The Jewish Other in the popular poetry of the Negev Bedouin, 1930s-1980s: Exploring a selection of poems from the Bar-Zvi collection

Various historical studies of Jewish-Arab relations rely primarily on Hebrew sources, as Jews did not cease to document their lives and pasts, while Palestinians generally made use of oral practices to accumulate and to transfer information. This difference between the two cultures of memory has created a bias in favor of Jewish perspectives even in studies focused on Arabs’ thoughts and emotions.
This paper seeks to examine the ways in which Jews were perceived by Arabs through the lenses of unusual historical sources in Arabic, offering a fresh point of view on the encounter between the two groups. These sources are Bedouin poems composed and declaimed throughout the Negev between the 1930s and the 1980s. They express objection with regard to the Bedouin’s conditions under the central rule (of the British and, later on, the Israelis).
The poems selected for this purpose are part of a collection of Negev Bedouin poetry that has never been used for scholarly purposes. It was collated by Sasson Bar-Zvi (1924-2012), who had been a Haganah intelligence officer, a military governor and an authority on Bedouin matters.
The paper explores the representation of the Jews in Bedouin poetry in three major periods: during the British Mandate, under Israel’s military rule, and between the 1967 War and the early 1980s. The ways Bedouin poets presented Jews in their verses changed during those periods and these changes will be at the focus of our inquiry.