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 Empirerevolved 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 civilNizamiye 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.
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.
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 fieldis 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 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’ waQaba’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 biladGhazza(Gaza region) or DiratBir 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, 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 startwith 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 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.
- 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]