Columbia Record · 31 March 1960

CP-1960-012

Bedouin Life Is Timeless, But Changing

By ALVIN ROSENFELD

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Transcribed from the clipping

BEERSHEBA, Israel — Sheikh Audah Abu Muammar was entertaining guests in the big reception tent of the Azazme tribe. The Bedouin tent, pitched in the parched wilderness some 15 miles south of Beersheba, had an air of tattered majesty.

It was carpeted with colorful, patterned rugs, furnished with thick cushions — and made of old burlap bags still bearing the faded names of British sugar companies.

An aged minstrel, who accompanied himself on a primitive viol with a single string made of horsetail hair, had barely finished a song when a Bedouin strolled in and seated himself confidently at the Sheikh’s side. A lengthy conversation punctuated with much laughter ensued.

Clearly the stout man was the object of complex jokes, but he took the joshing graciously, as if this were an old story. The stout man’s father, a military government captain whispered in explanation, was a village Arab from Galilee who had fled to the Negev desert during the first World War.

The son was born in the tribal tents and has lived all of his 40-odd years among the Bedouins. He is a member of the proud Azazme tribe. To the Bedouins, however, he is still a peasant’s son and himself a peasant. “The Bedouins are animals,” the stout man said in joking response to a crack at his expense.

“We are animals?” the tall, lean Sheikh asked with mock scorn, and added: “Look at you. You’re fat!” The tribal elders gathered in a semi - circle laughed appreciatively.

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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 from an inside page. The dateline carries no date at all, only “BEERSHEBA, Israel”. Nothing on the scan confirms 1960-03-31 or the Columbia Record.

Cite this clipping

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• All 227 clippings from the 1960s →

The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Life of Israeli Bedouins Showing Drastic ChangesCorpus Christi Times4 April 1960CP-1960-013

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.