The Bedouin Women of the Negev

The Bedouins, indigenous inhabitants of the Negev desert in the south of the country, number today between160,000-180,000 people, and are unrecognized citizens unless they give up their lands inherited from their ancestors, their only livelihood resource. For 60 years they have been denied their fundamental human rights acknowledged under the law of the State of Israel and international law.

The Negev Bedouin women are not excluded from these problems; to the contrary, they are oppressed, marginalized and discriminated. Their deep multifaceted suffering originates from four major factors: as women in this world; as part of the Palestinian minority in the country; as living in the periphery; and as belonging to an oppressed patriarchal society.

Our concern here is the Negev Bedouin women and girls lack of access to adequate services e.g education, health care, employment, social and others despite Israel’s many laws that assure the promotion of these services and the right of every citizen in Israel to enjoy it.

In the last decade the civil society movement and organizations in the Negev has grown and started many unique projects that tried to bridge over more than 61 years of institutional discriminations, many of these projects has changed lives of so many people in the Negev to the better, gave hope and chances for development and evacuation from severe marginalisation and poverty.

Women in the Negev were and still the major group who suffers the most negative consciousness of both the formal policy of discrimination and the local tradition and customs limits the freedom and mobility for women.

Beside the formal and none formal polices and traditions, economically wise, the Bedouin population in the Negev consider the poorest in Israel, have highest rate of unemployment, lowest performance in education and enrolment. More than 50% of the Bedouin in the Negev lives in shakes and in unrecognised villages which are not officially recognised by the Israeli authorities and are subject to ongoing threats of house demolishing and evacuation, leads to social and physiological stress and instability.

On top of all the above to live in the buffer zone of the ongoing Israeli Palestinian conflict for such a long time do put allot of pressure over the local population from all sides of the conflict, but no one do take into consideration their needs and role when they discuss potential solutions, their families are spread over all over the geographical areas in the region which directly involved and influenced by the ongoing conflict. Once again women are the most effected by any new procedures and majors which restricts movements and connections between all the different areas, West Bank, Israel, Gaza and Jordan. many of the women married outside of their family original base crossing the border lines between the different entities in the region, instead of considering them as the live example of potential peace messengers they are the ones to suffer the most, due to recent and past legislations related to citizenship, personal status laws, inheritance and access to services….

Tradition and local habits and culture sometimes lead to intensifying of women exclusion and marginalization adding an extra layer of suffering. Polygamy, violence physical and physiological consider above the average level and do make the lives of women much more difficult. The most significant negative impact of the traditions reflected in the exclusion of Bedouin women from public life, politics, business and leadership.

The pioneering work Sidreh has been doing over the past one and a half decade mange to overcome some of the local traditional taboos in a very dialect way without costing them the lost of the support and trust of their local communities, Sidreh were able to promote the first women groups to got involve in paid jobs, the first women who got a driving licence, the first to run literacy education projects, tackling violence and promoting young female leadership.

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