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Last update - 19:02 05/03/2008 Romantic - but wrong By Erez Tzfadia Tags: Negev, Bedouin, Negev, Bedouin Advertisement It doesn't belong to them... ' 'So you are spraying the lands?' 'They don?t understand anything else... ? 'But it's toxic... ' 'Yes.... What's wrong with that?'" Two quotes: The first is real, taken from a report of the Regional Council of the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages of the Negev. The second comes from "The Happy Man." Both quotations describe different layers of the policy that Israel follows with regard to 80,000 Bedouin citizens living in 46 unrecognized villages in the Negev: demolishment of houses and demolishment of sources of income. These two policy lines, along with the poisoning of the air and the soil in the Ramat Hovav industrial dump area, the activity of the electricity station and the military-industry plants at Ramat Beq'a - in the heart of the village of the novel's protagonist - are the reason for the Bedouin revolt that is due to break out in 2009, according to Tsur Shezaf's fictional forecast. The novel weaves together the speech of four narrator-characters to create a full picture of the revolt. The four - heroes, victims and suppressors of the revolt - represent different personal points of view regarding the Negev, its landscapes and its people: Najib, the neurosurgeon with the golden hands who leads the revolt; Boaz, a macho skirt-chaser from the security forces, the salt of the earth and hater of Arabs, who is entrusted by the security establishment with the task of suppressing the revolt and killing its leader - Najib; Zora, a Kirghiz princess who wanders from the steppes of Asia to the Negev in order to find her unknown love - Najib, her father's successor and the father of her son; and Noam, a geologist and former good friend of Najib's, who loses his daughters in a terror attack carried out by Najib's people. All of the characters move among the communities that constitute the social mosaic of Israel, along the boundaries between the permitted and the forbidden, on intercultural bridges. Each of the chapters is narrated by a single protagonist, and through his or her individual story there emerges a picture of the narrator's character and experiences, the intersection of his path with those of the other characters and also the reasons, from the narrator's perspective, for the outbreak of the revolt. The individual stories reveal the author?s own complex love affair with the Negev: Shezaf admires every path, well and stream bed. He guides readers far from any road to hidden springs known to very few, to a secret camel trail that leads from the Negev to the Arava, to places not even marked on trail maps or mentioned in guidebooks, to the primal landscapes of the land of the Negev. But Shezaf is also full of anger at the people and what they have wrought. The loathing that he feels for Be'er Sheva, its buildings and its people is manifest; he expresses criticism of the Zionist project to develop the Negev; he is disgusted by the weekend tourists who come in their luxurious off-road vehicles, embodying in his eyes the hedonism combined with bullying that characterizes the Israel of today. By contrast, he pines for the legendary Bedouin, the noble savage who knows every stone and rock in his natural habitat, who does not know what a border is, to whom his honor and the honor of others are dear. This is the character of Suleiman, Najib's adoptive father: the Sheikh of Sheikhs of the 'Ourabi (as I understand it, this refers to the Azazmeh tribe), the father of 300 children, from women who were sent to him as gifts from all over the Middle East. The revolt, then, poses the primal, natural and wild world against the attempt to impose a modern reality by bullying means meant to harm the indigenous people of the desert, their culture and their ways of life. This is the revolt of those "who do not want to change anything, only to understand" against the hedonistic bullies who feel that "the desert belongs to them and therefore there is no need to conserve it, only to exploit it," "to change it, to occupy, to settle." As in every colonial story, this tale too ends with the re-occupation of the Negev, the defeat of its authentic population and its expulsion to a desert that for the time being is still safe from the talons of modernity - Sinai. The Bedouin who see no contradiction between their heritage and the Jewish state, like Dr. Najib the neurosurgeon, and Brigadier General Ahmad Dagoni, who defects from the Israel Defense Forces to join the revolt, meet a common end: They die in agony at the hands of the security forces of the Jewish state. Could it happen? The expectation of a Bedouin revolt is not a figment of Shezaf's imagination. About four years ago, Amnon Barzilai reported in Haaretz: "The handwriting is on the wall, in especially large letters: A Bedouin intifada in the northern Negev is on the way. This assessment is shared by - among others - the Prime Minister's Office, the Defense Ministry, the Internal Security Ministry and the National Security Council." These are joined by local Jewish politicians who extract political capital by the nurturing of fear of the Bedouin. What do Shezaf, the government ministries and the local politicians have in common? Why do they all conclude that a Bedouin revolt in the Negev is approaching? Rationally, the reality of the Bedouin's life supports the possibility of a revolt. For six decades now, the state has refused to recognize the existence of 46 Bedouin villages in the Negev, some of them more than 400 years old; other villages were populated under orders from military governors during the 1950s. Nevertheless, when the military regime ended in 1965, the Israeli civil administration refused to recognize these villages. The new master plan for metropolitan Be'er Sheva, which was supposed to offer a solution for the unrecognized villages, has also chosen to ignore their existence and instead of recognition it suggests to the Bedouin that they move to one of seven permanent townships that have been organized to receive them. These townships are of course ranked at the bottom of the list of the poorest locales in Israel. As far as the Bedouin are concerned, relocating to the permanent townships means abandoning the traditional Bedouin way of life, giving up agriculture and relinquishing a demand - which the state rejects outright - for recognition of their ownership of the land. To implement policy, state institutions employ a number of means that do not accord with basic rights to housing and employment. In 2007, the state demolished hundreds of homes in the Bedouin villages on the grounds that they had been built illegally. Until a March 2004 ruling by the High Court of Justice, fields cultivated by Bedouin were poisoned from the air, and since then it has been the practice to plow under and destroy fields that are about to yield crops. About 40 percent of the inhabitants of those 46 villages are not connected to the water grid. Not a single one of the communities is connected to the electricity grid or the sewerage system. Education and health services are provided stingily and in many cases only after the inhabitants of the villages and human rights organizations petition the court. Non-recognition means you are not taken into account in calculations about where to situate environmental hazards: For example, Bedouin who live in Wadi al Na'am, near Ramat Hovav, suffer from the highest rates of infant mortality, illness and miscarriages in Israel - according to research studies carried out by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Health Ministry and health organizations. At the same time, a policy of Jewish settlement in the Negev is being pursued; in recent years, dozens of single-family ranches have been established in the region. Since the establishment of the state, about 100 locales for Jews have been established in the Negev, some urban and some rural, and they have enjoyed generous allotments of land. In recent years the government ministries have been hard at work to establish new community and rural settlements. Some of them are already in place and others are at various stages of planning and implementation. IDF bases have also been established in the Negev, thereby nourishing among some of the local politicians another source of hope that the Bedouin "problem" will be solved. It appears the development of the Negev is something intended exclusively for Jews, and the Bedouin are supposed to move out of the expanse and converge in the permanent townships. But is all this liable to lead to revolt? "What kind of nonsense is that?" a Bedouin friend, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, reproached me when I directed the question to him. He added: "Read Hamid Mohsin's book 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist.'" In the book, an American of Pakistani origin describes the way, in the wake of the terror attack on the World Trade Center and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, American society marked him as fundamentalist, even though during the course of his life he felt that he had been absorbed into the world of American values. The hint is clear: The Bedouin will not revolt. This is a tranquil community that does not profess violence as a means to achieve political aims. Nonetheless, the Jews see the Bedouin as potential rebels. As in a vicious circle, the discrimination and the oppression arouse among the oppressors the fear of a revolt, and the fear of a revolt - signs of which are identified in crimes against property and illegal construction - nourishes the discrimination and the oppression. However, the geological reasoning of Noam, one of the main characters in Shezaf's book, that if you "take materials and compress them until they become a gas, one day they will burst out through the cracks of weakness along the breaks in the surface, they will bring up with them fragments and explosions and volcanoes," is not applicable to the Bedouin. In addition to local politicians who nourish their careers by creating fear of the other, the belief in a Bedouin revolt is the province of those who are engaged in preparations for the use of force, like Boaz of the security forces in the novel and like the experts at the Defense Ministry, the Internal Security Ministry and the National Security Council. And also, with a difference, of romantics who imagine the man of the desert as a noble savage - like Shezaf. This is the second time he has raised the idea of a revolt in the Negev and connected it to the daily oppression of the Bedouin (the first time was in his 2007 travel book, "Dead End"). The problem is not the mistaken forecast concerning a possible revolt; the problem, which characterizes the book and in which the prediction of the revolt is rooted, is in the stigmatic perception of reality. The image of the noble savage that is attributed in the book to the Bedouin is based in Eurocentric thinking that perceives the native as beautiful, proud, strong and an object of erotic attraction - but also cruel and disloyal - as Edward Said described clearly in "Orientalism." If we pressure him he will rebel, or will be defeated. Shezaf's Bedouin is the Israeli manifestation of transforming the Arab in the Negev into a fundamentalist, even though he isn't one and is not interested in being one. This stigmatization is not directed only at the Bedouin; the Jewish characters are also flattened to the point that all of the characters in the book become simplistic and stereotypical molds, and this is also the book's major weakness. The stunning descriptions of the Negev landscape and the suspense that accompanies the story through the eyes of the four narrating characters do overshadow the blight of the stereotyping with which "The Happy Man" is flawed. However, it is this blight exactly that brings up questions that cannot be detached from the everyday reality in the Negev, with regard to Shezaf's bleak predictions. Dr. Erez Tzfadia is a lecturer on public policy and administration at Sapir College. Bookmark to del.icio.us   UN hushes Human Rights Council observes moment of silence for Gaza 'martyrs.' Hitler's sign Document shows that British spies hired a flamboyant astrologer in World War II.

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