ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the symbiotic relationship of race and nomadism in British ethnographic discourse on the Arabs of Palestine. It shows how native Palestinian Bedouin came to be viewed as a separate race within a hierarchy of Arab races, and how in this racial reconfiguration, but also a racial archetype on which Arabness itself was measured, codified, and reproduced. As the descendants of the original Arab tribes who invaded Palestine in the seventh century, they represent a foreign race who, immune as it was to racial assimilation, remade the country in its own image: a barren land. To show that the Bedouin served as a passive agent of a new 'scientific' revolution is to place British tribal discourse in Palestine at the genealogy of British racial thinking and attitudes to the Arabs. In the late Ottoman period, Arabs and Jews in Palestine were rarely identified in racial or ethnic terms.
