Bedouin Settlement in Late Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine: Influence on the Cultural and Environmental Landscape, 1870-1948

During the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods the cultural and environmental landscape of Palestine changed dramatically. This was reflected in both urban development and rural settlement patterns. In the last decades of Ottoman rule much of the newly settled rural low country of Palestine, including the coastal plain and Jordan valley, was strongly influenced by Bedouin tribes, who were living in various states of mobile pastoralism. By the end of the British Mandate the majority of the Bedouin, with the exception of those living in the Negev in Southern Palestine, had become sedentary in one form or another. The Bedouin actively built about 60 new villages and dispersed settlements, comprising several thousand houses. The Mandate authorities estimated the population of these Bedouin villages to be 27,500 in 1945. Our paper examines who the inhabitants of these Bedouin villages were, tracing them from their nomadic and pastoral origins in the late Ottoman period to their final sedentarization under the British Mandate. We examine how Mandatory land policies and Jewish land purchases created legal and demographic pressures for sedentarization. In shedding light on these intertwined topics we illustrate the increasingly limited role the Bedouin played in the rural landscape due to constraints placed upon them and show how, as a result, their settlement was part of a change in the environment in the period

Counting nomads: British census attempts and tent counts of the Negev Bedouin 1917 to 1948

The census of nomadic populations poses a challenge for governing authorities. In 1945, the British Mandatory government of Palestine developed a novel method to enumerate the nomadic Bedouin population of the Negev. By using aerial reconnaissance photography to augment conventional methods, they counted the tents of the tribesmen and marked them on a small scale map. This represented the culmination of years of British efforts to estimate the nomadic population of Palestine's largest administrative area, the Beersheba subdistrict of the Negev Desert, between 1917 and 1948. The aims of this paper were to chronicle, examine, and evaluate the British Mandatory estimates and censuses of the Bedouin population of the Negev undertaken in 1922, 1931, and 1946, and to compare them with their aerial survey of Bedouin tents in 1945. This study brings together a body of primary source material to examine a topic that has not been adequately addressed by researchers, and briefly touches on British strategic interests to invest in this activity. We assess the importance and accuracy of this mapping as well as its implications for the study of the Bedouin population of the Negev