The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule

by Smadar Lavie

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Matthew Petti · Rating 5 out of 5]

The occupation of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula is a lesser-known chapter of Israel's conflicts with its neighbors. Unlike the educated, urbanized, nationalistic Palestinians, Syrians, or Lebanese, the Israeli government considered the indigenous Bedouin population of the Sinai to be friendly noble savage types. (It helps that the Sinai was not really desirable for Israeli settlement, and valuable mostly for tourism, with the traditional Bedouin lifestyle as one of the attractions.) Bedouin, more attached to clan than national or ethnic identity, were in turn more willing to bargain with the Israeli army and the hordes of tourists who followed.

But military occupation and tourism were fatal to the Bedouin way of life, a process that Smadar Lavie documents up close as an anthropologist. The arrival of the cash economy, along with consumer goods and naked women, irreversibly changed traditional life in ways that are familiar all around the world. The symbols of "Bedouin culture" became unbound from lived Bedouin experience. On one hand, Bedouin clung onto their identity as hardy free spirits in the face of a life increasingly dominated by bureaucracy, wage labor, and humiliating service to tourists. On the other hand, performing that identity itself became a form of service, as tourists paid a pretty penny for a "biblical" experience.

"From the several vignettes that present each character in his or her fullness, I hope to have conveyed the fantastic idiosyncrasies of the South Sinai geopolitical situation. Perhaps in this era of superpower dominance over the local states of Egypt and Israel, and the concurrent state dominance over tribes, tribal identity can develop little further than allegory," Lavie writes.

Interestingly, the Bedouin whom Lavie speaks to seem to prefer being museum pieces under Israeli rule than being pressed into the modern Egyptian state-building project. (Much of the book was written as the Sinai was being returned piece-by-piece to Egyptian rule in the aftermath of the 1973 war; tor all the pageantry about their naive traditional life, by the way, the Bedouin seem very well attuned to geopolitics.) Of course, it's hard to tell how much these interlocutors are simply telling Lavie what they think Israelis want to hear. Lavie hints at social cleavages within Bedouin society between people who made money under British, Egyptian, and Israeli rule. While she herself tries to romanticize Bedouin social structures — which is her responsibility, as a good liberal defender of her country's downtrodden — I get the sense that many of her interlocutors are quite mercenary and clannish.

Fair warning, the book is very much a product of academic anthropology, and so it can get into dense (and sometimes self-absorbed) theoretical discussions, as anthropology tends to do. While I am reading the book as part of an anthropology degree, and therefore have to slog through that stuff, there are plenty of colorful anecdotes for the lay reader that paint a really interesting picture of life in that particular time and place. The Poetics of Military Occupation is the best of the anthropological tradition. It is a thorough description of an interesting society that could only have been written by someone who immersed herself in that society deeply.

[hay man · Rating 3 out of 5]

funny stories about bedouins ripping dudes off in here