheel to start the engine. Inthese moments, I began to perceive Mustafa’s relation to thehumanitarian activism as just another experience of deep subalternity.Wealthy suburbs with green gardens and swimming pools could befound a few kilometres away and housed most of the activists whocame on weekends to express solidarity. In the meantime, in front ofhis HD-TV screen or in the dust of the valley, Mustafa waited for anew job. His marginalization did not seem to be necessarily connectedto the Arab-Bedouin cultural identity as the ‘right to culture’ stance


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would have it. Rather, he waited for social integration into a westernsociety. This impossibility could at times produce unusually harshexpressions. For example, while talking about the Jewish reforestationproject in the area, Mustafa said: ‘Hitler did not do a good job since hedid not finish.’ This type of comment may be based on historicalignorance, yet it shows the distance of the political imagination ofMustafa from the liberal model of ‘coexistence’ that is promoted bymost human rights organizations as shown above. Over this period, Iwitnessed how Mustafa used increasingly rigid categories and inter-pretations about local building policies, including an original mix ofreferences to Islamic resurgence, civil rights discourses and self-emancipation. At the time, these rigid categories had not beenreflected in daily practices. His engagement was not very wide ranging.After a year of demolition and reconstruction, he told me over aburger and a coke in a shopping mall: ‘These continuing demolitionsare not very healthy. For me this is a war. Nobody wants always war. Ihave a family and I want to care about my children. Maybe I will stopgoing to Abu Saf.’ Three years later, in early 2010, members ofMustafa’s extended family accepted an offer by the authorities of aseries of legal plots in another government-planned Bedouin town. Allviolent rhetoric and activism seemed to instantly dissolve. In 2010, Ialso met the coordinator of the CSO who had promoted politicalactivities for land rights between 2006 and 2007. He had planned to setup a business or go to Canada to complete his doctorate. ‘I have hadenough of activism,’ he stated bluntly, adding: ‘At that time I did nothave much information about the case. If they would have told me wewant a plot in Al-Lahiv we would not have launched that wholecampaign.’ The time of Abu Saf being a hotspot for activism appearedto be already over after two years; other places and themes have movedinto the foreground.

Conclusion

In this article, I have offered insights into the different narratives andimages that have circulated around the events of the demolitions andreconstructions in Abu Saf. People with shifting self-representationslike Mustafa have been at the centre of various and often contra-dictory forms of mobilization. The fast-evolving narratives made AbuSaf in a short time a hotspot for activism, offering possibilities formultiple interpretations. People like Mustafa, who did not live in thearea, became fashioned sometimes as a ‘genuine’ local Bedouin,sometimes as a passive victim of home demolitions, and other times asan active anti-Zionist resistance fighter. Forms of mobilization basedon the ‘right to culture’ stance rely often on romanticized culturalfeatures, such as the metaphor of equating the touch of labane cheese


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with a first kiss. These elements constitute central features for thearticulation and circulation of political claims that are associated withthe ‘right to culture’ approach. Important dimensions of the life ofordinary people like Mustafa do not find a place in these reductiveperspectives.

To understand and overcome the limits of both the ‘right to culture’and constructivist stances, a new approach may be useful. Furtherresearch analysing the emergence of constructivist understandings ofidentity politics, mostly in academia, and the role of the ‘newculturalism’ in public discourses is needed here. Knowledge aboutethnic rights, culture and conflict is not simply given, but is the resultof complex power relations and interactions that obscure irregularitiesand contradictory experiences. The ambiguities and openness todifferent interpretations of the events in Abu Saf enables new spacesfor collective action. As Tsing (2005, p. 245) states: ‘. . . we must movebeyond the common-sense assumption that solidarity means homo-geneity. Differences invigorate social mobilization.’ The openness todiverging interpretations of the events in Abu Saf supplies the powerfor a wide range of political and social actors (Poletta 2006). Thealliance of Islamist-inspired activism and left-wing coexistence acti-vism, with its different values and goals, is a case in point here. Inother words, conflicting interpretations, imaginaries and friction areno obstacles for political mobilization but seem to enable theirvisibility.

Acknowledgements

The personal names of ordinary people who make an appearance inthis article are pseudonyms, as are the names of minor localities. Ithank the following persons for their comments and critique: AvinoamMeir, Yaakov Garb, Pnina Motzafi-Haller, Cristina Papa and ScillaLuciani. However, I am solely responsible for the contents of thisarticle. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork realizedbetween 2006 and 2007 thanks to a doctoral fellowship (PhDProgramme in Methodologies of Ethno-Anthropological Research,Universities of Siena, Perugia and Cagliari), and in 2010�11 thanks toa postdoctoral fellowship (Blaustein Institutes for Desert Environ-mental 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


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tours with staged encounters whose images travel around the world, for example through

social media (Koensler and Papa 2011).

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 2001).

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 (2001) and

Dinero (2010), 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

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Frictions as opportunity: mobilizing for Arab-Bedouin ethnic rights in Israel

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Transcript of Frictions as opportunity: mobilizing for Arab-Bedouin ethnic rights in Israel