The Catholic Times · 21 October 1955

CP-1955-017

The Negev Obsession

Richard Pattee

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Transcribed from the clipping

Beersheba prior to 1949 was an Arab city, center of the floating Beduoin population that lives in the arid desert and carries on precisely as in the days of David, Abraham and Herod. Now, when one comes within the outskirts of Beersheba the first sight that strikes the eye is the modernity of everything.

New sections are going up at a dizzy rate in the bright stucco functional architecture that is the delight of all Israeli. This profoundly historical city, associated with so many incidents in the Old Testament, bears no remote resemblance to anything in the past. It is a booming frontier town, comparable perhaps to what one might find in Nevada or New Mexico.

The town is all-Jewish and, aside from a small part of it previously occupied by Arabs, there is nothing that makes it stand out either for antiquity or for colorful charm. To be sure the Bedouins still come in for market, leading their camels past chemical works and phosphate factories.

The contrast of these nomadic, non-sedentary people in their flowing garb and head-dresses with the energetic vitality of Israel is one of the deepest impressions one gets in Beersheba. Incidentally, most of these Bedouins enjoy certain privileges denied the ordinary Arab inhabitant of Israel.

They are often armed — at least in a primitive fashion — and during the war of independence fought against the Egyptians in behalf of Israel. The explanation is that tribal feuds and long-cherished antipathies led them to prefer the Israeli cause to that of their so-called blood brethren on the Arab side.

More and more of them are settling down and, I imagine, it will not be too long before they occupy permanent communities and become quite indistinguishable from the rest of the population.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, folio line or page date is on this clipping; it is a two-column cut of a signed opinion column with a one-column portrait of the writer. Nothing in the image dates it, so 1955-10-21 cannot be confirmed. The text's internal reference — “Beersheba prior to 1949” — puts it after 1949 only.

Cite this clipping

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