Why have the Youth Disappeared? The Visible Invisibility of Youth Political Activism in E-1 Bedouin Communities
- Osama Risheq, Tamara Tamimi, and Raghad Adwan
- Jul 1, 2024
- 40 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Introduction[1]
Why have Palestinian Bedouin youth in the Jerusalem periphery disappeared? This has been a consistent question in the minds of researchers working with Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic (AQHRC). The AQHRC has been working with Palestinian Bedouin communities in the southeast Jerusalem periphery since 2014. These communities are among the most vulnerable communities to Israeli settler colonialism in all of its components; land expropriation, displacement, and imposition of an apartheid system, as will be demonstrated shortly. Over the past ten years, despite making concerted and consistent engagement with these communities, AQHRC has failed in engaging young men in the vast majority of activities, including research, advocacy, and awareness-raising workshops, to name a few.
This observation was corroborated while interviewing a 37-year-old Bedouin man in a Bedouin community near Jerusalem. The field research team of AQHRC asked him about the whereabouts of young Bedouin men, and his response was: ‘we rarely see them as well…if it is a wedding, or a social event you will see 300 young men but otherwise you will barely see one of them, it is like they have just ‘disappeared’ as if they rode a donkey or a car and went deep into the desert’.[2] This statement on its own gave rise to several other questions. Why would the Bedouin young men appear in weddings or social events and not in political activities? Why are they absent from the public sphere and the political arena of their communities despite the imminent threat of eviction and demolition of their homes by the Israeli authorities? How can this alternating surfacing of young men be explained?
Suppression of resistance, activism, and mobilisation are intrinsic components of settler colonialism. Within this framework, Israeli occupation has constructed a sophisticated system of suppression through the adoption of a series of vital laws and policies. These include Military Order 101 and the British Defence (Emergency) Regulations in Mandatory Palestine, which restricted freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and political participation. All of these will be explored thoroughly later. Apart from these laws, the risk of revocation of civil status as a concrete part of settler colonialism, coupled with the risk of deprivation of opportunities and access to livelihood, has given rise to self-censorship and refrain from any form of participation in activism and resistance. This is particularly relevant among the most vulnerable Palestinians, whose livelihoods completely depend on the Israeli economy.
Israeli measures intended to instil domination of one racial group over another has over time given rise to the absenteeism of key social groups from political arena and wider Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. This system of hegemony and domination has been the subject of several recent analyses by Israeli and international human rights organisations, who have all concluded that Israel practices a system of apartheid against Palestinians that seeks to perpetuate the domination of one racial group over another.[3]
A key pillar of this system of apartheid is the fragmentation of Palestinians, which classifies Palestinians by civil status and confers a hierarchy of privileges and rights accordingly. This system of classification is designated by area of residency. To demonstrate by way of example, Palestinians inside Israel enjoy the status of citizenship, which differs from nationality, as the former confers individual rights, while the latter confers collective national rights.[4] In contrast, Palestinians in Jerusalem enjoy the status of ‘permanent’ residents, which confers residency, employment, and other social rights. However, this status is fragile, and unlike its connotation can be easily revoked, on grounds including but not limited to the ‘centre of life’ criterion and as a punitive measure.[5] Further down the ladder of privileges are Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are stateless and reside under a system of military occupation, and last are refugees whose right of return is unrecognised by Israel.[6]
