The displacement of the Palestinian Bedouins evokes a synecdoche: the
fate of these communities represents a piece of the bigger picture of
dispossession, dispersal and attempted erasure imposed on all native,
indigenous Palestinians in rural as well as urban locations. From the
moment European powers embraced the Zionist movement’s plan to settle
Palestine, culminating in the creation of the State of Israel in 1948,
the catastrophic impact on the Arab Palestinian population was apparent.
One of the most prominent Zionist leaders wrote in 1923 that it would
be ‘utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine
Arabs for converting “Palestine” from an Arab country into a country
with a Jewish

majority’, concluding that ‘Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population’.1

As this book will illustrate, the risk of forced displacement that
Palestinian Bedouins face today in the Eastern Jerusalem periphery and
across the Israeli-occupied West Bank – as well as within the (as yet
undefined) borders of the State of Israel2 – is steeped in a legacy of
racism, colonial violence and a system of domination which normalised
over time.3 The Bedouins are one group within the broader Palestinian
polity, and as such they share the plight common to their people. At the
same time, their identity, as well as the opportunistic ways in which
such identity has been construed by those seeking to remove them from
the land they inhabit, places them in a vulnerable position due to
stereotypes around their mobility and displaceability. For these reasons
(among others), Palestinian Bedouins face a humanitarian emergency and a
daily reality of hardship;4 their forced displacement and urbanisation
has catastrophic effects individually and collectively.5 This
vulnerability is entirely man-made and thus reversable if there is the
will to hold those responsible to account in accordance with the
requirements of international law. Instead, routine, almost guaranteed
impunity for violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and
international human rights law (IHRL) against Palestinians is one of the
drivers of the deteriorating situation of the Bedouins