Bedouins: The Native Israelis?

Every Thursday, OTZMA takes everyone on the program to an Education Day somewhere in the country. Most of these are in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv and have covered a range of issues such as Israeli politics, history, and religious information. But this week we went south to learn about social justice. Part of this day took us to a Bedouin Village. Now this is not the camel riding, tea drinking locale that Birthright and other Jewish programs often visit. Continued...

Bedouins of the Middle East have it pretty rough. Their plight is very similar to the saga of the Native American. Once they nomadically roamed through out the desert, now they live in shacks of which many can be seen along roadsides. Some of these are reservations created by Israel, but many are unrecognized villages. Places that the Israeli government refuses to acknowledge.

There are several reasons and problems because of all this. First of all I’ll talk about the recognized villages, the Israeli government has set aside land with running water and sewage treatment for seven Bedouin Villages. But when driving through these, one can see empty plots of land with hookups for water and electricity. The unused space is because Bedouins are tribal and territorial. Therefore only one tribe can live in an area and even if there is more room, another tribe will not move in the first tribe’s area. So there might be extra space and across the street are hundreds of people without water or sewage treatment, yet they will not move into another tribe’s space. Another issue is gender roles in the Bedouin community. In the past the women would gather everyday at the water hole where they talked with other women and connected. Their role was food preparation and keeping the home and children together. In the past they connect at the water hole, but today with out this space, Bedouin women do not even leave the home causing depression and isolation. Bedouin men today, do not tend to the animals outside, but travel far every day to factories to do boring numbing work such as watching bottles on a conveyer belt for cracks for eight hours a day.

Fortunately things are in place to change soon. The next generation is going to college, the women in fact more than the men, because they are unable to work in factories and need to seek work elsewhere. Hopefully with this influx of education from the next generation, they will be able to bring about change.

Sadder is the unrecognized village. There are around 45 Bedouin tribes in Israel. The government was willing to give some land to them, but not 45 different plots and so many tribes are living in the desert with nothing. OTZMA took us to one of these unrecognized villages where some of the people there spoke to us. Their situation really sucks. Borders between countries have ended their nomadic life style, so they must get used to having a village. There is no sewage treatment or new roads being built because no tribe wants any of these roads to go through their own village. So progress is at a stand still. Women are treated way worse here. Men can have more than one wife, and when they grow tried of one wife, they will often take another. Most of these women are smuggled across the border and because they are illegal they have no medical treatment or other help from the government and are totally at the whim of the men who married them.

Looking around at the makeshift village was difficult. All the homes where made out of tin siding and there was trash everywhere. Also drugs are a large problem for the Bedouins, because they are nomadic, they know the desert better than anyone else and therefore have taken over the drug trafficking trade.

There are a lot of issues that the Israel government has to focus on and the Bedouin situation is difficult, expensive and not life and death for the country and is therefore slipping through the cracks, so I thought it deserved a little recognition from my blog!

The Oregon Country Fair of Israel

I’ve spent the last week camping out at a festival called Beresheet along the Sea of Galilee. It was a three-day music festival for Sukkot, which is a huge holiday here. We get off 10 days from the program and Beresheet was the first destination. Check out the link to it, but basically it was the Israeli Oregon Country Fair, if you could camp out in it without being a vender and if only 15 year olds went to it.

The social scenes in Israel are often reserved for the younger crowd, but I was definitely not expecting such a low age bracket at the festival. Literally my friends and I were pretty old by comparison, very unlike the extreme variety of ages that attend any festival I’ve been to in the US. But that and quite a bit of Jews for Jesus aside, it was one of the most incredible things I have experienced here so far Continued...

We camped with hundreds and hundreds of other people in kind of a tent metropolis. At the festival, there was a main stage and a few other stages inside; there was lots of good food, clothing and jewelry stores, massage and yoga workshops, and a huge fire pit in the middle. Everyone was dressed up in these crazy costumes and the best part about it was the whole thing was really cheap. Big meals were around 5 bucks apiece and I got all these cool clothes and jewelry for hardly anything at all.

The music was incredible. Every night at six, a band would start playing on the main stage and after that two more would come on, playing until one in the morning! We heard Israeli reggae, jam bands, folk music, and rock. Amazing! The first night, the last act was this rock group and during one of their last songs, a group of people cleared out and started fire spinning right in the in the crowd!

The next day there was this massive drumming circle. Tons of people were around this big fire and drummers and dancers were in the middle. It went on for so long and I was dancing with them in the center until the smoke hurt my eyes! It was really cool though. Then the most amazing thing happened. They brought out a Shofar and blew it right along with the drums. Nowhere else, with no other crowd would this have made sense, but right then it was perfect and just totally seemed to flow with it. We all sang Israeli songs I remember from camp and English songs by Marley. It was pretty much the most fabulous thing I’ve ever been apart of.

Later that night the music was sweet. The last group was actually very well known and when they got to their final song I knew what it was! It’s a song they play everywhere, in the malls and bus stations and any other public area, but still it was exciting to sing along and I felt more part of the crowd when I knew what was going on.

At times I was frustrated because everything was in Hebrew, and my language skills are still way below par, so even though I know we got to experience the basic really cool things the festival had to offer, not being able to read the list of events or communicate deeply with the people we met made me feel at a loss.

Click here to see all the pictures I have of Beresheet.

Well after three days of all this, and some unexpected rain, we had enough and left for Deganya Bet, the kibbutz where our friends’ brother lives. While we stayed there we got a great deal on some near by hot springs, and some people told us about a near by hike. The hike was out of this world. You can’t bring a camera or anything (so I have no pics ☹) because part of the hike involves swimming through water. The hike started off at the top of a ravine that we climbed down. At the bottom, we walked through a few streams and got to this massive cliff. To get down you climb a ladder and jump into to a pool of ice-cold water. Good thing it was super hot that day! When I jumped in, it was so cold I had to remind myself to breath. There were two of these little swims and the rest of the hike we were scrambling over boulders and other fun things! If you have the means, I highly recommend checking this one out!

Yom Kippur

I experienced an amazing two days in Jerusalem for Yom Kippur. During the day on Wednesday, our group got to listen to different speakers that were very inspiring. The first was an old rabbi in his 80s. He spoke to us about his life journey and about how he was still making choices, not knowing if he was picking the right path/ doing the right things, but taking chances none-the-less, all of which was relevant to everything I question daily and it was so cool to hear this out of someone who was so much older than me, yet still processing information like I do.

OTZMA set up our group in a hostel right in the heart of Jerusalem. We ate a big dinner together around 4 and we got maps of the city and were different synagogues with explanation of what kind of service they had. A few of my friends and I went to a reform service right down the road.The area where it was held was so beautiful. There were windows that over looked all of Jerusalem, so as the service was going, we watched the sun set. Continued... This was wonderful; the service itself though was not that great. There was a choir that sang most of the songs in beautiful tones I don’t think my throat has ever made before so I couldn’t sing along. And the service was so long. Like 3 hours for reform and I am quite a fidgety girl. It really made me miss services from my congregation back home, no cantor, just the rabbi and his guitar.

After the service though, I had a few really neat experiences. First my friends and I walked to the German area of town where many people just walk or bike up and down the street. More so then any Shabbat, the city was completely shut down. There was absolutely not a car on the busiest streets, so everyone just walks on them. We chatted to several random people along the way. Everyone we met was so friendly and wanted to know how our travels and experiences had been.

We walked for some time and then turned around to go to the Kotel, the Western Wall. It was about 10 at night at this point. We finally got there and it was quite amazing. Tons of people were praying still. A lot of people were actually camped out and had sleeping bags and pads all lain out for the night. Like they were waiting in line over night for tickets!

The next day I woke up in dire need of a latte. Oh well! I ended up fasting the whole time. It was easier then it has been before for me because I felt like the whole country was right with me. And although I was a little weak and crabby, I was really proud of myself for sticking with it. Later that night we did some celebrating and later spent the night at my friend’s place in the Hebrew U.

For the rest of the weekend, my friends and I traveled to a Kibbutz on the Galilee. One of my friends has a brother that is in the army and he lives on this Kibbutz with other soldiers who don’t have any family in Israel. The place was great! We hung out with his army friends, ate dinner at the dining hall, hung out at the pool the next day – which over looked the Jordan border and you could see so far from it. The whole place was like a mini paradise in the north. Everything was very green and there were many palm trees all over. Much nicer than the desert of Be’er Sheva where we have been spending most of our time. At night we got to watch the sunset from a top of the bomb shelter in the middle of a circle of houses. A weird thing about this country is the amount of bomb shelters everywhere. Most of the people’s homes I have visited have a room that is a bomb shelter and here at the Kibbutz, they were all over the place because it was so close to the border. It is a weird reality to have in your backyard.

Shana Tovah

Rosh Hashana in Israel is really an amazing ordeal. Rather than the holiday season being late December, the country is alive with it right now. Every where I have been in the last week I have gotten happy new year wishes and this is a welcomed change from a “Merry Christmas” when I go to the grocery store.

I remember in elementary school, the week before Christmas we went into the auditorium every morning and sang Christmas carols. Well, here at uplan we spent a few days learning Rosh Hashana songs and then put on a whole show for everyone at the absorption center.There was a feast of apples and honey and lots of singing and dancing! Continued...

The whole country takes off 2 days for the holiday. And so that means everything stops. Since there is nothing to do, the days become more family orientated than Thanksgiving in America. Nobody travels or does any shopping because nothing is up and running. So what this meant for me was I needed a family. Thankfully one happened to be available and took me in! My mom met a women when she was in Israel many years ago who befriended her and showed her around the country, and she too, invited me to her home for the holiday! It was wonderful. This is the vew from the back of their home. Rosh Hashana dinner was the most amazing food, again I am allowed to spend a few days of my diet of hummus and pita, and it was great to spend time with a huge family and kids. Everyone was so welcoming and I felt very at home. During the next day, we traveled around the north of Israel. We were staying in a town called Nahariya which is north of Haifa. We went to cavesthat you can walk in and around which was very cool. Then we went on a small hike that you could see forever! It was very beautiful. We were even right next to Lebanon

The next day we went to a museam and saw some neat exhibits. There was a statue of a suitcase with roots, and an outdoor part with a lot of other statues.