ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between a community and its space. It addresses the ongoing attempts by Israeli governments to settle the entire Bedouin population in several segregated planned townships. The chapter explores the various mechanisms and practices used by the state to concentrate and segregate the Bedouin population within racially defined spaces, including land expropriation, land use regulation, municipal services and territorial jurisdiction, in an attempt to understand the unifying logic underlying these practices. It explores the crucial role played by law in creating homogeneous Bedouin spaces and describes the ways in which judges, urban planners and other national and local state agents participated in producing a discourse of 'cultural difference' that enabled and justified the restriction of the Bedouin to segregated localities. The chapter criticizes progressive scholars from the multicultural left, who, by uncritically embracing cultural difference, assisted in the production and dissemination of a 'fetishism of difference' necessary for the legitimization of the state's segregationist practices.
