Desolation in the Negev

"A desolation that not even imagination can grace with pomp of life and action." - Mark Twain, on the Negev Desert, 1867

After a few days, we drive south down to the Negev Desert to spend an evening in a Bedouin tent, our first (and only) official encounter with an Arab Israeli during the 10-day program. This is something of a sensitive topic: Arabs comprise 1.3 million (or 19%) of Israel's 6.6 million population, and that percentage is growing fast. (This does not include the 3.1 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza). In 2005, Benjamin Netanyahu called "Israeli Arabs who remain... Israeli citizens" a "demographic problem" - others have used the more incendiary term "demographic bomb" - and warned that if Arabs reached 35% "than the Jewish state will be annulled." For more on the status of non-Jewish Israelis, this is a decent place to start.

I'm excited for the trip. The scenery along the way is simply staggering - within 25 minutes you transition from the lush, rolling hills of "Israeli Tuscany" to complete, rocky desert desolation - and the rustic setting is a welcome alternative to the Jerusalem bar scene. It's late, dark, and bitter cold by the time we roll into the camp - which essentially consists of a small corral for camels and six massive rectangular tents - and we're quickly brought a delicious meal as we sit cross-legged on the ground. After dinner we settle into our tents (there are quite a few different Birthright trips there at the time, and each group of 45-50 kids piles into its respective tent), and soon shuffle off to the "hospitality tent" to be formally received.

Reclining on a mat, sipping tea and playing a wonderfully twangy stringed instrument, is an undeniable, honest-to-God Bedouin. I stress this because I'm pretty certain the raggedly-dressed kids that served us dinner were Bedouin, too, but nothing distinguished them as such (for example, this guy's impressive drum and red-and-white checkered keffiyeh), and it's clear that now is our appointed Bedouin-meeting time. He welcomes us with tea and coffee, introduces himself in heavily accented English as Saleem (after some words in Hebrew to our guide), and we all settle down onto the mats for our 20-minute cultural talk. The prefatory comments are promising, introducing the fact that many traditionally-nomadic Bedouins are beginning to settle down, and how contemporary Bedouin culture represents a mix of traditional and modern culture.

And then things begin to get horribly, bewilderingly weird. "We have four wives! Yes, wonderful! I only have two wives, though." There are some gasps, some nervous laughs. "One wife is skinny, one wife is not so skinny." And then he goes on about how having many wives can create problems because of the multiple tents they necessitate; and how big trouble if two wives in one tent; and how great it is to be with skinny wife on Monday, and not so skinny wife on Tuesday; and the number of camels in dowry it would cost him to procure another. The presentation briefly leaves the topic of multiple-marriage to include Saleem's recollections of riding his camel to school, but I'm not really focusing at this point. At the end, a young woman in our group volunteers to try playing the drum Saleem has brought, and he's delighted at her effort: "Very good! I make you wife number three... Five camel dowry!"

There's a brief discussion back in our tent. Some complain that the presentation we just witnessed was offensive to women, but our trip leader is quick to help them move past such a naive, knee-jerk reaction. "Look, that's just their culture, okay? You can't say 'right' or 'wrong'... It's inappropriate of us to tell the Bedouins what they should or shouldn't do, because that's the way their culture is." The discussion doesn't last long, though, because seven beautiful, young Israeli soldiers have been assigned to our trip for the next few days, and tonight is our night to meet them. We play get-to-know you games for an hour and a half. One of the girls is a calisthenics instructor in the Army; one of the boys is part of an elite commando squad that kills terrorists.

The next morning I spot Saleem at the other side of the breakfast tent sipping coffee. His accent is noticeably milder. Saleem's been doing this gig as seasonal work for about a decade, he tells me, and before that he was a truck driver. Like most Bedouin, he doesn't actually have multiple wives. The "camp" is owned by a Jewish businessman from Jerusalem. His boss. He says what he's supposed to.

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I want to make sure I'm as clear as possible on this. I, too, thought Saleem's presentation was offensive. Polygamy does still exists in a minority of Bedouin communities (Bedouins are a very tiny minority compared to the much larger Palestinian Arab population, it's probably worth mentioning), and there are many important Bedouin women's NGO's dealing specifically with this issue. (This might be a good place to start if you're interested in some of these groups , and if you're interested an overview of Bedouin culture that goes beyond polygamy - perhaps, for example, the Israeli government's systematic violation of Bedouins' human rights - this is a decent report).

But my anger at the presentation arises mainly for other reasons. Birthright trips are vetted incredibly closely - two independent evaluators shadowed us at different times during the program - and I simply can't believe it was an accident, an organizational oversight, that our sole official encounter with an Israeli Arab happened to be a complete minstrel show. One can argue over whether the Israeli formulation of "Jewish and democratic" is or is not an inherently racist precept, but Birthright's effective erasure of 20% of the citizenry (whose tax dollars, incidentally, funded 30% of my free trip to Israel) unquestionably crosses that threshold. It represents a form of what Amos Oz refers to as "moral autism," the willingness to assign to others a status that one would never accept for themselves. (Thanks for the book, Mom. Really good). Related to this is Judaism's encounter over the past few centuries with European humanism, particularly its liberal and socialist strains, and Oz goes on to write (critically) about the willingness of some in Israel to consign this rendezvous to the dustbins of history. In the long run, this latter tendency will do more harm to both Israel and Judaism than any suicide bomber.