The New York Times · New York, New York · 14 March 1960

CP-1960-014

Israelis Bid Bedouins Cut Flocks

Sale or Slaughter of Drought-Menaced Sheep Is Urged

Scan 426 × 970 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

BEERSHEBA, Israel, March 2—The Israeli Government is trying to persuade the Bedouin tribes of the Negev that they will have to sell or slaughter most of their flocks of sheep if a three-year drought continues. There is every indication it will continue.

The short winter season of rain is over and it brought the Negev’s sun-baked dusty hills only [illegible: two-digit figure] per cent of their average rainfall. For most of the country, this was the driest year in 111 years of record keeping. Putting the bad news to the Bedouins is the task of Lieut. Col.

Pinhas Amir, military governor of the Negev district, southern Israel’s triangular semidesert region. He is the man who exercises military control over these Arabs. He is also the man who ministers to their needs. “The Bedouins understand force” he says. “As long as we show force, we have no need to use it. They respect our authority.

They also turn to it for help. This is the way they run their own society. This is the life of the desert.”

Colonel Amir has spent twenty-two of his forty-four years working with or against Arabs—in Haganah, the Jewish underground army that operated in Palestine before the creation of Israel, in the Israeli Army intelligence service and, for the last two and a half years, as military governor here. He is convinced that he knows the workings of the Bedouins’ minds.

“I put myself in their skins,” he explains. And he is responsible for 15,000 Bedouins, all in a single reservation of 275,000 parched acres.

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: A running head along the very top of the page reads “THE NEW YORK TIMES, M” — the scan is cropped at the right edge mid-word, so the paper agrees with `pub` but the date that would follow is cut off. 1960-03-14 was a Monday, which fits the surviving “M”, but the date itself is not visible.

The dateline reads “BEERSHEBA, Israel, March 2”.

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