On a visit to Beersheba, I was driven a few kilometers out of town by the geographer Oren Yiftachel to see some of the Bedouin communities there.  Bedouin villages don’t look like villages in the West Bank; rather than clustered centripetally, they are more often plural groupings of a few dwellings each–neither the traditional tents nor stone constructions, but jerry-built shelters–scattered over a wide area, grouped by families but considered nevertheless to form a single village.  We drove part way into one such cluster, then Yiftachel took me up to a rise topped by a water tank to get a wider view of the area.  Looking in one direction we saw a more tightly clustered Bedouin community about a kilometer away, and, closer in, a rectangular enclosure with a lush growth of trees.  Yiftachel identified this as a Jewish cemetery, kept green in this desert landscape by ample watering all year long; the Bedouin community, he pointed out, was held to a stricter liquid diet. Their water was rationed.  If thirst is your problem, better to be a dead Jew than a live Bedouin.

Yiftachel, a fine scholar–author, among many other works, of a powerfully argued book called Ethnocracy–is also active in the defense of the rights of Bedouins as well as those of the Palestinians of the West Bank and the various Israeli minorities, active to the point of having had members of the Knesset call for his dismissal from his university.  As we drove around he recounted a court case in which an Israeli plan to drive a roadway through a Bedouin area was being contested by one of the affected villagers.  The case made its way to the High Court, where a lawyer arguing for the State insisted that there was no village there, that it appeared on no Israeli map.  The villager countered that this village, his village, had indeed been there for generations and that he could prove it:  his grandfather’s grave was there.  The State stuck to its guns, pointing, accurately enough, to the absence of any village on its map, its official map, and the argument was going back and forth in this fashion when the Bedouin villager invited the Judge to come down to the Negev and see for herself whether his village was real or not. Which, to her credit, she did.  And there, indeed, was the grave.  Nothing like a grave to mark the Real! The Judge then ruled for the Bedouin plaintiff, though, Yiftachel added, her ruling was mildly worded:  she merely urged the State to try to avoid putting the road right through the village.  It isn’t yet clear that the State will feel obliged to comply.