Indian Resembles Bedouin, Israeli Visitor Believes

By HERBERT BEN-ADI

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Transcribed from the clipping

The other day someone pointed out an American Indian to me. I don’t know what he was doing here or how he came here, but he reminded me very much of the Bedouins in Israel; there is a great similarity between the two races. Not that they are of the same origin, because the Bedouins are of Arabic descent, but otherwise their ways of living are very similar.

The Bedouins, or as they call themselves the “Badawi,” are nomads who have been roaming the Arabian peninusla and Palestine for the last two thousand years. In most countries they are still the same wild nomads they used to be. In Jordan, Glubb Pasha managed to settle the mand to form them into the well known Arab Legion.

In Israel the government, in a ten-year effort, managed to make semi farmers out of the Bedouins and considerably improved their living standard. At present 18,000 Bedouins are living in Israel territory, all of them settled in the Negev. They are divied into 14 tribes, each of them ruled by a sheik.

The sheiks in most cases have been elected by the members of the tribe and their appointment is confirmed by Israeli authorities. The Bedouins cultivate about 125,000 acres of farm land and they have another quarter million of grazing lands. Like in most parts of Israel the land is owned by the government and rented to the Bedouins at 10 cents per acre.

If a Bedoiun can prove that he has been working his land for the last 15 years he becomes its owner. Besides being farmers the Bedouins also own big herds of camels, sheep, goats and horses. Today most sheiks have agricultural machines to work the land, which they rent to their tribesmen for a fee.

Although not all Bedouins have yet been convinced that it is better to work the soil the modern way it is not unusual to see a Bedouin with a wooden plow in one field and next to him another Bedouin working with a tractor.

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.

Context added by this archive

Date check: The folio line at the top of the page reads “‘Want Ad’ Service . . . KI 5-4000” on the left and, on the right, a running head that the scan crops mid-word: “THE DAILY HO” (consistent with The Daily Home News). No date appears in the folio line or anywhere else on the clipping, so 1958-07-09 cannot be confirmed from the image.

Cite this clipping

"Indian Resembles Bedouin, Israeli Visitor Believes," Central New Jersey Home News, 9 July 1958. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1958-025. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1958-025