Every summer, hundreds of British teenagers come to Israel and have one fleeting interaction with a Bedouin person. My brother, Gabriel, told me about his experience. He described a man in a beautiful tent showing him how to grind coffee and telling him about a traditional Bedouin lifestyle. But no one made clear who the real organisers were.
“I don’t remember interacting with any of the Israeli staff,” he said. “The only representative of the institution that I met was this Bedouin guy, so I definitely thought we were being hosted by Bedouins.” And, strangely, they weren’t being hosted by Bedouins at all.
Gabriel and I went back to the place where we had our so-called ‘Bedouin experiences’, a village called Kfar HaNokdim in the Negev desert. Eitan, the tourist operations manager, told us what we could expect.
“We’re doing what we call ‘Bedouin hospitality,” he said as he welcomed us. “So we’ll sit with a Bedouin guy or woman – I’m not sure who’s here today. She or he will tell us a little bit about Bedouin culture, about their struggles in Israel, about how they used to live in the past, about how they manage to live the Bedouin tradition and lifestyle today – or not manage to live that way…”
A tourist trap
Khaled showed us how to grind coffee, and told us about the clash between traditional and modern life. Credit: Kfar HaNokdim.
The hospitality experience was great. We sat in a beautiful tent hung with tapestries, drank sweet tea and bitter coffee, and heard an interesting talk on Bedouin traditions from our host, Khaled. He talked about food, travel, clothes, gender dynamics, family structures.
And what’s more, Kfar HaNokdim is just a really lovely place – it’s easy for tourists to want to spend time there. I went for a walk and couldn’t believe what a paradise I was in. Everything was made out of desert brick and bamboo fencing, with flower beds along the sides of the dirt tracks, bubbling fountains and peacocks roaming free. Every path is lined with palms and fig trees, and when you reach the edge of the village you can see the desert stretching away from you, rocky and mountainous, with the blue sky beyond.
A realistic experience
So if you want, you can see the beautiful tents, the camels, the coffee grinders and palm trees. But is this giving you a false image of Bedouin life? Of the two hundred and fifty thousand Bedouins who live in the Negev, about half of them live in houses, in cities like Rahat. I went there to talk to Jamal Alkirnawi. His NGO, A New Dawn, aims to create dialogue between Bedouins and Jews in the Negev, and it organises its own Bedouin experiences for tourists. Jamal made no secret of the fact that he thinks his programme is more authentic.
“We try to give a realistic – as much as possible – experience, for those people who really want to learn, to adapt and question,” he told me. “Having a Bedouin journey, or testing a Bedouin maqluba [a traditional middle eastern meal] or Bedouin hospitality…without having any context – I think this makes it less real. But the question is how much do we want to become more open, to go to this authentic, and realistic, and ordinary journey. To see them, not in an exotic way, but in a normal way, where we can learn from them, and we can be exposed to their culture, and we can respect their heritage.”
And it’s true that the tour he arranged for us was much grittier. Rahat is a hot, dusty city with signs of poverty and unemployment on every street corner. Khaled did tell us about some of problems Bedouins face, complaining that “if you don’t go to the modern life, the modern life comes to you.” But our tour guide in Rahat, Elham, had very different concerns.
A different perspective
Rahat is home to 70,000 of Israel’s Bedouins. Credit: Israel National News.
“If you are black, you live only in black neighbourhoods,” she told us. “That neighbourhood there – they’re all white, and they refuse to let black people move there.” And she pointed out the huge wealth gap. “You can find modern houses – they’ve got electricity, they’ve got water, internet, computers, everything. And on the other side of the street, very poor people.” She told me about how the bus drivers refuse to drive through the poorer, black neighbourhoods, despite an official ruling from the city council in nearby Be’ersheva.
Finally I went to meet Salman, who lives in a virtually unmapped Bedouin village of about thirty families, near the Negev town Mitzpeh Ramon. The problems that he faces are different again.
He told me about the problem of littering in Bedouin communities. A culture, he said, that for most of its history existed without disposable possessions, never learned how to clean up after itself. With the introduction of plastics and disposable goods, the desert has become messy as Bedouin villages. Many people dump their rubbish without thinking.
Salman showed us how to make traditional Bedouin flatbread. Credit: Salman Aricha.
Misleading the tourists?
So which of these interactions gives the best representation of Bedouin life? If tourists only sit in a comfortable tent and drink coffee, or only take a tour around a city to hear about inter-tribal racism, or only visit one isolated village, can they say they’ve truly experienced the culture?
How can we know we’re getting the real thing, and that we’re not buying into an orientalist misconception? To be fair, the managers of Kfar HaNokdim are open about the experience they provide.
“We used to call this place a Bedouin hospitality experience,” Eitan said. “But eventually they decided to not put the main thing as Bedouin, and just call it a general desert experience. So part of the desert experience in Israel is the Bedouin culture, because they live all around the desert. That’s why we still have the Bedouin hospitality here, even though we don’t call ourselves a Bedouin host anymore. They don’t want people to think this is a Bedouin village. It’s not a Bedouin village. It’s a desert experience village.”
The word ‘authentic’
Elham and Salman still have their complaints. They both dismissed Kfar HaNokdim as ‘not real Bedouin’. But as he drove me to the bus stop at the end of my trip, Salman’s business partner Oded said something that made me think.
“When people call they always ask, is it really authentic,” he said. “And sometimes by the way they respond, I understand what they mean by authentic. You know, they want camels. When they say authentic, what they mean is, the best show. But then I start thinking, what does the word ‘authentic’ mean?”
What he said next is what really stays with me. “There’s a place near here, like Kfar HaNokdim, that’s all show. But sometimes I send people there, because I understand that what they’re looking for is not what we provide. They want something very superficial, very easy to digest. So I say listen, we’re not the place for you. I think it’s okay that in a field like tourism you have the range of experiences. No one guarantees that the call of tourism is to give real things. Sometimes tourists want fake things.”
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HeadlineCity Investigates: Authenticity in Tourism
Short HeadlineCity Investigates: Authenticity in Tourism
StandfirstCan tourists ever be sure that what they're buying is real?
Every summer, hundreds of British teenagers come to Israel and have one fleeting interaction with a Bedouin person. My brother, Gabriel, told me about his experience. He described a man in a beautiful tent showing him how to grind coffee and telling him about a traditional Bedouin lifestyle. But no one made clear who the real organisers were.
“I don’t remember interacting with any of the Israeli staff,” he said. “The only representative of the institution that I met was this Bedouin guy, so I definitely thought we were being hosted by Bedouins.” And, strangely, they weren’t being hosted by Bedouins at all.
Gabriel and I went back to the place where we had our so-called ‘Bedouin experiences’, a village called Kfar HaNokdim in the Negev desert. Eitan, the tourist operations manager, told us what we could expect.
“We’re doing what we call ‘Bedouin hospitality,” he said as he welcomed us. “So we’ll sit with a Bedouin guy or woman – I’m not sure who’s here today. She or he will tell us a little bit about Bedouin culture, about their struggles in Israel, about how they used to live in the past, about how they manage to live the Bedouin tradition and lifestyle today – or not manage to live that way…”
A tourist trap
Khaled showed us how to grind coffee, and told us about the clash between traditional and modern life. Credit: Kfar HaNokdim.
The hospitality experience was great. We sat in a beautiful tent hung with tapestries, drank sweet tea and bitter coffee, and heard an interesting talk on Bedouin traditions from our host, Khaled. He talked about food, travel, clothes, gender dynamics, family structures.
And what’s more, Kfar HaNokdim is just a really lovely place – it’s easy for tourists to want to spend time there. I went for a walk and couldn’t believe what a paradise I was in. Everything was made out of desert brick and bamboo fencing, with flower beds along the sides of the dirt tracks, bubbling fountains and peacocks roaming free. Every path is lined with palms and fig trees, and when you reach the edge of the village you can see the desert stretching away from you, rocky and mountainous, with the blue sky beyond.
A realistic experience
So if you want, you can see the beautiful tents, the camels, the coffee grinders and palm trees. But is this giving you a false image of Bedouin life? Of the two hundred and fifty thousand Bedouins who live in the Negev, about half of them live in houses, in cities like Rahat. I went there to talk to Jamal Alkirnawi. His NGO, A New Dawn, aims to create dialogue between Bedouins and Jews in the Negev, and it organises its own Bedouin experiences for tourists. Jamal made no secret of the fact that he thinks his programme is more authentic.
“We try to give a realistic – as much as possible – experience, for those people who really want to learn, to adapt and question,” he told me. “Having a Bedouin journey, or testing a Bedouin maqluba [a traditional middle eastern meal] or Bedouin hospitality…without having any context – I think this makes it less real. But the question is how much do we want to become more open, to go to this authentic, and realistic, and ordinary journey. To see them, not in an exotic way, but in a normal way, where we can learn from them, and we can be exposed to their culture, and we can respect their heritage.”
And it’s true that the tour he arranged for us was much grittier. Rahat is a hot, dusty city with signs of poverty and unemployment on every street corner. Khaled did tell us about some of problems Bedouins face, complaining that “if you don’t go to the modern life, the modern life comes to you.” But our tour guide in Rahat, Elham, had very different concerns.
A different perspective
Rahat is home to 70,000 of Israel’s Bedouins. Credit: Israel National News.
“If you are black, you live only in black neighbourhoods,” she told us. “That neighbourhood there – they’re all white, and they refuse to let black people move there.” And she pointed out the huge wealth gap. “You can find modern houses – they’ve got electricity, they’ve got water, internet, computers, everything. And on the other side of the street, very poor people.” She told me about how the bus drivers refuse to drive through the poorer, black neighbourhoods, despite an official ruling from the city council in nearby Be’ersheva.
Finally I went to meet Salman, who lives in a virtually unmapped Bedouin village of about thirty families, near the Negev town Mitzpeh Ramon. The problems that he faces are different again.
He told me about the problem of littering in Bedouin communities. A culture, he said, that for most of its history existed without disposable possessions, never learned how to clean up after itself. With the introduction of plastics and disposable goods, the desert has become messy as Bedouin villages. Many people dump their rubbish without thinking.
Salman showed us how to make traditional Bedouin flatbread. Credit: Salman Aricha.
Misleading the tourists?
So which of these interactions gives the best representation of Bedouin life? If tourists only sit in a comfortable tent and drink coffee, or only take a tour around a city to hear about inter-tribal racism, or only visit one isolated village, can they say they’ve truly experienced the culture?
How can we know we’re getting the real thing, and that we’re not buying into an orientalist misconception? To be fair, the managers of Kfar HaNokdim are open about the experience they provide.
“We used to call this place a Bedouin hospitality experience,” Eitan said. “But eventually they decided to not put the main thing as Bedouin, and just call it a general desert experience. So part of the desert experience in Israel is the Bedouin culture, because they live all around the desert. That’s why we still have the Bedouin hospitality here, even though we don’t call ourselves a Bedouin host anymore. They don’t want people to think this is a Bedouin village. It’s not a Bedouin village. It’s a desert experience village.”
The word ‘authentic’
Elham and Salman still have their complaints. They both dismissed Kfar HaNokdim as ‘not real Bedouin’. But as he drove me to the bus stop at the end of my trip, Salman’s business partner Oded said something that made me think.
“When people call they always ask, is it really authentic,” he said. “And sometimes by the way they respond, I understand what they mean by authentic. You know, they want camels. When they say authentic, what they mean is, the best show. But then I start thinking, what does the word ‘authentic’ mean?”
What he said next is what really stays with me. “There’s a place near here, like Kfar HaNokdim, that’s all show. But sometimes I send people there, because I understand that what they’re looking for is not what we provide. They want something very superficial, very easy to digest. So I say listen, we’re not the place for you. I think it’s okay that in a field like tourism you have the range of experiences. No one guarantees that the call of tourism is to give real things. Sometimes tourists want fake things.”
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