ABSTRACT
Because of the political nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, there is no consensus about what constitutes ‘Bedouin history’ in the Naqab nor any examination about how histories are produced by members. Chapter 1 initiates this discussion. It presents a critical description of Naqab Bedouin historiography while keeping an eye on socio-political changes in their society and their transregional interactions over the centuries. Produced over the last centuries, this learned history largely describes Bedouin experiences as observed by outsiders during the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and the state of Israel. The quasi-exclusivity of this discourse ended in the late 1990s when Naqab Bedouin history was no longer merely about their society but was increasingly made by Bedouin themselves. The turn of the twenty-first century marked the beginning of a new type of history, one produced by Bedouin but inherently different from their customary oral stories.
