Introduction: Terra Nullius in Zion?
1. The Legal Geography of Indigenous Bedouin Dispossession
2. The Land Regime of the Late Ottoman Period
3. The Land Regime of the Mandate Period
4. Formulating the Dead Negev Doctrine During the Israeli
Period
5. Historical Geography of the Negev: Bedouin Agriculture
6. Bedouin Territory and Settlement
7. The Bedouin as an Indigenous Community
8. International Law, Indigenous Land Rights, and Israel
9. State and Bedouin Policies and Plans
Conclusion:
Alexandre Kedar teaches at University of Haifa School of Law and is a co-editor of The Expanding Spaces of Law (Stanford, 2014). He is a co-founder of The Israeli Association for Distributive Justice.Ahmad Amara is a Polansky Academy Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a human rights lawyer, and co-editor of Indigenous (In)Justice (Harvard, 2013). In 2005, he co-founded a human rights organization, Karama (Arabic for "Dignity"), in Nazareth.Oren Yiftachel teaches political geography and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He authored Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Penn, 2006), co-edited Indigenous (In)Justice (Harvard, 2013), and was Chair of B'tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
"People are dispossessed not only with guns and bulldozers, but
also with legal practices and strategies. Emptied Lands reveals how
the painfully named and legally invoked Dead Negev Doctrine
facilitates the continued dispossession of Bedouins in the Negev,
the most intense and protracted land dispute within Israel. Drawing
from decades of activism and scholarship, Kedar, Amara, and
Yiftachel provide a powerful challenge to the doctrine, creating
space for better forms of legality."—Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser
University
"Three of the best critical scholars of contemporary Palestine have
successfully combined legal, geographical, and political analysis
into a forensic study of how Israel has weaponized the law against
the most vulnerable of all inhabitants of Palestine, the Bedouins.
A remarkable multidisciplinary feat, this book provides an
essential understanding of settler colonialism."—Eyal Weizman,
Goldsmiths, University of London
"This book is particularly valuable on a subject that is as complex
as it is almost unresearched—namely, how the state formulates
different elements that amalgamate politics with history and law in
order to legitimize Bedouin land dispossession. Kedar, Amara, and
Yiftachel...are able to identify and explain in their historical
and legal context the key elements of the state's policy and the
court decisions with regard to the Bedouin land issue."—Morad
Elsana, Israel Studies Review
"[Emptied Lands] confronts us with a direct, scholarly account of
one of the main routes to dispossession on which the State of
Israel has relied in emptying the Negev of its Palestinian Bedouin
residents. This fascinating and well-written book—the result of
extensive archival research, verification of sources, and a
thorough reading of historical and geographical
documents—systematically dismantles the Israeli establishment's
claims using a variety of scientific, legal, geographic, planning,
and Zionist sources. The uniqueness of the work lies in the
presentation of an alternative, geographically based legal property
rights study."—Safa Aburabia, Journal of Palestine Studies
"The three authors have done a great service to those who wish to
critically appraise the Israeli court position with regard to
Bedouin in the Negev, their indigeneity and their claims to
autonomy. Knowing the argument put forward to deny their
indigeneity, or their rights to the lands of their forefathers, is
powerful ammunition for future legal cases, as well as in
continuing resistance to being ignored in 'unrecognised villages',
or forcibly resettled."—Dawn Chatty, Nomadic Peoples
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