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Formulating the Dead Negev Doctrine During the Israeli Period Chapter abstract: This chapter focuses on the history and impact of the Dead Negev Doctrine—the legal doctrine utilized by the Israeli government and judiciary to dispossess Bedouin Arab communities of their lands. The chapter begins with the land claims lodged by the Bedouins in the early 1970’s and the special governmental committee established in response in 1975 (headed by Pliah Albeck of the State Attorney Office, the mastermind behind the DND). The chapter shows how the DND manipulated Ottoman and British law to determine that all Bedouin lands in the Negev should be classified as mewat and thus “state land,” and how it defined the Bedouin claimants as trespassers on their own lands. First adopted by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1984 in the al-Hawashlah precedent, and applied to hundreds of cases since, the doctrine has led to major evictions, crops’ demolitions, and house demolitions by the Israeli state.

From July to December 1948, Egypt had sought to retain, with the aid of the Great Powers, control of the Negev and a foothold on the West Bank. However, Israeli's offensive at the end of the year convinced Cairo to accept the best terms that it could obtain directly from Tel Aviv. In February 1949, therefore, Egypt became the first Arab power to sign an armistice with the Jewish state. The Egyptian diplomatic withdrawal also led indirectly to Israel's gain of territory further north. Not sharing a common border with the Jewish state, Iraq could afford to shun all contact: Baghdad ordered its forces to return home without so much as opening negotiations. Jordan's army, now the sole Arab force responsible for the defense of the West Bank, was left in the lurch. On the face of it, this sad finale to a disastrous war marked the complete failure of Egyptian foreign policy. Indeed, the defeat of the Egyptian army and the occupation of most of Palestine by the Jews was also a disaster in terms of politics.

Many Arabs offered the new state of Israel their services after the Little Triangle was annexed to it. Just as collaboration with the Jews was not foreign to some inhabitants of the Arab villages, neither was the art of managing collaborators unfamiliar to Israeli security officials. Some had overseen Arab informers during the Mandate and the war, mostly in the framework of the Shai, but in some cases in the framework of the British police. Some of the Bedouin tribes in the Negev acted in a similar fashion. Some allied themselves with the Jewish forces during the fighting, while others sought Israel's protection and promised to help the state when hostilities ended. In some villages and neighborhoods there was competition for the post of mukhtar, and winning the job was itself adequate compensation for assistance offered. But other mukhtars and collaborators frequently expected more concrete returns, and security officials grappled with the subject of how to compensate collaborators from the time the state was founded.

The introduction presents the general setting and outlines the book’s main research questions. It does so by reviewing four key events of recent conflictual encounters between Israeli authorities and Bedouin communities, as telling entry points for the book ahead. The chapter than highlights the book's main arguments, mainly dealing with the development of a 'Dead Negev Doctrine' as an Israeli version of a colonial 'terra nullius' approach, through which most of the Bedouin tribes of the Negev (Naqab) have been thoroughly dispossessed. The introduction also outlines the book's main approaches, methods, sources and structure

This chapter is an overview of the “state of the art” in scholarship dealing with Negev (Naqab) Bedouins. It sets the book within relevant scholarly frameworks as a foundation for the empirical investigations of the chapters that follow. This chapter defines key concepts such as “Ethnocracy,” “settling society”, “gray space” and “hegemony;” and discusses the emergence and nature of critical legal geography. The chapter then reviews literature dealing with the dispossession of indigenous peoples, focusing on the evolution and nature of the terra nullius concept and its Israeli version —the “Dead Negev Doctrine” (DND).

This chapter begins the task of challenging the geographical components of the DND, by providing a thorough account of the historical geography of the Negev, drawing on various historical accounts of European travelers and Zionists. Relying on these accounts, it challenges the hegemonic history and narrative that depict the Negev as an uncultivated and unsettled desert used by nomadic Bedouins. The chapter demonstrates that the human geography of the northern Negev was characterized, at least from the 19th century, by widespread agriculture, in parallel to traditional pastoralism. There is ample evidence that Bedouin agricultural settlement in general had existed for centuries, including among the al-‘Uqbi tribe in the ‘Araqib area. The chapter shows organized local habitation and economic activities, based on a customary and well developed land system.