ABSTRACT
This chapter represents the legal consequences that flow from the conceptualization of the Bedouin as rootless nomads and from the imposition of certain legal categories of land ownership for solving disputes across the indigenous/nonindigenous divide. It describes ways in which the storytelling techniques of the law objectify the gradual extinction of the indigenous Bedouin culture in the Israeli Negev. The way, conflicts over space are transformed into a temporal dispute, is a crucial element in the storytelling techniques of the law. Bedouins have been in said area but as invisible nomads who cannot prove anything because the temporal signpost prevents them from doing so. The inversions in law have completed a full circle: the image of the Bedouins as nomads who threaten the state-owned lands is upheld and affirmed and yet individual Bedouins are singled out for a more lenient treatment. Conceptualism is praxis of extracting and isolating elements from the indeterminate and chaotic flow of events and bounding them as fixed categories.
