Predictive History

The Negev Bedouin Expulsion

4 min read

The Negev Bedouin Expulsion

Core idea: The ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouin was a distinct campaign that began in July 1948 and continued until 1959 — the longest-running expulsion of the entire Nakba — targeting 90,000 people across 96 tribes who had inhabited the region since the Byzantine period, with survivors forced into reservations requiring special permits to leave, and Ariel Sharon’s Unit 101 hunting returnees well into the 1950s.

The Bedouin of the Negev

The Negev Bedouin had inhabited the region since the Byzantine period and had been following their semi-nomadic way of life for at least 500 years. There were 90,000 Bedouin in 1948, divided between 96 tribes, already in the process of establishing a land-ownership system, grazing rights, and water access. They were not the rootless nomads of Zionist mythology but communities with established territories, agricultural practices, and social structures.

The Initial Expulsion

In July 1948, the ethnic cleansing extended to the Naqab (the Negev) for the first time. Jewish troops immediately expelled eleven tribes, while they forced another nineteen into reservations that Israel defined as closed military areas, which meant they were allowed to leave only with a special permit. The expulsion of Negev Bedouin continued until 1959.

The first tribe targeted was the Jubarat. Part of the tribe was expelled in July; the tribe as a whole was then forcibly transferred in mid-October, with the majority sent to Hebron and the rest to the Gaza Strip. In 1967, Israel uprooted them once more, this time expelling them to the eastern bank of the River Jordan. Most of the other tribes were driven away towards the end of 1948.

December 1948: The Tribal Cleansing

December 1948 was devoted to cleansing the Negev of many of the Bedouin tribes that resided there. A huge tribe, the Tarabins, was expelled to Gaza; the army only allowed 1,000 of its members to remain. Another tribe, the Tayaha, was split in two: half deported to Gaza and the other half forcibly evicted in the direction of Jordan. The al-Hajajre, whose land straddled the railway line, were pushed into Gaza by December.

Only the al-Azazmeh succeeded in returning, but they were driven out again between 1950 and 1954, when they became the favourite target of a special Israeli commando force, Unit 101, led by a young ambitious officer called Ariel Sharon.

The Beersheba District

In December 1948, the Israeli units also completed the depopulation of the Beersheba district that they had started in the autumn. When they had finished, ninety per cent of the people who had lived for centuries in this, the most southern inhabited region of Palestine, were gone.

The town of Beersheba itself was captured with its 5,000 inhabitants on October 21. Habib Jarada, who today lives in the city of Gaza, remembered the people of Beersheba being driven out at gunpoint to Hebron. His most vivid image is that of the town’s mayor beseeching the occupying officer not to deport the people. “We need land, not slaves,” was the blunt answer.

The Reservation System

The Bedouin who were not expelled were forced into a reservation system — closed military areas where they needed special permits to move. This system persisted for decades, effectively confining a formerly mobile population to confined spaces under permanent military surveillance. The reservations became a model for controlling indigenous populations while claiming the land they had been removed from.

Key Insight

The Negev Bedouin expulsion shatters the myth of a single 1948 event — the cleansing stretched over eleven years, from 1948 to 1959, with Ariel Sharon’s commandos hunting returning tribes in the 1950s, proving that the ethnic cleansing was not a wartime emergency but an ongoing demographic engineering project that continued as long as there were Palestinians left to remove.

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