Chapter 1. Once Chapter 2. Second thoughts Chapter 3. In the desert Chapter 4. The first morning in Khonj Chapter 5. A friend meets death Chapter 6. An old man's troubles Chapter 7. Khonj's two new residents Chapter 8. A dangerous call Chapter 9. The house in Wadi Wamit Chapter 10. The end of the road Chapter 11. The road to Wadi Allaqi Chapter 12. The final desert miles Epilogue Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments List of Illustrations ## 1 On a morning in the autumn of 2010, a young Bedouin stood outside an old farmhouse in the Wadi al-Nuquud, a mile from the Turkish border. He sat on the threshold, which was built into the wall of the house, and gazed at the nearby olive groves, the arid stretch of desert, and the low hills in the distance. To the east, across the Jordan River, Syria, and across the border, lay the land that had for so long been considered impossible to cross. The Bedouin were moving out of this place, because this was Palestine, and because Israeli police officers had chased them away. They were returning to the villages from which they had been expelled by the colonial Zionist regime decades before. The police had been here again, this time to drive away some sixty Palestinians, mostly refugee Bedouins from the 1948 war, who lived in tents and huts that stretched across the Wadi al-Nuquud. They were living in a forbidden place, and the police had asked that they leave. That they had been asked to leave felt almost like an act of kindness. No Palestinian should have been able to live here, so why allow people in, in case they might be harmed? The Bedouin had been here for years. They came from what was once called the Arabah, the Syrian desert, to work in Israeli settlements and farm the land that the settlers did not want to farm themselves. During the 1948 war, the Israeli army had burned their villages, a fire that had spread to the grass, then consumed the trees and then the houses and barns. The Bedouin had fled the area and settled in the north, near the Jordan River. Some remained in this part of the West Bank. Others had returned to the abandoned villages where their ancestors had once lived and where their children would be born. The Bedouin were a distinct group from other Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and so while many had worked as laborers in Israeli settlements, others sought to preserve their culture and heritage, sometimes at great personal risk. * * * The Bedouin are Arabic speakers from a Bedouin-speaking Arab society. Most are descendants of people from the Hijaz, the fertile stretch of territory that lies between Arabia and Syria. The Bedouin are called ʿajam. Many are also Muslim, but many are also Christian, as were the ancestors of the Bedouin, with whom Christ met. The story of Jesus was written in a language that the Bedouin understood. This language is largely Arabic, as is the language the Bedouin speak in daily life. These two languages have been called semitic, but while they can be used in a religious sense, it is more useful to consider them as dialects of the same language, an ancient tongue that has a broad reach throughout the Near East. The Arabic alphabet may seem alien to a Westerner, but it is no more alien to the Bedouin than English or French, German or Italian, Japanese or Urdu. With the Arabic alphabet, they write a rich heritage of literature, poetry, and law, including some of the world's oldest written texts. The oldest manuscript in the Western world, now stored at the British Museum, dates to the first century BC and was written in ink on papyrus in the Greek language. The Koran, the foundational document of Islam, was written in Arabic during the eighth century AD. The Arabic language has been called the tongue of God, a language that touches every man and every woman. Most of the Bedouin have lived for centuries in the Jordan Valley, in the eastern parts of the West Bank, in the Golan Heights, and in Syria. Most have moved away from the sea, where they did their fishing. Most are nomads who travel by camel or donkey. They come from villages dotted across the landscape and speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Their homes and dwellings are based in places called "homes" or "villages," which may be temporary or permanent, and where they find what they need to survive. Their food is found in the land. They speak about their homes in the language of "from there to there." They have a place that they call "from there to here" and use this to describe things they find in that place. There is a language of place and a language of journey and transition. It is a language in which they talk about a place where someone or something came, such as their home. And if they find something in the road, it might be a sign. They believe that there are signs to be found in the paths in the land. Their lives are about movement and permanence. They journey and camp and then return. Their life is in the road, so they travel by the road. They live with their herds, so they follow the route of their flocks. The Bedouin live according to the rhythm of the year, following the cycles of rains and droughts and shifting sands. There is nothing static about their life. The landscape around them is shifting, and the history of their people is a shifting of place and of identity. This is the history that the Bedouin live. And as they move along the road, living their history and following the pattern of the seasons, they make their way to the places where they might have a new home. This is the pattern they follow as they seek a new place to call their own. In this way, the Bedouin are no different from the immigrants who move from their homes in the north to find a place in the cities and towns of southern Israel. But whereas the Bedouin have settled here for centuries and have lived here before the current residents arrived, the inhabitants of southern Israel arrived recently, sometimes from another country, sometimes from another place in the same country. These new arrivals have all made their way to places where they might have a new home, where they might belong, and where they might make a new home for themselves and for their families. * * * The new arrivals from within Israel in the West Bank—to the places that the Bedouin call homes—came on foot or by foot, in their parents' cars or trucks. The route they followed was the route that had been mapped by Zionist settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, the Zionist movement was searching for a place to set up the first Jewish homeland and to settle a Jewish majority in the ancient lands of Israel. When it found one, it established a provisional government and tried to make people move to that place. These pioneers of 1948 came not only from Europe, as in the First and Second Aliyah that had come earlier, but also from America, which helped establish the state of Israel. The Zionist settlers had set out to create a new place, and they had made their way there. Most arrived from within the borders of the state of Israel and had to find a way to make their way to their new home, the land of Israel, that lay on the other side of the border with Jordan. In 1948, three-quarters of these early arrivals arrived by car or truck and made their way from the border area to the center of the country, to Tel Aviv, where they could take trains or buses to their new homes. The rest were refugees who were driven across the border into the northern parts of the West Bank in cars or trucks. When the state of Israel was established in 1948, a temporary border was created that took the lines of partition drawn up by the United Nations in 1947. The "Green Line," the term used to refer to the temporary border, divided the land of Palestine into two. The Palestinians call these border areas "borders," as the area between the Palestine and Lebanon in the north was called. They call the Israeli-controlled area the West Bank, and they call the area under Israeli control in the Palestinian Territories, the Occupied Territories. The Palestinians call the people who come from within Israel, Israeli citizens, but they also use the term occupied people when they are asked about the status of these people. The word Israel is considered a term of abuse by the Palestinians, so they avoid it altogether. But the term Zionist is sometimes used, and the use of that term is almost never discussed with an Israeli or an American in the West Bank. In January 1948, the term "borders" was still used to describe these areas. But the term "borders" is no longer used by those in the West Bank who have come here. There is a difference between the two areas. This is true for both the new residents who have arrived from across the Green Line and the people who have been here for many years and have made their lives here. It is the difference between those who want to make a home here, as the people