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Dwelling in Conflict
Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging
By Emily McKee STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9832-7
CHAPTER 1
Narrating Present Pasts
INVOCATIONS OF THE PAST are everywhere in Israel's contemporary land conflict, from the land claims of individuals to governmental justifications for regional land-use plans. In 2007, two-meter-tall corrugated metal Hebrew letters sitting on a hilltop just west of Jerusalem asserted one link between past and present. "AGRICULTURE WILL WIN," they declared across the valley. These letters lined the steep entrance road of one of the few remaining collective kibbutzim in Israel. Kibbutzim of the early 1900s were small agricultural settlements run as economically and socially cooperative communities. They played a significant role in Israeli nation-building, not primarily through economic contributions but as social and ideological keystones of the Zionist movement. Since then, most kibbutzim have privatized, and many have shifted away from agriculture (Grossman 2004). The kibbutz I was visiting, for example, had many productive acres of vineyards, orchards, and vegetables but also a glass factory and a children's water park that supplied much of the community's income.
Mark, a proud resident of the kibbutz, explained the message his community hoped to send via these metal letters to the other Israelis who drove through the valley or bought the new housing plots that encroached on the kibbutz's farmland. Mark explained how the founders of this kibbutz and others across the country had transformed a barren landscape into lush and productive agricultural plots. We are struggling to keep the agriculture and the green space, Mark said. It is not as profitable as using land to construct buildings, but we think agriculture will win, he concluded. To some extent, Mark's kibbutz was struggling against status shifts common in any society undergoing a transition from an agrarian economy to one more reliant on industrial production, tourism, and other services (Cronon 1991; Harvey 1996; Heatherington 2010). But in certain ways, this struggle is unique to Israel and the Zionist movement. The rallying cry for agriculture invokes an Orientalist historical narrative of campaigns to civilize a Middle Eastern wilderness with European farming technology and a work ethic that prizes agricultural labor as redemptive of both workers' character and a neglected land. While it speaks most pointedly to fellow Jews who would replace farming land with condominiums, the sign also speaks to non-Jews, asserting Jewish claims to land through their productive use of it.
Yousef, a middle-aged Bedouin man living in an unrecognized Negev village, invoked agricultural practices during an interview with me, too, to strengthen his land claim. However, he did so by telling a very different kind of history. He spoke of an unbroken chain of forebears who had worked the land where his house now sat. Long ago, the land was covered with shrubbery, he told me. His ancestors cut down shrubs, dug furrows, and farmed. This was before Ottoman times, he explained. It was before his grandparents; it was seven grandparents ago. Yousef's assertion of a steadfast line of grandfathers counters Zionism by contradicting its erasure of non-Jews from the land. But in the same breath Yousef asserted a work ethic familiar to Zionist accounts. His forebears fulfilled the requirements for agricultural labor and suffering espoused by Zionist leaders.
Though Naqab Bedouins' land claims are often denied because of their supposed nomadism, Yousef asserted that his tribe was only "quarter-nomadic." Rather than simply living in one place and then moving to the next, he told me, they settled the village of Tel Assha'ir as a base for growing wheat and barley. Residents stored these crops underground through the winter in wells they dug. The families also herded sheep and goats, and if vegetation was scarce, one year a portion of each family, such as one of a man's wives and her children, might travel north to graze the herds above the rain line (in an area recognized within the family's dira, its tribal territory). Meanwhile the second wife and other residents would stay in the village. Yousef emphasized that the graves were always here, along with the water well and the storage places. He carefully accentuated the sedentary and farming aspects of his heritage, like growing rain-fed wheat and barley, and depicted shepherding as a complement to farming.
While Mark's and Yousef 's uses of history contradicted each other indirectly, other historical claims-making can be more blunt. At a Shabbat dinner in 2009, my host, Chaim, asked what I had learned in the Bedouin township where I lived before moving to his moshav. I began describing different ways families had adapted to that urban township, including some who continued past lifestyles of agriculture and raising animals. "No," Chaim cut in suddenly, "the Bedouin never farmed. They only do it now to hold onto land." Chaim then contended adamantly not only that Bedouins were manipulating the ideological weight of agriculture within Zionism, but also that Israel's collective agricultural communities were "a beautiful dream" of the past that could not survive humanity's individualistic nature. His community members had done what was necessary, he contended, by quitting agriculture and finding jobs off the moshav.
Chaim and Mark both draw on variations of Zionist foundational narratives, which hold high status in Israel. Official Israeli historical accounts of Eretz Israel, told in school classes, governmental documents, a voluminous published literature, and the celebration of national holidays, recount the expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land during Roman rule, followed by a period of neglected landscapes, and the eventual return of the Jewish people to rehabilitate these landscapes. Zionist Negev residents told me of brave predecessors taming a wild and dangerous desert to create a new society. A robust historiography examines how Zionist narratives have been mobilized for these nation-building purposes (Attias and Benbassa 2003; Kellerman 1993; Piterberg 2008; Zerubavel 1995).
Critics of Zionist land policies, both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, tell counter-narratives that contest official accounts as well as their meanings and moral lessons. In the Naqab, these narratives focus on a long line of Bedouin Arab protagonists, with Jewish settlers arriving as interlopers. Contradicting the barren desert wilderness of Zionist accounts, counter-narratives depict sparsely peopled, yet social landscapes. They describe long histories of family land use as legitimate claims to lands. Unlike Zionist narratives, these accounts rely primarily on informal reminiscences; they are less tied to published sources and include fewer facts and figures.
What is striking about these competing histories of the Negev/Naqab is that despite their contradictions they often rest on shared environmental discourses: agriculture's value for rooting persons, depictions of Bedouins as traditional desert dwellers and Jews as progressive and civilized, and the characterization of certain lands as "Jewish" or "Arab." Moreover, these environmental discourses interlock and strengthen each other, as they contain overlapping binary oppositions of Arab versus Jew, nature versus culture, and tradition versus progress. These discourses are not innately given, but rather trace back to the development of Zionism as well as the wider Orientalist and ethnic nationalist discourses that shaped the movement. As Zionism's dominance grew, these discourses were associated both with successful settlement projects and with ongoing nation-building narratives, giving them tactical power in making moral arguments and practical claims (cf. Silverstein and Urban 1996).
Contemporary land debates draw force from discourses with long genealogies. What this chapter offers is not a comprehensive history of Zionism, nor a full historical account of nationalism and state-building in the region of Israel-Palestine. Rather, this chapter traces the consolidation of three key environmental discourses in mainstream Zionist accounts and examines how Bedouin residents negotiate with these powerful discourses when telling counter-histories of the Naqab. Placing Naqab narratives alongside textually and institutionally strengthened Zionist narratives highlights the unequal footing of these accounts. If done naïvely, such a juxtaposition would risk delegitimizing Naqab narratives. However, when done with attention to the political and material histories surrounding these narrations, this juxtaposition highlights the sociopolitical constraints with which Bedouin Arabs must contend when narrating their connections to land.
Making Jewish Territory
The first of these Zionist discourses asserts the imperative of establishing and protecting a physical territory for the Jewish people. In contemporary Israel, it is common to hear Zionist residents bolster their claim to a particular area of the Negev by asserting the Jewishness of the place. When I asked Yaron, a moshav resident, how he and his fellow moshav members had come to settle in their particular area of the Negev after immigration, he said their parents were drawn to the place. "And that's because in the Bible [Tanakh], they talked about Beersheba, and Abraham our father, long ago. ... [So,] they came here." Yaron came from a religiously observant community, and this proclaimed desire to resettle his biblical forefather's land asserts both the immigrants' Zionist dedication and their religious piety (Shahar 2008). The importance of "Jewish" lands is not necessarily religious, however. When Jewish residents of a different Negev town established in 2004 described their move to that "remote" area as important because "otherwise, Bedouins would settle here," they invoked a discourse of Jewish territory as state territory.
Territorialism may have religious or secular meaning, but both versions share the conviction that territorial integrity is critical for the survival of the Jewish people. Equally importantly, both look to a long genealogy of Jews in Israel to make their claim. Zionism and its drive for territorial integrity developed in the nineteenth century in the context of European colonialism and nationalism. Early leaders viewed the sovereign nation-state as the ideal — indeed, the natural — form of community (Laqueur 1989). Responding to widespread attitudes in Europe, Theodore Herzl, the widely proclaimed "father of Zionism," agreed that Jews were materialistic and morally weak, but argued that these character flaws resulted from Jews' distorted relationships with their states. Anti-Semitism barred Jews from gaining the full benefits of citizenship, he argued, and thus denied them the motivation to uphold responsibilities, such as military service, to the wider community. The solution, he claimed, would be for the state to expect Jews' full participation, making them honorable contributors to the common good (Kornberg 1993). The emphasis on civic duties shaping citizens corresponded with French ideals of nationalism at the time (if not its practices, as demonstrated by the discrimination of the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s). The goal of aligning ethnic and political borders in a nation-state, and the particular tactics used during Zionism's early years of settlement, drew from the ethnic nationalism that Zionist leaders experienced in Germany and elsewhere in Europe (Brubaker 1996; Piterberg 2008).
Though sharing much with European territorial nationalism, the notion of "return" has been more particular to Zionist understandings of territory. Statements like Yaron's justification for settling describe individual Jews' connections to landscapes within Eretz Israel as reconnecting with an interrupted national ancestry. Particularly during early statehood, school curricula, youth movements, and popular rituals brought this ancient connection into Jewish Israelis' everyday lives. Children's literature drew on archaeological finds and stories of the first-century Bar Kokhba revolt to teach lessons of strength and integrity, for example, and youth hikes and military initiations at ruins of the ancient fortification of Masada instilled a sense of common purpose between ancient Jewish rebels and contemporary defenders of the Jewish state (Zerubavel 1995). Indeed, the belief in a natural connection between the Jewish people and Eretz Israel has become central to Zionism (Selwyn 1995). In contemporary conversations, the simple use of the word "return" to describe Jews' immigration to this area indexes this larger narrative of ancient connection, and a claim of rightful repossession. The geographical focus of this "return," however, was far from certain during the movement's early years (Attias and Benbassa 2003; Elon 1971). The amorphous bounds of the project are reflected in the common term ha-aretz, which literally means "the land" and refers to the area over which Zionists assert historic claim. The term may include only the territory of the current Israeli state or a much wider area.
Following anti-Semitism's fevered and genocidal pitch in Europe, Zionists also invoked the Holocaust to justify their territorial intensions. The place of the Holocaust within Zionist politics and historical accounts has been complex. During the 1930s and increasingly in subsequent years, Jewish leaders argued that the extreme anti-Semitism that eventually fueled the Holocaust proved the need for a Jewish state as a safe haven (Zertal 2005). Yet there was a "less than compassionate response [from] the Jewish community in Palestine to the destruction of the European Jews" during the Holocaust, as leaders like David Ben-Gurion rebuked European Jews for not having heeded the call of Zionism earlier (Segev 2000:11). Symbolically, the urban and migratory image of European Jews became an important antithesis against which Zionist leaders sought to forge a Jewish society in Palestine that would be deeply entrenched in place.
This discourse of Jewish territorialism — the need for Jewish sovereignty over Jewish land — has had widespread implications for the development of the region since the early 1900s. Chief among them was the materialization of a "dual society" separating Arabs from Jews. Zionist leaders strove to establish a "dual society paradigm" that would naturalize a separation between "two completely separate and self-contained entities in Palestine," the yishuv (the community of Jews living in Palestine) and Palestinian Arabs (Piterberg 2008:64; Lockman 1996). This paradigm was based on a premise shared by other forms of colonialism, that natives could be kept external to the settler society (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Looking to the "working people's colony" used in nineteenth-century Germany to induce Germans to establish agricultural settlements in Polish-majority regions, settlement administrators for the World Zionist Organization created collective settlements that segregated Jews and Arabs in different territories (Bloom 2011; Piterberg 2008).
With Israel's declaration of statehood in 1948, the Zionist movement's discourse of territorialism became more concretely geographical. Previously, the movement's imagined territory had been the amorphous bounds of ha-aretz. Suddenly, with the establishment of armistice lines, the state had a clear and contiguous, but insecure, territory. The Labor Zionist movement, which led Israel's first government and dominated politics for the next thirty years, used new military and legislative tools to continue securing this territory by establishing "presence," specifically Jewish presence (Kimmerling 1983). Guided by their conviction in the power of the state to shape citizens, Labor Zionist leaders built centralized institutions to help establish this presence.
Because the Jewish National Fund (JNF) had managed to purchase only a portion of the land that came under Israeli control, legislative redefinition of additional lands was one key method of control. First, successive legislative measures reclassified Palestinian-owned lands for which owners were not present on or after November 29, 1947 (when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine) as "abandoned land," and then "absentee land." The government needed these legislative measures to legalize land use for nation-building purposes such as housing new immigrants and providing them with established agricultural fields. Under David Ben-Gurion, the government made the JNF a semigovernmental organization and transferred one million dunams (approximately 250,000 acres) to it. However, the state did not own this land by any existing laws, so new laws retroactively legalized these transfers (Forman and Kedar 2004). Then, in 1960, control over these redefined lands was further consolidated when new legislation gathered the lands held by various state and semistate bodies under the unified control of the Israel Land Administration.
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Excerpted from Dwelling in Conflict by Emily McKee. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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