Echoes of Legal Pasts: The Social-Legal History of Landed Property Relations in Southern Palestine, 1858–1948 (Ahmad Amara)

Attempts to incorporate southern Palestine, as a frontier and peripheral region of the Ottoman

imperial domain, under more direct governance began in the late nineteenth century and continued since

then. The incorporation process involved a number of dialectics, many times conflictual, around the

scope, meaning, and nature of the new governance order. The new administration, the legal system,

taxation and redefinition of property rights, were in constant negotiation and reconfiguration, and they

had differed from one regime to another. We may rightly state that such contestation continues until the

present day in Israel, especially in the area of land rights and housing. In my view, despite the

particularities of Israel’s Zionist land policies, they should be read in part against the original major

Ottoman reforms beginning in the late nineteenth century, as part of the art of modern-state making.

The current draft is a work in progress that seeks to target the interrelationships between the social

and geographic categorizations of a particular region (Negev) and of a social group (Bedouin), and how

such categorizations and imaginations had impacted the produced state-social relations and the legal

system around landed property. As an agrarian empire, landed property rights in the Ottoman Empire

revolved largely around agriculture, and thus property rights stemmed largely from cultivation. In such

case, the categorization of the Bedouin as nomads, and as a community that subsisted from animal-related

economy is significant. As the research shows, the exceptional approach that the Ottoman have

undertaken towards Beersheba, began a state of “exceptionalism” that continues until the presence,

including in scholarship. The Ottomans allowed a higher number of members in the local council,

allowed the council to serve as a tribal court, allowed the native property system to operate with high

autonomy, and utilized a discourse of “civilizing the Savage” Bedouin.

On the other hand, on the ground things developed in a more mutual as well as contested manner. The

Ottoman government sought to register Bedouin-held lands since the 1880s, with no particular success.

On the other hand, the Bedouin themselves sought to register their lands in order to be able to get loans.

Further, the special legal zone that the Ottomans had constructed, especially around land disputes, led to a

situation of jurisdictional tensions vis-à-vis the civil Nizamiye courts in Gaza, where Bedouin and non-

Bedouin, who were ignored in producing this space, had conducted forum shopping, and sold and

mortgaged lands frequently. Finally, the Ottoman archival resources demonstrate a highly integrated

community into the ‘state apparatus.’ Sheikhs served in administrative and judicial positions, and were

active in protesting appointments of the qaimakam, writing petitions to the Sultan, requesting assistance

in years of aridity, and sending their kids to study in Istanbul.

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The project, in broader terms, explores and conceptualizes state-society and center-periphery

relationships by exploring the frequent reconfigurations of landed property relations and spatial

transformations in the Beersheba region through the mutual constitution of law and space. In the shadow

of major Ottoman administrative reforms and governance incorporation of peripheries, the late-nineteenth

century marked a significant socio-political conjuncture in the history of the Ottoman Empire and of

modern Palestine. This coincided with changing notions of authority and sovereignty, based on direct

rule, power centralization, subjecthood, and defined territoriality. Alongside such transformations,

fluctuating’ notions of modernization and ongoing capitalist development, including land

commoditization, had impacted the spatial-legal order and attendant social sphere of southern Palestine.

The research utilizes archival resources from Israeli, Ottoman, and British archive, as well as personal

papers and interviews.

The draft includes a high number of maps. Nevertheless, here is a suggestion for the most relevant pages:

2-5; 11-19; 22-35.

Southern Palestine and the Making of the “Negev”: Governance Incorporation and Geographic

Transformation

This chapter outlines the Ottoman and British’ developed administrative apparatus starting from the

major Ottoman governance reform in the Beersheba region by founding the Beersheba town as a center of

a new kaza (district), which was designed as a ‘Bedouin kaza.’ Among the then-new Ottoman

developments in the Beersheba region were the founding of administrative and municipal councils,

furnished largely by Bedouin sheikhs; the founding of a tribal court; attempts to settle the Bedouin and

increase agricultural activity, and thus taxation; development and infrastructure projects including

schools, clinics, roads, and railroads; and the founding of police and military forces. The British,

occupying Beersheba from the Ottomans in 1917, had continued to large extent a similar line of policies.

Both the Ottoman and the British had constructed an administrative apparatus that maintained, at times

through formal incorporation, much of the existing local customs and practices. Addressing the major

social and economic transformations, such as property formalization, agriculture, sedentarization, and

development in the following chapters, this chapter focuses on the administrative and political processes

that led to the formation of what is known today as the “Negev.” Consequently, the chapter goes beyond

this spatial formation to investigate the scholarly implications and shortfalls resulting from utilizing the

“Negev” as a research category, without sensitivity to its historical-political formation.

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Whenever the word “Negev” is heard, it is usually associated with notions like “desert,” “tribal area,”

and “Bedouin nomadism.” The “Negev” has become not only a self-contained term that needs no further

unpacking, but has created its own imagined social and geographic reality. I argue that the simple

adoption of the “Negev” category together with the “Bedouin,” led many scholars to conduct a flat and

homogenizing social and spatial reading of the region, framed within a modernization discourse. In this

chapter, I refer to such scholarly approaches as the “Negev Paradigm.” Under this paradigm scholars are

not careful in identifying the different sub-ecological and geographical zones of southern Palestine, their

respective populations and the resulting socio-economic realities. Such approach led to a state of isolation

and siege to the scholarly prospects; the scope of the region’s history is limited and studied in isolation

from nearby regions and communities. Looking at the region and its population as homogeneous coupled

with presumption on nomadism, led to undermining the presence of other non-Bedouin communities, as

well as the resulting economic and agricultural activities. Nearby geographic areas and populations, such

as the towns of Gaza, Khan-Yunis, Hebron, and al-Majdal, constituted a significant part in the orbit of the

Bedouin population, and their inhabitants had socio-economic, familial and other relationships with the

Bedouin population. Further, in many cases the study of southern Palestinian does not take into account

the pre-nation states’ natural geographic and communal’ extensions of southern Palestinian and its

inhabitants into the Sinai, Hijaz, and Transjordan. The extensive agricultural activity and the inter-

communal interactions created complex and various networks that should be explored.

The “Negev Paradigm” represented a similar line like that of Zionist propagandists, who hoped that

an all-encompassing term for southern Palestine as a desert would justify its allocation for Jewish

settlement and control. As I will show, the earliest Ottoman development efforts of this space involved a

diverse array of nomadic, settled and semi-settled/nomadic peoples and merchants. In the next chapter, I

discuss Bedouin agricultural activities, including the growing of barley, which was mostly exported to

European beermakers. An image far removed indeed from the idea of a vast desert populated by a few

wandering pastoralists.

Scholarship on the Beersheba region and its inhabitants expanded in recent years, and the field came

to be known as the “Negev/Naqab Bedouin Studies.” The most recent development in this field is a body

of scholarship produced mostly by native Palestinians. It came to challenge older scholarly paradigms and

resituate the Bedouin community within the broader Palestinian community and the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict, by stressing the marginality and discriminatory Israeli practices against the community. This

scholarship, recently termed the ‘third paradigm,’ was summarized as follows:

“The third paradigm has seen a surge in efforts to… re-Arabize (and Palestinianize) both place and community. The ‘Negev Bedouin’ has been increasingly challenged as a conceptual framing. In some

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ways this has been pioneered by the terminology of the NGO advocacy, where the ‘Naqab’ has become central to Palestinian iconography… In academic writing, too, there has been a similar shift towards the use of ‘Naqab’ and Naqab Bedouin (in place of ‘Negev’), and towards adding clarifying epithets, such as ‘Palestinian Bedouin’ or ‘Arab Bedouin’, or ‘indigenous Palestinian Bedouin’. It is in the past decade or two that we can begin to speak of ‘Naqab Bedouin studies’, rather than ‘Negev Bedouin studies.’”1

The ‘third paradigm’ made a significant contribution to remedy the shortfalls of scholarship on the

“Negev/Naqab Bedouin.” Nevertheless, despite its critical underpinning, there remain serious flaws in

this paradigm that need to be addressed, mainly in the conceptual approach. For example, beyond the

addition of the epithets of ‘Palestinian’ and/or ‘Arab’ before or after the term ‘Bedouin,’ there has been

no serious scrutiny to deconstruct these identities or to study the interconnections among them, or how

have their meanings changed throughout the years.2 More importantly, the utility of the analytic category

‘Bedouin,’ and that of the Naqab/Negev, and the implications of their use in our particular case were

never deeply investigated. What makes the Negev/Naqab inhabitants distinctive, and in relation to what

communities? Who is a Bedouin? What are the Naqab/Negev boundaries and when did it emerge as a

distinct geographic unit, and what makes it distinctive? How did the “Negev” and “Bedouin” come to

dominate the constructed’ study field? A historical outlook into the administration of the region enhances

our imagination and provides us with a larger spectrum of options to approach the field, and to utilize a

range of alternative concepts, categories, and areas for research.

Let us highlight a major flaw, or rather paradox, in the existing scholarship with the following. The

vast majority of scholars of the ‘Naqab Bedouin studies,’ in telling the pre-Israeli history of the

community, cite and rely on Arif al-Arif’s famous book Bir al-Sabia’ wa Qaba’iluha (Beersheba and its

tribes). Al-Arif, a historian and the Ex-governor of the Beersheba sub-district, did not use the term

“Negev” or the equivalent Arabic term “Naqab,” simply because the region of southern Palestine was not

historically known as such. It never constituted a defined geographic or an administrative unit known as

the “Negev” or “Naqab.” Rather, different parts of southern Palestine were associated with several nearby

geographic regions and towns. The northern parts around Beersheba were mostly known as bilad Ghazza

(Gaza region) or Dirat Bir al-Sabia’ (Beersheba area), whereas the further southern parts were associated,

depends on their geographic proximity and social composition, with the Sinai, the Hijaz, and Transjordan.

Al-Arif did not use the term ‘Naqab’ throughout his book to refer to the region.

This chapter will explore the various definitions to the “Negev” based on numerous primary sources.

The genealogical production of the currently-studied “Negev” as a defined, or rather undefined,

1 Mansour Nasasra et. al., “Introduction,” in Mansour Nasasra et. al., (eds.,), The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism- New Perspective, (Routledge, 2015), 13.2 See more in the introduction

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geographic unit, will illustrate that there were a number of understandings, maps, and various definitions

of what constituted the “Negev,” as well as a diversity of ecological zones (desert, semi-desert, mountain,

valley, and cultivable zones) within it. Further, the discussion will show how the Bir al-Sabia’ region was

reconfigured from being part of a broader, lively, and more dynamic space which extended into the Sinai

and Gaza into an isolated, defined, and arid space delineated by modern political lines. The “Negev,” as

other geographic units, was constructed in a specific historical political conjuncture and should be treated

critically together with other inter-related terms and categories such as “Bedouin,” “desert,” “tribal

space,” or “nomadism.”

As will be shown below, the “Negev” was introduced more forcefully as a political-geographic term

by the Zionist movement during the 1930s, with the surface of the political proposal of partitioning of

Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The “Negev,” geographically and figuratively, became a site of

political and nationalist contest over the region’s political future, its economic potentialities, and overall

concerning the future of Palestine. It is within this context that it came into being. The use of Negev or

Naqab, in my view, does not only represent one form of Israeli-Zionist geographic hegemony and

reconstruction of the Palestinian space, but further, is a form of communal reconstruction and discursive

representation. Such geographic and social reconfiguration is a significant prism through which to study

modern state-making processes, state-society interactions, as well as the political upheavals that Palestine

went through since the early nineteenth century.

Rejecting the use of the “Negev” category and its commonly-accepted geographic boundaries, the

following will start with a brief discussion of the no-less important twin term; ‘Bedouin,’ which will be

discussed in depth in the next chapter. Then, the chapter goes on to investigate the origins of the term

“Negev” and what it referred to, followed by the Ottoman views towards southern Palestine and their

significant administrative reform. After that, I will move to discussing briefly the British general

administrative approach to the same region. It was in this period that Anglo-Zionist political debate

around southern Palestine generated a number of attempts and definitions to the then-revived term; the

“Negev” as referred to by the Zionists and the “Negeb” as was referred to by the British. While the use of

the “Negev” is rejected, the chapter does not propose an alternative geographic unit or name, but rather

suggests a sensitive and pluralistic approach to multiple sub-categories, zones, and networks that could

have existed in the past. It suffices to say at this point, however, that often what purports to study the

“Negev/Naqab Bedouin” is in fact studying a smaller geographic area of southern Palestine and the

population that inhabited that area. This area extends southeastward from the line connecting Gaza and

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Rafah towards Beersheba, and is estimated at about 3 million dunam,3 its soil is cultivable, and it was

inhabited by particular tribes who consisted the majority of the Bedouin who lived in southern Palestine.

I. Southern Palestine and its Population:

i. The Naming: As was outlined in the introduction of the dissertation, many of the commonly-

used terms (Bedouin, Negev/Naqab, Palestinian/Arab, tribal) are historically and socially constructed

terms that should be de-constructed and analyzed within each particular case. How should we refer to the

Arab population that historically inhabited the region of southern Palestine together with the nearby Sinai,

Hijaz, and Transjordan areas, and whose seasonal mobility depending on pasture and rain was a

significant component of its lifestyle? The easy answer would be “Bedouin” if they were still undertaking

a lifestyle of transhumant pastoralism typically associated with the term. However, in the Palestinian

context, these inhabitants are Israeli citizens and now consist of mostly sedentarized laborers and

agriculturists, which makes it inaccurate or rather mistaken to simply refer to them as Bedouin. Moreover,

since the late nineteenth century, this population relied heavily on agriculture in addition to livestock

rearing. As a result, it is more accurate to refer to them as agriculturalists-pastoralists or a settled/semi-

settled (semi-nomadic) community, or a combination thereof. It is more problematic when “Bedouin” is

utilized as a research category and not simply as a descriptive qualifying term.

William Young has discussed the discursive political and ideological construct of the term

“Bedouin,” and its various usages and meanings in different regions and of communities in Jordan.

Young suggested that the term ought to be approached with much caution and perhaps even discarded

altogether. Young proposed instead utilizing alternative categories including “nomadic pastoralists” or

“migrant laborers” as the particular case requires. As he correctly noted, the use of the term “Bedouin”

distorts the complex reality of interrelations between different groups—whether nomadic or sedentary—

and eventually creates a misleading signifier, lacking neutrality and replete with ideological baggage. 4 In

the same line of critique, the use of “tribe” as an analytic category and its various definitions was

criticized by scholars as failing to represent the complex reality of the studied groups. The common use of

it failed to consider the fact that tribes could be nomadic or sedentarized, and could have different ethnic

origins.5

Moreover, the use of “Bedouin” within the Israeli-Palestinian context bears further ideological and

political implications. In denying the nationalist identity of the Palestinian people, including the

3 Four dunams equal one acre. 4 See William C. Young, ‘‘‘The Bedouin’: Discursive Identity or Sociological Category? A Case Study from Jordan,’’ Journal of Mediterranean Studies 9:2 (1999), pp.275–99.5 Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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Palestinian citizens of Israel, and in undertaking a ‘divide and conquer’ approach, the Zionist leaders and

later the Israeli government viewed the Palestinians as a group of religious and cultural minorities,

including Muslims, Christians, Circassians, Maronite, Bedouins, and Druze. Thus, the term ‘‘Bedouin’’ is

criticized as denationalizing and divisive to the Palestinian collective.6 Yet, while further research on this

question is needed, including an investigation to the terms “Arab” and “Palestinian” and the relation to

them, the following chapters will tackle the “Bedouin” identification within the context of agricultural-

economic activity and settled lifestyle.

ii. What is the Negev?

The “Negev” never existed as an administrative district or sub-district under the Ottoman, the British,

or even the Israeli rules. Before the modern boundaries of Palestine were drawn in the 1920s, southern

Palestine was perceived as part of a unified spatial unit that included what are today southern Jordan, the

Sinai Peninsula, and northern Arabia. In most of the 18th and 19th-century surveys and maps, southern

Palestine was associated in particular with the Sinai Peninsula.7 At the administrative level, until 1900

most of Southern Palestine and its inhabitants were under the jurisdiction of the Gaza kaza, whereas in

1900, the Ottoman government built the new town and kaza of Beersheba, in order to separate the

Bedouin from Gaza. In 1908 the Ottomans established another kaza, the Auja-Hafir, near the Egyptian

borderline in southern Palestine and placed it under the jurisdiction of Beersheba, whose status was

promoted. This Ottoman reform marked the beginning of the governance incorporation of southern

Palestine and its inhabitants under the direct rule of the government. The British, after 1917, cancelled the

kaza of Auja-Hafir and maintained the Beersheba sub-district as one administrative unit, the borders of

which became defined in the 1920s as Palestine’s international borders were finally drawn. The Ottoman

Beersheba kaza was smaller than the British one and its boundaries were less clear. The British Beersheba

sub-district’s area was estimated at 12,576,000 dunam. Currently, there is in Israel the Southern District

(comprising 14,185,000 dunam) and its Beersheba sub-district (12,918,000 dunam).8 Clearly, the

definition of what constituted this space fluctuated according to the exigencies of various ruling regimes.

The term “Negev” appears in both the Jewish bible (Tanak”h) and in the ancient commentaries of

Jewish sages. Linguistically, the noun “Negev” in Hebrew comes from the root n.g.v. ב-ג-נ , which means

“to dry,” and is also used as a synonym for “south.” In the Book of Genesis, the “Negev” appears for the

6 Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism 1917-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).7 Noam Levin, Ruth Kark and Emir Galilee, “Maps and the Settlement of Southern Palestine, 1799–1948: An Historical/GIS Analysis” (Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010): 3.8 Map available in the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, available at http://www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton62/map/01_01.pdf

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first time referring to a section of land, with connection to Abraham’s journeys.9 The Negev boundaries

are mentioned in different locations in the Bible, through references to a number of historic sites of cities

and regions.10 Although not all of those sites’ locations are known, scholars used descriptions to draw the

southern boundary of the Negev, and thus of biblical Eretz Israel, on the south-eastern edge of the Dead

Sea. From there the Negev’s boundary extends westward to Egypt’s Wadi, identified by religious

commentators as Wadi al-Arish. As for the northern border, it is not clearly defined in the Bible.

Nevertheless, Arad city is mentioned as being in the Negev, while Hebron as situated within the Judaean

Mountains; thus, the northern boundary passes between Arad and Hebron. The biblical definition of the

Negev, then, excludes a vast area of southern Palestine.11 Further, there appeared sub-divisions to

southern Palestine which also used the term Negev such as “Negev Yehuda,” “Negev Hakini,” “Negev

Hakriti,” “Negev Kelev,” and others.12

The parallel term to the “Negev” in Arabic is “Naqab” (نقب) or ‘Najab’ (نجب). Naqab literally

means the creek in between two mountains which served as a passage area, mainly existent in the Wadi

Araba mountain chain between Palestine and Transjordan. The plural form of Naqaba would have

perhaps been a more appropriate name, as 30 different naqabs crossed this area according to al-Arif.13

Whereas Najab, as mentioned by Mustafa Aldabagh in his famous encyclopedia Biladuna Falastin

(Palestine, our land) is the area located roughly south of Beersheba to Ein Qiddis in Egypt (about 82 km.

from Beersheba). The term is very old as it appeared in old Egyptian inscriptions and, as with the Hebrew

term, it commonly used to mean the south.14

In addition to the two common names of bilad Ghazze and dirat Bir al-Sabia’ referring to the

northern parts of the region, the more southern parts were at times referred to as the Palestine Desert.

According to Aldabagh, the Palestine Desert is an area of more than 10.5 million dunams, and lies below

the line passing from Auja, to Asluj, to Kurnub, inhabiting the Bedouin confederations of Azazma,

Sa’idiyeen, and Ahewat.15 The area of the Palestine Desert and its inhabitants is the area that is

understudied and usually not included in the “Negev/Naqab Bedouin studies” (except for part of the

Azazma). The approximate area of the Palestine desert was also known as the “Negeb Desert,” and more

famously as the “Wilderness of Zin.” In 1913 a Royal Engineers team, under an archeological )ג, יג, בראשית” (וילך למסעיו מנגב ועד בית אל 9 .”; Ruth Peleg ed., The Negev- Human and Environment over Generations, (The Ministry of Education and Yad Ben-Zvi, 2004), 17-20. (Hebrew).10 Peleg, The Negev, 17. 11 Peleg, The Negev, 18. Defined in Joshua’s Book, note also the saying “Dan to Beersheba.”12 See, Arnon Sofer, “The Negev”- Geographical Definition, in Shmueli and Gradus (eds.,), Eretz Hanegev, Adam W-Midbar (Hebrew, “The Negev Land”- Man and Desert), (1979): 3-8. 13 Al-Arif, Beersheba and its Tribes, p.159.14 Mustafa Aldabagh, biladuna Falastin, Vol.II. p.459, reprinted by Dar El-Huda, (1965) (in Arabic).15 Mustafa Aldabagh, p.129, Vol.I.

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smokescreen of the Palestine Exploration Fund, visited the Wilderness of Zin, led by two famous PEF

archeologists, Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence- Lawrence of Arabia.16 Moreover, there have been

other terms referring to the northern desert parts of southern Palestine, as Badiyat Al-Tih, and to the

further southern hilly parts as Jabal Al-Tur.17 According to al-Arif, as one of the stories goes, the Tayaha

confederation gained their own name from being the first tribes to have lived in the Tih desert.18

The only official Israeli definition of the Negev is in the Israeli “Negev Development Authority

Act” of 1991, in which it is defined as the Israeli area south of line 115 in the Israeli old survey grid.19

(see map X) This Act replaced the Negev Act of 1986, which defined the Negev as synonym to the

Beersheba sub-district,20 an equation that was also followed at times by the British.

Map X: The Israeli defined “Negev” (light brown, prepared by Rani Mandelbaum)

16 Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence Wilderness of Zin, Stacey International Publishers; 2nd edition 200317 Sofer, “The Negev,” 1979, 3-8.18 al-Arif, 103.19 See, text in Hebrew available at, http://www.negev.co.il/?page_id=86. The ICS, Cassini Soldner, is the old geographic coordinate system. The new system is, Israeli Transverse Mercator (ITM).20 Available at http://www.dinimveod.co.il/hashavimcmsfiles/Pdf/sh1185.pdf, Sefer-Hahokim, 1185.

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Scholars have generally followed a commonly accepted definition of the Negev as constituting

about 12.5 million dunams, or about 60 percent of Israel. Emanuel Marx, among the first Israelis to study

the "Bedouin of the Negev," provided the following definition in 1967:

Geographically the Negev may be defined as the area lying to the south of the Judean mountains and west of the Dead Sea and the A’rabah, that part of the Great Rift extending from the Dead Sea to Elath (Aqabah) ... extends over 12,500 sq km ... This region is roughly co-extensive with the administrative district of Beersheba during the British Mandatory period, but it also includes a small enclave of the former Hebron sub-district.21

Since Palestine's southern boundaries are now defined internationally, it is the northern boundary

of the Negev that poses the challenge and leads to gaps in definitions. It is normally referred to through

flexible geographic reference points; the Judaean Mountains or Beersheba’s plains. Other scholars,

including myself, have followed this definition, sometimes with less-detailed description of the

boundaries.22

The few scholars who have tackled the challenge of defining the Negev boundaries have in fact

pointed out different approaches undertaken by scholars to explain boundaries of this region. In this

regard, Amnon Sofer outlined the different undertaken approaches, such as the ‘historic approach’ which

seeks to define the Negev based on historical sources; the ‘natural region approach’ which seeks to define

the Negev based on topographic and climatic elements; the ‘core and periphery approach’; the

‘administrative approach’ and other approaches. In sum, Sofer argued that different scholars adopted

different definitions of the space as fit with their own research, and concluded that any attempt to define

the Negev is in fact a major challenge.23

A more recent study looked into a large volume of historical maps to trace the settlement of

southern Palestine and demonstrate the “shifting boundaries of the Negev.” While the authors use

“Southern Palestine” in their title, they use it interchangeably with the “Negev” and the “Negev Desert.”

Only in their footnotes do they refer to the fact that the “Definitions of the Negev varied with time,” and

specifically that its northern boundary “is more fuzzy and may represent the boundary between the ‘desert

and the sown’ land… or a definition of where Desert and Mediterranean climate and biogeographic

regions meet.”24 This suggestion is relevant for a climatic definition of the region. But it does not always

match up with the Negev as a political-geographic unit. After all, the distinction between desert and sown

carries with it a distinction between nomadism and sedentary lifestyles which were historically practiced

21 Marx (1967), p.7.22 Ismael Abu-Saad and Ahmad Amara, Introduction, in Amara (2013), pp. 1-16, at 15; Abu Hussein and McKay (2003), p.115, 137. 23 Sofer, “The Negev,” 1979, 3-8.24 Levin et. al.,(2010), p.3.

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by the same people. This is even more problematic today since nomadism no longer exists in the areas,

not to mention climatic changes throughout the years. Hence, the process itself of how the Negev came

into being as a commonly-used geographic unit, especially within what the “Negev/Naqab Bedouin

studies,” remains unexplored.

II. Extending Governance and Spatial (re)Construction:

Deserts and mountains have often been imagined and categorized by government agents as places

where natural features have suspended time and blocked the penetration of “civilization.” Similarly, the

inhabitants of these regions were mostly characterized as “barbarian,” “tribal,” or “primitive.” Such

imagination and categorizations have strongly materialized in the shadow of governmental attempts to

bring these regions and their inhabitants under the government arm. Seen as beyond the state reach, and

perceived as fertile grounds for social engineering, these areas constituted a significant test case for

effective modern governance. As Lauren Benton notes, such categorizations are rarely unpacked by

scholars. Both, the categorization of a space as a “desert” and relatedly as “uncivilized” or “barbarian,”

need be deconstructed within their historical-political context.

Similarly, in his book The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott notes how civilizational

discourses of “tribalism,” and “primitivism” targeted those self-governing groups whose incorporation to

the nation-state was incomplete. Such discourses, according to him, “begin exactly where taxes and

sovereignty end.”25 Law, in this context, was also a civilizing tool. Thus, the categorization of mountains

and deserts as distinctive political and cultural spaces by imperial agents informed the development of

particular legal orders. Such spaces, regulated by a native legal system and particular ethical codes, were

associated with legal primitivism and their inhabitants were treated as people who deserved special

treatment so that “[T]hey might attain, and will be rewarded with, only the kind and amount of law that

matched their level of development.”26 Thus, the process of expanding the reach of the centralizing

authority included an intertwined discursive and structural processes, and fraught dialectical interactions

vis-à-vis the relevant regions and their inhabitants. The “incorporation” was far from a unified linear

process of imposition. Rather, there were constant reconfigurations of power dynamics, local knowledge,

and alternative and adapted frameworks in these regions. The Beersheba region and its inhabitants were

of no exception. They were often treated in this vein, as distinctive and thus requiring exceptional legal

and governance policies. However, the Ottomans and the British were mostly careful in seeking

consensual arrangements, and their policies had to be localized and adapted.

25 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009): xi. 26 (Benton, 2010:225).

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Southern Palestine during the Ottoman Reform Period:

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the relationships between the Ottoman center and its provinces

were ordered and administered mainly through intermediaries and notables. The intermediaries (powerful

leaders, tribal sheikhs, and village and town notables), took over and performed certain duties such as tax

collection and soldiers’ recruitment. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman government

embarked on a new governance form of centralization and direct rule, formulated within a major reform

known as the Tanzimat (ordering). The reform re-ordered a number of fields, such as local and regional

representation, tax collection, property rights, and settlement and sedentarization of tribes.

As an agrarian Empire, land, or rather productive cultivable lands, served as a central resource for

both Ottoman society and state. Throughout the 19th century, the Empire lost a number of territories, and

thus major source of income, seeking to improve and increase tax collection, alongside better hold over

the remaining areas and military conscription. Further, such agrarian system created “a distinction, hence

a dialectic, between a settled, state-governed population and a frontier penumbra of less governed or

virtually autonomous peoples.”27 We may add, also of productive and of unproductive peoples in the eye

of government agents. Enactment of new laws, codifications, individuation of property rights, land title

registration, infra-structures and discourse of civilizing particular communities within the empire, were all

part of the new imperial order. Such projects of standardization and control were part of a new

governance system, characterized by “internal colonialism,” and part of the modern state-making.28 These

policies and discourses are much evident in southern Palestine and against the Bedouin tribes.

Civilizing the tribes: In his A Movable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants & Refugees (2009), Resat

Kasaba argues that the Ottoman initiated their first significant push towards nomadic sedentarization

during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. The peak of Ottoman settlement and

sedentrization efforts were in the mid-nineteenth century, in conjunction with wider processes of

reordering state-society relationships.29 Notwithstanding these efforts of expanding the imperial reach,

this Ottoman settlement and sedenterizaton project encountered difficulties and resistance to such degree

that by the time of the Empire's collapse in the early 20th century it was far from being completed.30

Nomadic and semi-nomadic communities played a major role in the Empire’s economic network,

providing animals, meat, labor force and transport of products (on their animals), and maintained a web of

27 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009, 3-4.28 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009, 29 Resat Kasaba, A Movable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants & Refugees, University of Washington Press, 2009, p.5430 Resat Kasaba, A Movable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants & Refugees, University of Washington Press, 2009, p.54

12

relations with the sedentary population.31 Thus, it is very important to study these encounters and relations

as part of the new imperial making, and the transformation of southern Palestine. Nevertheless, whereas

mobility and nomadism were administrative categories constitutive of the empire itself, they became an

obstacle to the new extension of rule and new notions of sovereignty. Scott argues that dispersion,

mobility, and tribal composition, were “strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length,”

and should be read largely as political choices, and not only ecologically or culturally. 32

The incorporation process has always been “culturally styled as development, economic progress,

literacy, and social integration.”33 This was also evident in the Ottoman case, particularly of the Sultan

Abdu al-Hamid II, who had an interest to show the empire as a modernizing Muslim power, with a

civilizing mission, part of which, to “correcting the beliefs and habits” of the tribes and frontiers.34 The

Ottoman “project of modernity”35 of the late nineteenth century, particularly in the periphery and over

tribal societies, shared a lot in common with European colonialism and orientalism, termed by Selim

Deringil as “borrowed colonialism.”36 Makdisi looked more particularly at the representation of the Arabs

by the Ottomans as part of their own version of orientalism. He argues that the 19 th century saw a shift in

the imperial paradigm into a view suffused with nationalist modernization ideology, rooted in a discourse

of progress.37 Tribal communities were perfect fit for “modernization” projects and social re-engineering.

In her important study of Beersheba, Yasemin Avci draws three different phases of Ottoman-

Bedouin relationships since the mid-nineteenth century. First, the period between 1845 and 1865 was one

of struggle between Bedouin sheikhs and the Ottomans government of who will control the area, where

the government relied heavily on military coercion. Whereas from the 1860s onwards there are two

additional phases, where in the first there was Ottoman restructuring of the administrative apparatus to

better control the Bedouin, and in the second phase, the Ottomans utilized the newly created apparatus to

penetrate the local life by establishing consensus among the leaders, thus moving more towards

persuasion.38 Obviously, the typology of the relationship and its transformation was more complex.

31 Amy Singer, Palestinian peasants, p.114)32 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009, preface, x-xi.33 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009, 4-5.34 Deringil, the well protected domains.

35 Selim, Deringil, "They live in a state of nomadism and savagery" the late Ottoman Empire and the post-colonial state. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 311-342, at 311.36 Deringil, state of nomadism.37 Ussama Makdisi "Ottoman Orientalism" American Historical Review, June 2002, 768-796, pp.768-9.38 Avci, ‘‘The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert.” 981.

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Within the colonial context of establishing dominance through coercion or persuasion, Ranjit

Guha argues that the metropolitan state was different than its own colonial state. Whereas the first was

hegemonic and relied much on persuasion to establish its dominance, the colonial state was non-

hegemonic but utilized coercion to establish its dominance.39 However, Benton criticizes Guha’s account

on two grounds: 1) First, for undermining the responses of the community and the interactional aspects of

the colonial relationships; 2) Second, for emphasizing only one moment of shift, namely “conquest,” as

establishing a relation of dominance and subordination. According to Benton, such emphasis also ignores

the earlier imperial forms that preceded the “state hegemony,” which, without undermining its oppressive

forms, it proposed a more accommodating framework than later forms of colonialism.40 In the Ottoman

case of southern Palestine, we notice a shift from coercion towards persuasion, and we learn that even the

latter imperial form of “state hegemony” remained characterized by its earlier accommodative nature.

The adjacent Egyptian border and the British presence in Egypt since 1882 had increased the

strategic importance of southern Palestine. The Ottomans began to conduct military campaigns against

the Bedouin in conjunction with plans to demarcate tribal areas, settle the Bedouin, and as Ottoman

archival evidence shows, register and tax Bedouin-owned lands. In the eyes of Ottoman officials, land

registration would not only increase tax revenues, but it would contribute to the elimination of tribal

disputes over boundaries and assist in settling the Bedouin, and bring “civilization” to them. 41 However,

the most notable Ottoman achievement in southern Palestine was the establishment of the new town and

kaza of Bir al-Sabia’.42

ii. A New Bedouin Kaza: Seeking to separate the Bedouin from the Gaza and Hebron sub-

district and to establish an exclusive kaza for Bedouins, Sultan Abd al-Hamid II issued his imperial edict,

in June 1899, approving a plan to build Bir al-Sabia` to become the administrative center of the newly-

created kaza. At that time, the Ottomans estimated that the Bedouin of the five main tribal confederations,

namely the Tayaha, Azazma, Tarabin, Jbarat, and Hanajrih, numbered 70,000-80,000 persons.43 The

Ottoman outlined the boundaries of the kaza in order to encompass all of these five confederations,

whereas the nearby Hebron and Gaza kazas were outlined to include peasants’ villages. It was estimated

that there were only 530 Bedouin living within the Gaza kaza.44 For Beersheba town, the Ottoman

39 Ranjit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: Dominance and Power in Colonial India, Harvard University Press, 1998.40 Lauren Benton, Colonial Cultures, 257-258.41 See, Ottoman State Archives, DH-MUI, 1327.N.4; Response from Daftar Hakani (Land registry) Director to the Dahilye Nazareti (Ministry of interior), dated 9 Shaaban, 1327. See also, Ahmad Amara, The Negev Land Question: Between Denial and Recognition, The Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 42:4, 2013, pp. 27-47.]42 See Yasemin Avci, See also section X below.43 Avci, ‘‘The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert,” 973.44 Yosef Barsilavsky, Eretz Hanegev: Have you known the land, Hakibutz Hameaauhad Press, 1946 (in Hebrew).246.

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government purchased 2,000 (Ottoman) dunams (each Ottoman dunam is about 919 sq. m.) from the

Azazma confederation and embarked on building government and public buildings. The 2,000 dunams

were assigned to the municipality, and it started to market one-dunam plots for persons desiring to live

and/or build businesses in town. For Bedouins, these lands were to be allocated free of charge as a way to

encourage their settlement.45

In addition to fending off British encroachment from outside of the Ottoman domains and

attracting tax revenues from within the Empire, the Ottomans also hoped the establishment of Bir al-

Sabia’ would more generally strengthen the southern borders of the Jerusalem Mutassarefligi.46 Most of

southern Palestine was under the Jerusalem Mutassarefligi, which until 1900 included both the Gaza and

Hebron kazas. With the founding of the Bir al-Sabia` kaza most of the southern Palestine areas became

under its administration. Later in 1908, the Ottomans established the new kaza of Hafir, put under Bir al-

Sabia`'s jurisdiction, whose qaimaqam (governor) was promoted to acting Mutassaref.47

However, the exact administrative boundaries of the kaza are not clearly identified and scholars

have reached no consensus regarding the south-eastern limits of the Jerusalem Mutassarefligi. According

to Yitzhak Gil-Har, based on British sources, the south-eastern limits are described “as starting at the

southern end of the Dead Sea, thence to intersect with the Ottoman-Egyptian boundary of 1906 near G.

Maghara.”48 However, “British geographers and sources were not up-to-date about Ottoman policy in

southern Palestine and they thus misled modern students about the historical geography of pre-war

Palestine.”49 Since the region was an Ottoman periphery and the boundaries are internal administrative

ones, they were not clearly demarcated, as was the case with its western border with Egypt. When the

eastern border was later defined under the British Mandate, it is the northern boundary that remained as

an internal administrative one.

45 BOA, I.DH 1380/1318.N/18, 7 Teshrinisani 1316/20 November 1900.46 Yasemin Avci, ‘‘The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert: The Bedouins and the Creation of a New Town in Southern Palestine(1860–1914),’’ Middle Eastern Studies 45:6(2009), p.972.47 Yitzhak Gil-Har, The South-Eastern Limits of Palestine at the End of Ottoman Rule, Middle Eastern Studies, 28:3, (1992), pp. 559-564, at 560. 48 Gil-Har (1992), p.559. According to Gil-Har, “The separation line between Beer-Sheba Kaza and Kerak Sanjak passed along the eastern escarpment of the Wadi Araba Valley.”49 Gil-Har, 563.

15

The imperial making of the governmental machinery of Bir al-Sabia’ involved various interactions,

moving between coercion and persuasion, imposition and incorporation, over the boundaries and nature

of the new political, legal, and administrative order. From the outset, the Ottomans worked on gaining the

consent of the inhabitants and in integrating them in the making and operation of the new administrative

apparatus. For example, the Ottomans established an Administrative Council in accordance with the 1871

Provincial Law to deal with important, though limited, jurisdiction over infrastructural projects, budget,

tax collection and the land registry. Yet instead of four members, as was usual, the Council of Beersheba

included five members, one for each of the five Bedouin tribal confederations in the Beersheba area.50

Second, according to the 1871 law, councils were split into an administrative and a judicial body. 51 In

1903, the Council was authorized to sit as a Court of First Instance (bidayet mahkemesi) which served

mainly as a tribal court in land cases, ruling according to Bedouin custom.52

50 BOA, I.DH., 1385/13, 14 Nisan 1317/27 April 1901.51 Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria, I. B. Tauris, 2007, pp. 50-51.52 See, OBA, I.ZAN. 108/17, 21 October 1912. See also on the court, Gideon Kressel, Joseph Ben-David, and Khalil Abu Rabi`a, “Changes in the Land Usage by the Negev Bedouin since the Mid-19th Century: The Intra-Tribal Perspective,” Nomadic Peoples 28 (1991), pp. 28–55, at pp. 29–30; Marx (1967: 32); Yasemin Avci, “The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert: The Bedouins and the Creation of a New Town in Southern Palestine (1860–1914),” Middle Eastern Studies 45: 6 (2009): 976.

16

The very decision of where to place the town also owed much to an already existing market and

trade activity there. In addition to being the site of several important wells, the site was located on the

intersecting boundaries of the tribal lands of the Bedouin confederations of Jbarat, Tayaha, and Tarabin.

This intersection abetted considerable market activity, especially on Tuesdays, when people bought and

sold livestock and barley, in addition to other crops and products such as clothing, sugar, tea, and coffee.

Gaza’s Thursday markets also attracted the Bedouin and non-Bedouin traders of the region. 53 These

included Jewish and Arab traders from Gaza, Hebron, Yaffa, and Tel-Aviv whose main trade was in

Bedouin barley which was exported from Gaza to the beer industry mainly in Britain and Scotland, and in

exporting Handhal (Citrullus colocynthis) to Germany, used in the medicine industry.54

The already existing agricultural activity in southern Palestine became an important economic and

social target for the Ottoman government to increase taxes and eventually to transform the Bedouin

community. Barley was the main grown crop in southern Palestine, and together with the Gaza sub-

district, the Beersheba sub-district made up about 70% of Ottoman Palestine’s barley, and it was famous

for its great quality. The exports reached 40,000-60,000 tons in the years preceding WWI. Following the

war, and due to the increase of barley cultivation in California and Britain, as well as the rise of transfer

prices, the barley export dropped and became traded more domestically.55 The barley was mainly traded

in the Beersheba market, and then in the nearby markets of Gaza, Khan-Yunis, al-Majdal, and al-Faluja,

where the Bedouin purchased necessities like coffee, sugar, rice, and garments.56 According to

Barselavsky, there were, in the 1940s, 150,000 dunam in the Gaza sub-district and 1,500,000 dunam of

barley land in the Beersheba sub-district.57 Other crops such as wheat, lentils, watermelon, dhura, were

grown in the region. The estimates of overall Bedouin cultivated lands ranged between 2-3.5 million

dunams, due to different patterns and intervals in Bedouin cultivation which is dictated by the soil and

rainfall, leading to annual alternate cultivation (see Chapter II).58 Thus, the cultivation and economic

activities in this “periphery” had existed but the reform aimed to bring it under better control and taxation.

Further, such activities challenge the categorization of the community as nomadic and pastoral. It should

be noted, that, as previous research had already shown, nomadism and settled agriculture are not

successive stages in social evolution, since some pastoral nomads were previously settled agriculturists.59

53 See al-Arif; see also, Murdakhay Elkiyam, Forty years of Jewish Settlement in Gaza, p.76. (in Hebrew)54 Elkiyam, pp.43-49.55 Alexander Scholch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development; Yosef Barsilavsky, Eretz Hanegev: Have you known the land, Hakibutz Hameaauhad Press, 1946 (in Hebrew), 279.56 Al-Arif, Biruaslabia wa qabailha, p. 271-2.57 Yosef Barsilavsky, Eretz Hanegev: Have you known the land, Hakibutz Hameaauhad Press, 1946 (in Hebrew), 279.58 Central Zionist Archives files. 59 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009, 29.

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The cultivated areas were mainly, but not exclusively, controlled by Bedouin, primarily in the

area extending from Gaza south to Rafah, and then between both cities to the east towards Beersheba.

This area inhabited most of the tribes who were semi-settled (semi-nomadic), and were the first to settle

permanently, the Tayaha, Tarabin, Hanajrih, and Jbarat. Without delving in details into the socio-

economic habits and patterns of each tribe and its relation with the ecological and historical conditions of

their habitation area, it suffices to say that the Bedouin-cultivated areas fall within the currently-used

definition of the Negev. This particular area was, and remains, different in several accounts from the more

southern zones which were less productive, had less rain-fall and were less inhabited. As will be shown

below, many parties distinguished, for different reasons, between different zones of southern Palestine.

Map: Bedouin and Fellah Cultivations.60

Alongside the administrative legal reform, there was a property reform, including redefinition of

rights and access to property, and individual title formalization. Despite the Ottoman land reform of the

mid-nineteenth century and the enactment of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code and the 1860 Tapu Law,

property relations in Beersheba remained more complex in practice. Bedouin land rights were formed and

recognized according to land use, which was intertwined with local ecologies. Hence, cultivated lands,

pasture lands, and empty lands led to different sets of rights. The Ottoman and later the British authorities

recognized Bedouin rights over the cultivated lands, and had registered some of these lands under

Bedouin names (as well as other non-Bedouin Palestinians or Zionists) in the Tapu land registry.

60 CO, WO 303/204

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Nevertheless, landed property relations and rights in the region were predominantly administered in

accordance with Bedouin customary law. Despite the Ottoman attempt to create a modern system of land

registration since 1858, until the end of the Ottoman period only about 5 percent of the land in Palestine

was registered under the new registration system, with most Bedouin lands remaining unregistered.61

Nevertheless, as will be shown below, looking into the available records of taxation and registration of

land rights in the Beersheba region under both the Ottoman and British regimes, we see a more pluralistic

legal order which integrated both local and state practices and laws.

All of these policies shifted the geographic and administrative map of southern Palestine on the

eve of the British occupation. Moreover, when the need for defining the geographic borders of the

“Negev” arose in the 1930s, it was in fact mainly those cultivable lands, referred to by the British as the

“Bedouin Barley Lands,” and thus Bedouin land rights, which determined the Negev’s boundaries.

iii. The British Policy towards the Beersheba Sub-District: The British cancelled the

Hafir kaza and placed its area under the Beersheba sub-district which became of an area of 12,576,000

dunam. Despite further incorporation and increased British administrative power in the Beersheba area,

the governance order continued to encompass a large degree of autonomy of the Arab inhabitants. The

British maintained the working of the tribal courts, continued to apply the tithe-tax system despite its

cessation in the rest of Palestine, and permitted the holding of weapons in the southern half of the

southern Palestine.62 On 29 March 1921, Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill

“reaffirmed the assurances already given at Beersheba by the High Commissioner to the Sheikhs that the

special rights and customs of the Bedouin Tribes of Beersheba will not be interfered with.”63 The political

and legal spaces granted to parts of the customary indigenous law within the state legal and administrative

system should not be read only within the discourse of state power. Instead, it is the processes and the

politics, at times hard to grasp, leading to such recognition that are important to better understand the

colonial dynamics and relations.

Despite partial tribal autonomy and application of customary law in the region, the region was far

from unchanging in the course of the British Mandate. First, the Bedouin Arab community included

various groups with different lifestyles which included various combinations of mobility, agricultural

activity, and pastoralism. Second, there were other Palestinian and non-Palestinian communities who

lived or interacted in different ways with the region. Third, the British had their own understandings and

visions of the region and its inhabitants, and thus of its administration within the broader British policy in

61 Martin Bunton, Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 49. See also Kedar, “Legal Transformation,” p. 933.62 al-Arif, Bi’r al-Saba` wa qabailha, p. 271–72; Amara, “The Negev Land Question,” 27-47.63 Official Report, Colonial Office documents, 733/2, Government House, Jerusalem.

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Palestine. For example, the British initiated special projects and legislation concerning southern Palestine,

including agricultural stations, a special ordinance regarding Bedouin nomadism, a special police force

(the Camelry/Hajjana), and the appointment of a non-Bedouin district officer for the Beersheba district.

All of that created an integrated system of custom and state-laws and practices in different geographic

areas and various fields of the local affairs, such as in the field of landed property relations.

As for landed-property relations, the British had undertaken a major reform in reconstructing the

Palestinian space and landed-property relations through amending the Ottoman land laws, enacting new

legislation, and, more importantly, undertaking a land title settlement process. Established in 1928, the

land settlement process aimed to identify the owners of every parcel of land in the country, mainly

through a quasi-judicial procedure. It relied entirely upon cadastral and topographical surveys, which

divided lands into clearly demarcated blocks and parcels.64 Again, looking into the workings and

implementation of these reforms we read different colonial narrative of Mandate Palestine beyond British

imposition of power, western notions of property, and facilitating Palestinian dispossession. The constant

reconfiguration of the colonial relationships together with the evolution of land market, alongside the

British political commitment for a Jewish national home in Palestine, transformed the access to property

and redefining land rights. Despite the legal reform and the obligation to register land transactions, these

British laws were not enforced in the Beersheba sub-district, and there was no state-initiated land title

settlement.65 As was mentioned, the British had maintained the work of the tribal court and later

established a tribal court of appeals for the Beersheba sub-district. The British allowed these courts to

apply tribal custom “so far as it is not repugnant to natural justice or morality.”66 Land holding cases were

subject to the jurisdiction of the tribal court.

Nevertheless, jurisdictional tensions on land rights arose, and the communities also sought to

reach better results for their cases through different mechanisms. Land disputes, for example, from the

Beersheba sub-district also came before the state land court and were appealed before the Palestine

Supreme Court. The case law illustrates that Bedouin, and non-Bedouin, landholders were treated as

owners, that formal land law had limited application in the sub-district, and that courts relied on Bedouin

customary documentation, such as sanad baya’ and sanad rahn.67 However, despite the prevalence of

64 Dov Gavish and Ruth Kark, “The Cadastral Mapping of Palestine, 1858–1928,” Geographical Journal 159, no. 1 (March 1993), pp. 70–80. See also Geremy Forman, “Settlement of Title in the Galilee: Dowson’s Colonial Guiding Principles,” Israel Studies 7, no. 3 (2002), pp. 61–83.65 `Arif, Beersheba and its tribes, p. 267.66 The Palestine Order in Council 1922.67 Land Appeal (LA) no. 89 of 1929, Ashour Ghandour v. Abdullah Abou Ghaban (Supreme Court of Palestine, decisions delivered 16 April 1930): “in view of the absence of title deeds to land in the Beersheba area . . . a case such as this appears to be one of those for which the application of tribal custom under Article 45 of the Palestine Order-in-Council is specially intended.” The case is in the Palestine Law Report (hereafter PLR). These reports include decisions collected and edited by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Palestine for the entire Mandate period. They are available online at www.llmc-digital.org.

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custom and non-registration of land titles and transactions in the Beersheba sub-district, some Bedouin

and non-Bedouin landholders did register their lands. The registration process, as the archival evidence

shows, involved the integration of state law with local knowledge and practice. Usually, the person

requesting the registration of a specific piece of land would either approach the main registry office in

Gaza or the sub-office in Beersheba. The registrar, after ensuring that the relevant forms were complete

and the taxes and fees were paid, would ask for a statement signed by the sheikhs within whose tribal area

the land was located, confirming the applicant’s rights over the specific land and that there were no

conflicting claims to it. Then, the registrar would send the agricultural inspector to confirm that the land

was under cultivation. When completed, the file would have to go through the Director of Lands in

Jerusalem for approval, and then would be registered in the land registry under the name of the applicant,

who would be granted a certificate of registration. Land registrations involved Bedouin, non-Bedouins

from Gaza, Hebron, Jerusalem, and Jewish individuals and organizations.68

The various mechanisms of registration and dispute resolution testified to the complexity of

landed-property relations in Beersheba, all of which contradict the overwhelming tendency to view the

“Negev” as a homogenized tribal desert space. The land cases and registration files illustrate the

continuing incorporation of southern Palestine as a periphery into the new civic life and bureaucratic

reform and the encroachment of this new order into the agrarian and civil relations in the region. Yet even

alongside this policy, British control and understanding of the Beersheba sub-district remained limited.

Their attention to the sub-district varied depending on their various interests, which involved, among

other things, archeology, military, oil, and political considerations. However, in the 1930s, the British had

to respond to different Zionist requests and claims concerning the Negeb, which necessitated the study of

the region. More importantly this was the beginning of the “Negeb” formation as a political-geographic

region.

III. Zionist-British Political Interaction around the “Negeb”

The last official British view(s) on southern Palestine appear in the Survey of Palestine.

Administratively, “The Gaza District 13,689 square kms., [is] divided into the Gaza sub-district 1,113

square kms. and the Beersheba sub-district of 12,576 square kms.”69 Geographically, “The district of

Beersheba [is] an immense triangle with its apex at the gulf of Aqaba which contains nearly half the land

of Palestine (approximately 12,576 square kms.)”70 Climatically, the Survey referred to the “Negeb” as

68 Israel State Archives, M 5018, British Land Registries of Beersheba and Gaza.69 The Survey of Palestine, p. 104.70 The Survey, p. 103.

21

one of four weather regions in Palestine, being the “desert of the south from Beersheba to Aqaba. Hot and

dry in summer; cold and dry in winter…”71 Accordingly, in 1945 the British used the term “Negeb” only

to refer to the region as a climatic unit.

Following the approval of the Mandate terms, the classification of the Negeb’s land became

central to Zionist-British political debate, since it was seen as “waste” lands. Waste was a geographic-

climatic category of unproductive land awaiting redemption and revival by the Zionist movement as well

as a significant “legal” category. Article 6 of the Mandate required the British mandatory government to

work closely with the Jewish Agency to make waste and state lands available for Jewish settlement.

Waste and state lands were conflated under the British law as one “legal” category of state land. “Waste”

land corresponded with the Ottoman legal category of “mewat” lands (discussed below), which, while

under the Ottoman was open for public use, it became a state land and its cultivation without

governmental permit constituted trespassing. Article 6 of the Mandate and the issue of state land provided

the Zionists with “a convenient stick with which to beat the British dog.”72 As a result of developments in

Palestine and Europe beginning in the mid-1930s, political interest in southern Palestine increased,

mainly for its political future, thus leading to a debate on, inter alia, its climatic nature and legal status. In

this case, the formation of the Negeb as a defined space was not part of new state craft of demarcated

territories, or to make it legible for better taxation and control, but more the result of political bargain

over the future status of Palestine.

The political developments in the mid-1930s were many. First, there was the Great Arab Revolt

and the resulting British White Paper, which called for limiting the number of Jewish immigrants to

75,000; second, there was the emergence of the partition of Palestine as a possible solution to the

intensifying communal conflict; third, there was the emergence of what came to be known as the “Jewish

Refugee Problem” in Europe, following the Nazi rise to power. There were different groups in London

and in Palestine with varying interests and demands regarding southern Palestine. The Zionist movement,

represented mainly by the Jewish Agency, which had no real interest or investment in southern Palestine

until the mid-1930s, began to request land grants from the British Government for Jewish settlement and

development. It also requested the government to undertake and support water borings, hoping for the

eventual inclusion of the Negeb in the future Jewish State.

Meanwhile in London, a group of Jewish (Zionist and non-Zionist) and British politicians, was

advocating before the British Colonial Office for the opening up of the Negeb for Jewish refugees from

71 The Survey, p. 105. 72 Warwick P. N. Tyler, State Lands and Rural Development in Rural Palestine, 1920-1948, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001, p.48.

22

Europe, for settling and developing the Negeb. Their political program became known as the ‘Negeb

Scheme.’ This group included British MPs led by MP Sir Frank Sanderson, who held several meetings in

the House of Commons with Secretary of State for the Colonies Malcolm MacDonald in July 1939, and

published editorial opinions in British newspapers advocating the Negeb Scheme.73 In addition, there

were two main Jewish actors behind the plan: Theodor Abraham Leib Zissu and John Gwyer. Their

names and memoranda on the Negeb were cited in, and attached to almost every letter and debate

concerning the Negeb in this period.74

To support their scheme, the supporters advanced a number of reasons, formulated in memoranda

prepared by Zissu and Gwyer. First, they advocated for the separation of the Negeb from Palestine’s

Policy, which would mean the region would not be subject to Jewish immigration restrictions stipulated

in the British White Paper. According to MP Sanderson, “indeed the Negeb has never been considered by

the Arabs of Palestine as part of their land. It can properly be said that the limit of Palestine in every sense

of the word was just on Beersheba.”75 Second, arguing for the untapped potential of the Negeb, the

supporters referred extensively to the ancient prosperity of the Negeb under the Byzantines with a

‘conservative estimate’ of its former population to be between 300,000 and 500,000 inhabitants, with an

efficient irrigation system of canals and conservation of rainfall.76 Third, the supporters noted the special

Jewish attachment to the Negeb. According to Zissu, “[i]t was in the Negeb that the Jews first emerged as

a distinct people” and, furthermore, “Just as independent Jewish history had begun in the Negeb it also

ended there- at Massada, the last place to have been under Jewish sovereignty...”. 77 Hence, the Jewish

historic connection also remained limited to the geographic area around Beersheba. Fourth, the supporters

added that having the region in Jewish and British hands would serve British imperial interests.

In the Colonial Office, they had realized that it was impossible to advance the Negeb Scheme due

to Arab opposition generally and Egyptian opposition specifically, as well as the undeniable fact that it

73 CO 733/404/15; see also, CO 733/424/10, Irrigation and Settlement in Southern Palestine (Negeb). 74 Referring to them as well known in the colonial office, Luke (of the Colonial Office) described their interest and position: “Mr. Zissu and Mr. Gwyer are two young men, the former a rich Roumanian Jew, and the latter the son of the Chief Justice of India, who have for some time been investigating the possibilities of settlement for Jewish refugees in the Negeb. They are not concerned with the Zionist Organisation, who have not, I understand, given them much encouragement. They have a first-hand knowledge of the Negeb, but their hopes are largely built up on somewhat dubious archeological date.” CO 733/404/16, Minute by Luke, 8/3/1940 75 CO 733/404/15, letter from Sanderson to MacDonald on June 2nd, 1939.76. CO 733/404/15, report attached to letter by Zissu to Captain Crookshank, 13/3/1939. For this argument Zissu relied on an archeological report by Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence title ‘The Wilderness of Zin,’ published in the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1914. This article also related to the non-cultivable areas south of Beersheba, and was criticized by Luke who noted that the report must “be taken with some reserve. It should be remembered that their survey was a comparatively hurried affair, carried out in 1913 as a façade for a strategic survey.” Thus it cannot be regarded as “wholly authoritative” in particular since a later archeological expedition from 1933 (the Colt Archeological Expedition) expressed considerable disagreements with the ‘Wilderness of Zin.’ See, CO 733/404/15, ‘The Negeb,’ a memorandum by Luke, 28 June 1939. 77 CO 733/404/15, ‘The Negeb,’ unsigned and undated report, which seems to have been written by Zissu and Gwyer, p.2.

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was, to say the least, a “very speculative enterprise.”78 However, the British stated in their responses that

they were undertaking water borings, and that they would not object to other hydrological projects, and

try and support a study of the Negeb potentialities. Nevertheless, the British saw the need to define the

land rights of the Bedouin, to conduct surveys, and they made it clear that “If any Jews go to the Negeb

they must be counted against the White Paper maximum.”79 During the same period, the question of the

Negeb was addressed by a number of British Commissions, such as Peel (Royal Commission) and the

Woodhead Commissions (Palestine Partition Commission), and later the War Cabinet Committee. At the

center of each of these inquiries was the question of “what constituted the Negeb?” In keeping with a

theme of this chapter, a number of definitions were discussed.

i. Defining the Negeb/Negev: According to the Negeb Scheme supporters, the northern

boundary of the Negeb was “The boundary which divides it from Palestine proper should be taken as a

line running from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea and passing south of Khan Yunis and Beersheba in

such a manner that all settled population is excluded from the district.” Referring to its “present

population” they stated; “The Negeb contains no settled population whatever. With the exception of

some 3,000 to 4,000 semi-nomads in the district immediately bordering the Mediterranean, it contains

according to Major Jarvis, late Governor of Sinai, only approximately 1,000 nomads , consisting of about

500 persons from Transjordan, 400 from Palestine, and 100 from Sinai.”80 (emphasis added) Under this

definition the Negeb made up 11.5 million dunam. Zissu and the Negeb Scheme supporters, considering

the majority of the Bedouin population as “settled population,” sought to exclude them and their

cultivable lands around Beersheba from their definition of the Negeb. Thus, for advocates of this scheme,

the definition of the Negeb carried with it partial dispossession of the rights of the regions inhabitants.

78 CO 733/404/16, Minute by Luke from 30/9/39. 79 CO 733/404/1580 CO 733/404/15, ‘The Negeb,’ unsigned and undated report, which seems to have been written by Zissu and Gwyer, p.1.

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Map: The Negeb of the “Negeb Scheme”81

The advocates of the Negeb Scheme counted some success as can be seen in the recommendation

of the Woodhead Commission. From the heaps of letters received, it seems that “Zissu was the last

witness they (the Commission) called in September 1938, and the scheme they recommend in paragraph

255 is word for word what he put before them.”82 Paragraph 255 reads,

“The Unoccupied area (of the Negeb) has no settled inhabitants, though occasionally a few wandering Bedouin pass over it. It is desert, and desert it is likely to remain, unless Jewish enterprise and capital can develop it. This area, or any part of it which the Government are satisfied that the Jews have a serious intention of developing, would be declared by the Government to be public domain.”83

According to the Commission the land would be leased to a Jewish company for free, except for

taxes and royalties, and any Government expenditure, including “payment of compensation for ownership

or occupancy rights in the area covered by the lease.”84 The Commission did not deal with defining the

Negeb, and thus took the Beersheba sub-district’s boundaries as the Negeb, and divided it into “occupied”

and “unoccupied” areas. By addressing only the “unoccupied area,” the Commission shared some similar

81 CO 733/404/15, ‘Notes on the Negeb,’ report attached to a letter by Zissu dated 10th January 1939.82 CO 733/404/15, letter from Sir Henry Lawrence to Lord Halifax on Feb. 13 1939. Note that the Woodhead Commission was appointed in February 1938. 83 Paragraph 255 to the Woodhead Report84 Paragraph 255 to the Woodhead Report

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concerns to those of the Negeb Scheme supporters, by excluding the vast majority of the population.

Nevertheless, the “unoccupied area” of the Commission was smaller than the “Negeb” of the Scheme (see

map), and obviously was not an empty space but hosted few thousand Bedouin Arabs. The map includes

the boundaries of the Beersheba sub-district (Blue solid line in the map), and its division into ‘occupied’

and ‘unoccupied’ (gray dash-line), and Negeb according to the Scheme (red dash-line).85

Map: Beersheba sub-district/Negeb- Occupied and Unoccupied areas

Unlike the Negeb Scheme supporters, the Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency had a

different understanding of what constituted the Negeb and had more interest in the fertile lands of

southern Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionist Organization, raised the issue of developing the

Beersheba area at a private dinner with MacDonald in October 1935, after which the latter asked

Weizmann to send a written proposal on the matter. Weizmann did send a letter and attached a

memorandum, opening as follows:

“A. The Negev: The Beersheba sub-district which comprises the area known as the Negev extends over an area of 11,872 square kilometres. According to the 1931 Census, the population

85 CO 733/404/15, Memo by Luke on the Negeb, June 1939.

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of the area totaled 51,082… [T]his population consists for the most part of nomadic and semi-nomadic Bedouin, who derive a bare existence on the small and very variable rainfall. Left to itself, the prospects of this region appear to be hopeless.”86

The memorandum87 stressed the need for an “investigation of major character” in the Negev as to

water and development potentialities, emphasizing that it should be carried out by the “Jewish colonising

bodies with the active support of the Government.” More particularly on land allocation, the

memorandum requested that the following lands should be put at the disposal of the Jewish Agency:

approximately 400,000 dunams in the neighborhood of Kurnub; between 200,000-300,000 dunams in the

southern portion of the Wadi Araba, and a third land plot either between Beersheba and Auja or between

Beersheba and Gaza. Then, it requested that the government commence land title settlement and

“establish the nature and extent of existing rights in the areas… arriving at a satisfactory arrangement

with the Bedouin at present wandering over or cultivating them.”88

Only two days prior to Weizmann’s letter to MacDonald (13 October 1935), Ben-Gurion was in

London and met with the Development Officer. Ben-Gurion stressed that the JA “was anxious to develop

certain areas in the Beersheba Sub-district,” for which he requested 1,390,000 dunams. Ben-Gurion

further claimed that “the Arabs had no title to the land and that it really fell in the category of 'Mawat'

(dead) land.”89 Although Ben-Gurion’s position on the mawat question was not mentioned in the JA

memorandum, it deserves further comment, since this is exactly the current position of the Israeli

Government and judiciary to lands claimed by the Bedouin-Arabs in the Beersheba region.

Mawat land was defined under article 6 of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code as “land which is

occupied by no one, and has not been left for the use of the public. It is such as lies at such a distance

from a village or town from which a loud human voice cannot make itself heard at the nearest point where

there are inhabited places, that is a mile and a half, or about half an hour's distance from such.” 90 More

importantly, according to article 103, anyone who had “revived” dead land and cultivated it could acquire

a title deed to it, even if he has done so without a permit from the authorities, in which case he would

have to pay the value of the land before its revival. When revived, mawat land becomes miri, a cultivable

86 CO 733/345/11, p.187 In April 1937, the JA attached the same memorandum to a letter that it had sent to the Royal Commission. In the letter, the JA stated that “we feel that the time has come when some action might well be taken, rather than as a ground for complaint.” CO 733/345/11, Palestine Royal Commission, Beersheba-Land, 1937. Letter dated, 1st, April, 1937. David Ben-Gurion had also pressed the issue in a lunch that he had with the Secretary of the Peel Commission, Mr. Martin. CO 733/345/11, 12 March 1937.88 CO 733/345/11, p.3.89 CO 733/345/11, Memorandum on points arising out of the submissions of the executive of the Jewish Agency to the Royal Commission to the effect that Government should facilitate Jewish settlement in and development on the Beersheba area. 12/3/1937.90 R. C. Tute, The Ottoman Land Laws with a Commentary on the Ottoman Land Code of 7th Ramadan 1274 (Jerusalem: Greek Convent Press, 1927), p. 97, available through the LLMC digital law library online at www.llmc-digital.org (accessed 1 May 2011).

27

land that the formal title of which is in the treasury hands, yet the land-holder holds tassaruf (usufruct)

rights: almost full rights to the use (cultivation), mortgage, transfer, and inheritance of the land. The

Ottoman law, as was decided by the British, remained in force unless changed or amended. In 1921, the

British enacted an ordinance amending the Ottoman law by requiring prior approval to revive mawat

lands, and gave a two-month window to those claiming rights in mawat lands to register them. The

current Israeli position considers lands claimed by the Bedouin as mawat lands since they lie at a greater

distance from towns or villages, and since the Bedouin failed to register those lands in 1921. Such

position is supported by claiming that the Bedouin were nomads with no particular connection to the land

and were not agriculturalist, propositions which this chapter suggests are patently false.91

The British realized that there were a variety of land rights that needed to be defined in the

Beersheba sub-district, which included both grazing and cultivation rights, however they never settled

land title in the Beersheba sub-district. In the meeting with Sir MP Sanderson in July 1939, MacDonald

made the point that should the Negeb Scheme “appear feasible, the grazing rights of Bedouin Arabs

would have to be safeguarded.”92 Further, to the request of the JA on land grants in the Negeb, the British

Government responded that the 1,640,000 cultivable dunams in the sub-district were regarded “as

belonging to the Beduin tribes by virtue of possession from time immemorial: but the Government may

be able… to claim certain areas as 'Mewat' or waste land.”93

In the Colonial Office they were aware that the Zionists and the Jewish Agency had a different

understanding of what constituted the Negeb, at times exceeding even the boundaries of the Beersheba

sub-district, as was noted in a British memorandum:

It is, however, usually found that, when Jews refer to the Negeb, they are speaking not of the Beersheba sub-district but rather of the heavily populated coastal plain of the Gaza sub-district south of Isdud, the only portion of the coastal plain which they have not already acquired large holdings. The position of their recently founded settlement, “Negba”, which is shown on the map, supports this interpretation.94

Thus, there emerged different understandings of what constituted the “Negeb.” The same issue

arose again more forcefully in the early 1940s before the War Cabinet Committee. This Committee was

established by the War Office in 1943 and was instructed to consider the Palestine long-term policy

including the partition question, and to “take into consideration the possibilities of development in the

91 On mawat see Amara and Miller, unsettling settlement in Amara et. al., indigenous injustice, Harvard.92 CO 733/404/15. Minute by Mr. Downie in 10 July 193993 CO 733/345/11, Memorandum on points arising out of the submissions of the executive of the Jewish Agency.., p.3. See also, CO 733/345/11.94 CO 537/2311, Harris memo, 1947, para 15.

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Negeb.”95 During its deliberations the Committee relied on a number of reports, memoranda, press

articles, and information from other sources, in order to define the Negeb boundaries, all of which are

available in the archival files. These documents shed important light on the nature of Southern Palestine,

as well as on British perception of the region and its population. In the file, there were two important

memoranda on the Negeb (from 1943 and 1947) authored by Sir Douglas Harris, a commissioner charged

with studying the reconstruction and development of Palestine after World War II.96 Since the

international borders with Egypt and Transjordan were long defined by the 1940s, it is the northern

boundary that remained the challenge in defining the “Negeb.” At the beginning and for a matter of

convenience, the Committee adopted the boundaries of the Beersheba sub-district (12,576 square kms) to

correspond with the boundaries of the Negeb. In his 1943 memorandum on the Negeb, Harris divided the

Negeb –the Beersheba sub-district- into three zones.

Map: The Negeb 1943, Harris Memorandum.

Harris’s map relied mainly on climatic and geographic conditions provided in George Kirk’s

article The Negev, or the Southern Desret of Palestine, in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly

95 File CO 537/2311 The Negeb: Irrigation and Settlement in Southern Palestine (Negeb)- with a sticker note on the file, reading: “Most Secret-Special care should be taken to maintain the secrecy of the documents on this file. They should be locked in a steel press overnight and circulated by hand at all times.” (underlined in original)96 CO 537/2311, the reply itself is not in file, however the memorandum was attached to a Minute of the Committee dated 7 August 1943.

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(1941).97 According to Harris, citing extensively from Kirk, the hills in Zone 1 “present a bare, pale

aspect, such as one might expect to find in the Moon.” He added that the region was almost rainless, has

no agriculture, and the scanty scrub provides winter pasture for the camels and goats of a “few poor small

tribes.” Its population is “reduced to the absolute minimum.” Zone 2 has “retained a greater depth of soil.

The greater rainfall on this side of the watershed permits pasture on a larger scale, and some agriculture in

the wadis.” As for Zone 3, Harris wrote, “The peneplain of the north-west… is a region of combined

agriculture and pasture.... A block of shifting sand dune covers a part of this comparatively fertile zone.”98

In light of the political unrest in Palestine, the Committee was more concerned with the political

implications of any partition or policy recommendations concerning Palestine. Thus, it was concerned

with the Arab population and their land rights in the Negeb, alongside the climatic, geographic and water

conditions. As it appeared in the Committee’s interim report, Bedouin cultivation and cultivable land was

the driving parameter for drawing the Negeb boundary for the Committee, and they decided to have the

northern boundary coincide with the southern edge of what they called “the Beduin barley lands.”99 The

Negeb was defined in the report as “the triangle of land which extends from the southern edge of the

Beduin barley lands in the north-west of the Beersheba Sub-District to the Aqaba on the gulf bearing that

name.”100 However, since at the time when the Committee was sitting, “no map was available which

showed the limits of the barley lands… the boundary was provisionally assumed to be the same as that

between Zones 2 and 3” in Harris’s 1943 memorandum map. Thus, zones 1 and 2 constituted the Negeb

for the Committee.

Lacking the necessary statistics during its work, the Committee addressed the Palestine

Government with a list of questions concerning the Negeb, including information on the limits of the

barley land. In response, the Palestine Government conducted a “special examination on the ground” to

determine the southern edge of the barley lands, which seemed to have been conducted by Harris. 101 To its

answer, the Government of Palestine attached a map which included the Committee’s provisionally

adopted boundary (in black) and the new proposed revisions (in red) to serve as the northern boundary to

the Negeb, based on its findings (see map).

97 George Kirk’s article The Negev, or the Southern Desret of Palestine, in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly (1941), pp.57-71.98 CO 537/2311, Harris, 1943 memo p. 1, 2.99 CO 537/2311, Extracts and summary of the Palestine’s Government reply to a Questionnaire of the Secretary of State- answer to Question 1 on the northern boundary of the Negeb- boundary adjustment. The map was attached to the reply. Summary conducted and signed on 2.6.44; See also, Addendum to Question 1: “Determination of the Northern Boundary of the Negeb.” 100 CO 537/2311, para.20 to its report.101 Co 537/2311, Extracts and summary of the Palestine’s Government reply to a Questionnaire of the Secretary of State- answer to Question 1 on the northern boundary of the Negeb- boundary adjustment. The map was attached to the reply. Summary conducted and signed on 2.6.44; See also, Addendum to Question 1: “Determination of the Northern Boundary of the Negeb.”

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Map: Addendum to Question A: Determination of the Northern Boundary of the Negeb (25/3/1944)102

The map suggested further inclusion into the Negeb on the western end of a “large slice of

desert,"103 whereas it suggested exclusion from the Negeb a portion of land “in the center, north-east of

Asluj” where “the barley lands were found to extend further south than had previously been supposed.” 104

The north-east corner where the line drops south alongside the Dead Sea area, the amendment aimed to

excluding the Palestine Potash Company from the Negeb.105 These boundaries appear in the Committee’s

proposed Palestine’s partition scheme, in which the Negeb covers an area of 3,780 sq. miles (9,676 sq.

km.) (see upper left corner of Map V).106

102 Co 537/2311,103 This slice of the “desert,” seems to correspond with the “sand dunes” in Kirk’s map of his article in the PEF Quarterly. 104 Co 537/2311105 Co 537/2311, Extracts and summary of the Palestine’s Government.106 Co 537/2311, para.62.

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Map V: Appendix to the War Cabinet Committee’s 2nd Report (16.10.1944)107

Thus, making the Negeb involved the blending of climatological data with the extent of the

cultivation of Bedouin barley. It is the Bedouin barley lands which was the main point of reference to

determine the northen boundary and the Negeb limits. In his 1943 memorandum, Harris ruled out Zones 1

and 2 (the Committee’s Negeb) from possible future development based on the climatic and soil

conditions. In examining Zone 3's potential, Harris estimated the Bedouin Arab population at 80,000,

representing some 16,000 families, cultivating all 400,000 acres of the cultivable land in the Zone.”108

Again in his 1947 memorandum, Harris stated that,

“every acre that can be economically sown is already cultivated by its present Beduin owners. These Beduin are keen farmers and very much alive to the possibility of improving their agricultural methods. Tractor ploughing has made considerable strides within recent years and an increasing area is being planted each year with fruit trees.”109

Harris’s word stand in stark contrast to the repeated description of the region as empty and untended,

characterizations of today whose roots stretch to the 1930s. The “Negev Paradigm,” in fact, treats Zones

1, 2, and 3 in Harris’s map with no sensitive distinctions, taking all three zones as one unit, the “Negev,”

despite the stark differences and the various definitions of it, which had mostly excluded Zone 3.

107 CO 733/2311.108 CO 537/2311, Harris, 1943 memo p.2.109 CO 537/2311, Harris memo, 1947, para 10.

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It was at this time that the Zionist movement revived the biblical ‘Negev’ term, politicized it and

expanded its geographic reach to include the rich soil of southern Palestine. With this revival, also began

the discursive construction around the “Negev.” Despite some partial recognition of the Bedouin land

rights and cultivation, it was the desert nature, emptiness, and hopelessness of the region that was

emphasized, which could be redeemed only by Jewish hands and capital. On the other hand, we see a

variety of references and descriptions to the population and its lifestyle. The vast majority was referred to

as settled agriculturists who cultivated the ‘Bedouin barley lands’ and were to be left out of what would

become the ‘Negeb.’ Approximately 5,000 semi-nomadic lived in the farther south (Zone 2) and another

1,000 nomadic bedouin in the most-southern region (Zone 1). Without examining the validity of such

determination and statistics, it is rather interesting to see how the “nomadism” issue was not totalized and

simplified to all ‘Negev Bedouin.’ Finally, the excess barley growing and the intensive agricultural

activity of the population were remarkable and constituted the economic backbone to the region, and were

the main concern of the British. As a result, the various definitions to the Negeb were driven by political

ideological motives and considerations and produced different boundaries (between 9-13 million dunam).

Today’s treatment and assumptions in the “Negev/Naqab Bedouin studies” does a reverse work by

including those populations and lands that were intended to be left out, back within the ‘Negev.’

III. Conclusion:

On October 15th 1948, the British were still studying the potentialities of the Negeb for

determining its future. The Foreign Office Research Department prepared a ‘Note on the Possibility of

Development in the Negeb,’ which was prepared for Mr. Beeley, who was in Paris, and the note was

needed for the ‘forthcoming discussions on Palestine.’110 Just the day after, October 16th, 1948, the Zionist

military forces were starting their Yoav Campaign to occupy southern Palestine, which its parts south of

Beersheba were assigned for the future Jewish State in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan. In the end,

despite the long political debate on defining the “Negeb/Negev” and the dozens of maps prepared for this

purpose, it was the force of arms that determined the Negeb destiny and boundaries.

Since the creation of Israel, the term “Negev” became the exclusive term used instead of “Negeb”

or the Bir al-Sabia’ or Gaza region, thus corresponding with the Zionist naming of the region. Hasan abu

Sammur has warned against this naming. He notes that the Israelis try to use only the term “Negev” and

that is to erase the original names, Bir al-Sabia’ and the Palestine Desert.111 Further, “Negev” is now used

to refer to an area of more than 12 million dunams, which encompasses all the heavily cultivated and

110 FO 371/68700, Palestine- ‘Note on the Possibility of Development in Palestine with Particular Reference to Irrigation in the Negeb’ (prepared, October 14th 1948)111 The Story of Beersheba (in Arabic)- Hasan Abu Sammur, the Arab cultural Association- Culture section of the PLO, (no year mentioned), (in Arabic), p.11.

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inhabited area around Beersheba, which the British and the Negeb Scheme supporters excluded from their

Negeb’ definitions. The Zionist political discourse on southern Palestine as a waste-desert land occupied

by nomads, led to its treatment in scholarship as an isolated arid Bedouin tribal area. Such treatment

further parallels the current Israeli legal position on the Bedouin lands as mawat dead lands.

Nevertheless, and despite the gap in the extent or nature of land rights, both the British and the

Jewish Agency assumed in their debates the existence of Bedouin land rights and saw the need for a land

survey to determine them. Cultivation and individual land rights registration, as well as other

socioeconomic practices in the region were very complex and had integrated, in various degrees, with the

state law and institutions. The integration of the custom and local knowledge with state law and

institutions deserves further investigation, and pose a challenge to the Negev paradigm, and to the Israeli

sweeping denial of Bedouin land ownership. Further, individual ownership and cultivation negates the

abstract all-encompassing qualifications such as “tribal areas” and “nomadism.”

Further, it is important to note that even the more critical scholarship that rejected the Israeli claims of

Bedouin nomadism and lack of land registration, has its own shortfalls. First, it has also treated southern

Palestine in an exceptional and totalizing approach overstating the autonomy of southern Palestine as an

“exceptional” region, as being outside the state space. Further, the current use of the term “Naqab” by

some scholars to counter the Hebrew-used term “Negev,” does not only miss the point that the region is a

relatively recent-invention and was constructed within a particular political process which offered a

number of definitions, but that historically the region was not referred to as the “Naqab.” The fact that

Palestinian refugees of southern Palestine in Jordan, identify themselves as Saba’awiyun or Bir Al-sabi’

people/tribes, and not Naqabawiyun as those remaining in Israel, is a very good example of naming and

identity within and outside the direct matrix of Israeli-Zionist-Palestinian matrix of power relations and

geographic reconstruction. Additionally, it is mostly the area that we may call the Bir al-Sabia’ region

together with its Tayaha, Tarabin, Hanajrih, Jbarat, and part of the Azazma inhabitants that is mostly

studied, and not the entire ‘Negev.’ We still lack much of the knowledge about the less-known tribal

confederation of the Ahewat and Saidiyeen and their habitation in the farther southern parts of southern

Palestine.112

In sum, this chapter tried within the broader context of governance incorporation of a frontier and

periphery region, to demonstrate spatial transformation at two levels. The first is on the broader level of

political-geographic construction of a spatial unit, and the second is on the implications of the use of this

spatial unit in scholarship. The reform and spatial formation demonstrated the complex landed property

112 They were even excluded at the time in the famous study of Arif Alarif.

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relations, and how the legal and administrative reforms were constantly reconfigured within an

interactional form against the local communities and broader socio-political factors. Though we did not

discuss the Israeli period in depth, we can state that the process of incorporation continues until the

present in Israel. The imposition of Israeli state law and dominance occurred in several arenas which

included new legislation and re-interpretation of imperial and colonial legislation. Further, coercion and

violence was a constant form attached to this imposition.

As was shown, the different ideological motives and political considerations of the concerned

parties impacted the attempt to define the Negeb. Accordingly, there is a need to deconstruct the

geographic unit of the “Negev,” and instead, a more dynamic, regional, and nuanced approach should be

utilized to study southern Palestine, with fresh scholarly approach to reading the various social, economic,

political, and legal networks. The social and legal relationships in Beersheba crossed a number of social

and geographic boundaries, within a broader economic-political framework, that deserves better

understanding than what has been offered thus far.

35