Online via generator

Adnan Gharabiya does not have a computer at home. When he wants to work on his doctorate, he uses the computer labs at Ben-Gurion University or at the school where he teaches computer skills. The problem is that in the winter, his community floods from the rain, and the roads are sometimes blocked.

"I apparently have to exert myself more than most people in Israel who are working on doctorates," he says mildly.

Gharabiya, 34, lives in Wadi al-Na'am, an unrecognized community adjacent to Ramat Hovav that consists of tents and corrugated metal huts. When Wadi al-Na'am merits media attention, it is usually when one of the Ramat Hovav factories has leaked or when the Interior Ministry and the police send bulldozers and guards to raze homes built without a permit. The place is not connected to the electricity grid or to running water.

"I can buy a computer, but most of the time I don't have electricity, so it's not practical," says Gharabiya, who works as a teacher and computer coordinator in an elementary school in Segev Shalom.

The difficult conditions he and his family live in did not prevent him from completing an undergraduate degree in computer education and a master's degree in education technology. He is writing his doctorate on Israeli-Arab society's attitude toward the media, including the Internet. After he completes his doctorate, he hopes to work as a lecturer at the university, but he says he does not plan to leave Wadi al-Na'am.

"This is where I was born and this is where I want to live," he says.

Cut off from the world

While working on his thesis, Gharabiya discovered that the Internet, and in particular instant messaging programs, are very popular among Bedouin youth, the poorest, most neglected segment of Israel's population.

"I was surprised to find how many Bedouin youth like to use chat rooms," says Gharabiya. "I spoke to teachers who told me: 'If you come to the school on Friday, you can meet many teenage boys and girls who hang out in chat rooms.'"

That is how Gharabiya uncovered a new phenomenon among Bedouin teenage girls in the unrecognized towns of the Negev: On Fridays, when Arab schools do not hold class, they find a way to get to the regional school, kilometers from their homes, in order to use the Internet, where they enter chat rooms, or talk via instant messenger.

"It's very impressive," says Dr. Gad Alexander of Ben-Gurion University's department of education, who mentored Gharabiya in his research. "They find a ride and come to a faraway school in order to get online and visit chat rooms. They can spend up to 10 hours a week in chat rooms, which is a lot, given their lack of Internet access."

As part of his work, Gharabiya distributed questionnaires to 200 Bedouin youths, and interviewed some of them. He found that 60 percent of the youth from permanent communities have an Internet connection.

"In the past, these youths surfed the Web mainly at school and at the community center, or via cell phone," he says. "Now there are homes with wireless Internet. Some homes run their computers via a generator or through a solar receptor. The Bedouin population is young, and young people are more open to new technologies."

Like many young people around the world, from Beijing to Kiryat Bialik, Bedouin teens use instant messaging programs mostly to communicate with friends their own age. But in Bedouin society, searching for friends has a unique meaning.

"The tribal structure is very strong, and a teenage boy up to age 18 is almost constantly around the tribe and the community," says Gharabiya. "The Bedouin are usually isolated and cut off also from the rest of Israeli society, from the rest of the Arab sector, which lives mostly in the north, and from Arabs in other countries. Chat rooms open a window."

T., one of the interviewees who took part in the research, says he met "important people" in chat rooms, whom he could not meet in the area where he lives, between Be'er Sheva and Dimona. "Once I met a captain, he was sailing the seas on a boat," he says. "Through the chat room, I got to know him, and I obtained outstanding information from him."

But the Internet made the greatest change in the lives of young girls. "In Bedouin society there is rather strict separation of the sexes, and a chat room is the only place where they can talk with members of the opposite sex," says Gharabiya. "It is especially significant for the girls, because their social circle is even smaller, and their freedom of movement is limited. Not all of them can leave their parents' community. Unlike the boys, girls are not allowed to go to town after classes, or to visit friends. In this respect, technology is very important."

In many Bedouin schools, it is not acceptable for girls to take part in sports classes. Instead, they are sent to the computer room, where they are supposed to prepare assignments on the rules of basketball, for example. However, they often wind up surfing online.

"The girls don't attend sports classes, so they have time to hang out in chat rooms," says Gharabiya.

You can talk about everything

"In our society, the girl must be respectable and act moderately, because what's important for a girl in this society is her reputation," said A., one of the girls interviewed for the research. "In Bedouin society, it is forbidden to talk to a boy, to send him letters and to fall in love with him ... but in a chat room, no one knows if you're talking to boys there. They think you're a good, respectable girl, and that's the main thing. You write to people while no one sees you, but you and your real-life behavior are always under scrutiny."

Chat rooms let them bypass customs and prohibitions, and overcome the strict limits in traditional society, primarily the separation of the sexes and the severe restrictions imposed on women. "There is a lot more freedom in a chat room," says Gharabiya. "Among the family, it is not common to discuss all subjects, primarily when the children are adolescents. In a chat room, you can discuss everything, if you find someone who is receptive."

Do the conservative forces try to ban use of the Internet, much like the strict prohibition imposed by the rabbis on ultra-Orthodox society?

"The Bedouin population is comprised of several tribes that do not have a very centralized leadership," says Gharabiya. "Apart from that, the Internet symbolizes progress in Bedouin society, and parents are proud when they have Internet access at home. Usually they don't have tools to monitor what their kids are doing there."

Nevertheless, Gharabiya is not convinced that the Internet will effect great change in Bedouin society. "Internet is a technology and in every society, technology is used for different needs. But the fact that they are connected to other people and exposed to different worlds eventually will have an impact. Now the instant messages are not just via computer. All of the Arab stations use text messages, and send them all over the Arab world. The information reaches the viewer in a different way than it did in the past, when we could only watch a few hours of Arabic la nguage news on Channel One. So clearly it is influencing self-perception and identity. Even if an Arab youth enters a chat room on Nana and the other users don't accept him when he writes his real name, this has an impact."