Practices of Reality: Demolition and Reconstruction of a GhostVillage in Israel

Alexander Koensler Alexander Koensler has carried out fieldwork in IsraeliPalestinian border-zones since over five years. Currrently he is a postdoc fellow at University of Perugia (Italy) and he has been a lecturer at the University of Mnster (Germany). He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the program in "Methodologies of Anthropological Research" at the Universities of Siena, Perugia, and Cagliari. He is author of the monograph Amicizie vulnerabili. Coesistenza e conflitto in Israele ("Vulnerable Friendships. Coexistence and Conflict in Israel"). Abstract If knowledge is considered as incorporated in activities and events, no more single reality is waiting to be uncovered, but multiple realities are coming into being through different sets of practices. In the Israeli Negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized ArabBedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished almost ten times in one year by the Israeli police, but each time they have been reconstructed with the help of human rights activists. Surprisingly and in contrast to nearly all circulating discourses, nobody ever lived in the demolished buildings what at one level becomes a humanitarian catastrophe, at another becomes a "ghost village". Drawing on recent reflections on global ethnography, this article seeks to follow "zones of friction" and connections among people, money, discourses, and emotions that developed around this specific case: relations that range from solidarity activities to the discursive practices of journalists and dislocated officials of international organizations. On a more abstract level, the emerging contradictions between these levels reveal the implications of an uncritically reproduced idea of "local community". I claim that by following such connections, we gain important insights how transnational power relations are shaping multiple realities around a political conflict. Keywords: global ethnography, multiple realities, social activism, Israel

Fig. 1 Previously demolished Arab-Bedouin building reconstructed at el-Shams, Northern Negev. February 21, 2007 (Photo: Koensler)

INTRODUCTION: The Explosion of reality Oshra1, a middle-aged Jewish housewife from a Southern Israeli town, was sitting on a plastic chair in the middle of a dusty valley in the Northern Negev desert in Israel. Around her was a jumble of demolished shacks, tin, a broken car, dust, and sand. As an activist for social justice, on that day she came in order to visit a demolished Arab-Bedouin village and to express her solidarity with its inhabitants. Earlier that morning, the twenty shacks of the area had been demolished by the Israeli police for the seventh time in one year. The official reason was that they were built on land considered by the local authorities as a

protected area2. "Inside I cry, it feels like an inner explosion", was how Oshra described afterwards her desperate feelings when assisting people that had lost their homes. However, some months later she had to acknowledge that what she thought to be "the local community" or "the village" was never inhabited by anyone. In her eyes, it was a "fake village". I never met her again at Arab-Jewish solidarity activities; her inner explosion seemed to be transformed into a blowup of reality itself. But there is more beyond this story. At the same time, a series of coexistence and human rights initiatives raised funding in order to reconstruct the shacks and tents. Solidarity groups came by bus from Tel Aviv to help with the re-building. A "big day of activism and reconstruction" took place, as well as a womens puppettheater play for indigenous land-rights. The case of the demolitions made its way into newsblogs, television, and other media around the world. However, the place itself remained uninhabited. This article3 aims to identify how different actors enact such practices of demolition, reconstruction, and solidarity in often contradictory ways. Large pieces of this story draw on nearly two years of fieldwork in the Negev desert about activists for social justice4, but it is a story that cannot be confined to one locality. The very place itself is subject to different interests, desires, and power relations; in different localities multiple and contradictory "realities" of the story are coming into being. As we will see, the implicit assumption of what is assumed to be a "local community" plays a particularly important role in shaping those relations. Friction, global connections, multiple realties As anthropological fieldwork goes increasingly beyond the understanding of single site communities, unexpected heuristic challenges sometimes emerge: How can contrasts and contradictions in conflicts such as the ones described above be represented? How should we deal with practices incorporated in multiple realities? Instead of remaining anchored to the implicit assumption of a monolithic reality, the philosopher and anthropologist Annemarie Mol (2002) proposes to move away from formats that carry such universalistic pretensions in order to develop an ethnographic analysis that is able to consider practices as more important than principles. She states, "Objects come into being - and disappear - with the practices in which they are manipulated. And since the object of manipulation tends to differ from one practice to another, reality multiplies" (2002: 5-6).

The multiple character of reality emerges particularly clearly in ethnographic works that engage with transnational connections, mobilities and processes of de- and re-territorialization. Since the emergence of George Marcus concept of "multisited ethnography" (1995; 1998), monolithic perspectives on local cultures have been increasingly substituted by the exploration of global connections running through a variety of sites in many anthropological sub-disciplines such as migration studies, the anthropology of social movements, or development studies. James Clifford, for instance, proposes in his famous volume Traveling Cultures (1999) an ethnography of "zones of contact", of ephemeral encounters along borders or in places of cultural interactions, such as ethnographic museums and traveling diaries. But also William F. Fisher calls in his review of ethnographic studies on Non-Government-Organizations (NGOs), Doing Good? The Politics and Anti-Politics, (1997: 459) for the advancement of research methodologies that can "reconsider problems located in or flowing through multiple sites". At the same time, "global ethnography" has emerged as a distinguished methodological approach within qualitative research (Burawoy et al. 2000; Gilles and Riain 2002)5. However, this focus on movement and fluidity has sometimes a difficult stand within anthropology. For example, some scholars argue that such emphasis compromises some of the methodological advantages of fieldwork derived only from long-term encounters with stable informants (cfr. Friedman and Friedman 2008; Nieswand 2008)6. According to this position, "mobile fieldwork" risks undermining the principles of conventional fieldwork based on intense interpersonal relations that only can be established with long-term fieldwork in one single site. Further, Armitage (1999) lined out that globalization - as the experience of a compression of space and time through acceleration - often remains limited to those who actually have access to new technologies and who are referred to as a new "kinetic elite". Consequently it can be argued that this intense involvement in the dynamics of acceleration and mobility does not necessarily reflect the conditions of those living on the marginalized peripheries, the privileged subject of anthropology indeed. Recently, some suggestive ethnographies have introduced new ways to conceptualize ethnographic methodology under global conditions. For example, in Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna L. Tsing (2005) describes how "zones of cultural friction" are arising out of transient encounters and connections. Her approach analyses "global connections" that pass through an Indonesian region of rain forests, involving indigenous and ecological movements, as well as multinational companies and national bureaucracies. Interestingly, her approach seeks to combine the advantages of long-term observant participation in one place with an awareness of regional, national, and global interactions. By moving back and forth between one place and its wider

connections, the anthropologist and scholar of global studies creates partial but interconnected cultural scenarios, located transversally to the complete understanding of one well-circumscribed social group. It is an attempt to trace a duality between "located dilemmas", on the one hand, and its "universal aspects" (2005: 267), on the other. She states: A study of global connection shows the grip of encounter: friction. A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road (). As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power. Furthermore, difference sometimes inspires insurrection. Friction can be the fly in the elephants nose. Attention to friction opens the possibility of an ethnographic account of global interconnection. Abstract claims about the globe can be studied as they operate in the world. (2005: 5) In short, her methodological focus on "friction" means to understand "zones of awkward engagement". It points to the importance of interactions for the establishment of the movement. In this perspective, misunderstandings, contradictions, and diversity that emerge during the fieldwork are not disturbing elements, but become heuristic tools to recapture locally situated dynamics within flows of connections among people, discourses, and money. In order to understand the complex dimension of power relations in a conflict beyond a specific local situation, understanding such global friction becomes increasingly important. Precisely this is what I will try to show in this article.

"DO-IT-YOURSELF URBANISM" IN THE DESERT, "MASS DEMOLITION", AND NEW MODES OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION A particularly intricate example that provides evidence how contradictions and zones of friction enact multiple realities is offered by the case of demolition and reconstruction of el-Shams. As the news about the demolition traveled quickly from activists in the Negev through the various levels of the international "infosphere" (McDowell, Steinberg, and Tomasello 2008)7, to correspondents and bloggers of human-rights-foundation officials located in offices in Europe or the United States, this dusty valley soon developed into a powerful mobilization frame along multiple connections.

Fig. 2 Re-demolition of the construction of figure 1 by the Israeli police. March 9, 2007 (Photo: Koensler)

I stumbled onto the story through my fieldwork contacts with activists belonging to a coexistence organization representing Arab-Bedouin interests at a regional level. One morning, at 6.00 am, my mobile phone rang. A friend asked me, in a surprisingly quiet voice: "Are you coming? I am on the way to el-Shams. They are demolishing everything". When I arrived about one hour later at the place, I found a group of people gathered around a fire amid the rubble with absent, distorted expressions; I witnessed cold fear in their eyes. The traces of the two bulldozers were still fresh, the valley was littered with scrapped wood, deformed metal plates, plastic chairs and various containers, all destroyed. This was the first time that all the buildings of the area had been demolished by the police. However, in the past, the Israeli police occasionally demolished

unauthorized constructions and sometimes they were reconstructed or even extended. While I was looking at the ruins of a caravan, I heard an English voice with an Arabic accent behind me: "Good morning Mister. This was my home". When I turned around I looked into the eyes of Ahmed, a guy in his thirties, who protected his head under the hood of an Israeli army jacket. It was not easy to forget these strange and sad moments. It seemed to be an urgent task to document the events in the village itself, but soon I noticed that I was far from being the only person interested in recording what was happening. Various activists and members of lobby groups showed up, took pictures, called journalists with their mobile phones, and quickly left to go back to their airconditioned offices; they looked stressed, or tired, or both. For example, around four in the afternoon, two jeeps arrived at el-Shams, throwing up a cloud of dust stretching back to the horizon. Journalists of the satellite network al-Jazeera took position in the rubble, gave orders, unloaded heavy equipment and interviewed a crying woman sitting in the rubble. A man presented as "spokesman of the local Bedouin community" hastily arranged his jacket and gave an interview. Impressed by their professionalism, I recorded with my small DV-camera how they were documenting the case of el-Shams with their much more sophisticated equipment. A few minutes later, the whole team had already disappeared over the horizon again in a cloud of dust. Apparently other, more powerful actors already populated the scene. In these short seconds it became clear to me that the most promising experience was not the demolition in itself, but to move attention toward such ephemeral encounters that were developing quickly around the event. Important aspects of the conflict seem to be dislocated within the global "infosphere" and not in the dust of el-Shams itself. In the evening news, an al-Jazeera correspondent spoke of three hundred people that were left homeless as a result of the "crime of demolition", while the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, slightly more restrained, mentioned only twelve families who had lost their homes8. An activist of a lobby group spoke to me of "mass demolition", offering an original mutation of the term "weapons of mass destruction". However, in the village itself no signs of ordinary daily life were seen. The cars were parked in an open field, as if people had come for a barbecue; there were nearly no things that people use for daily life. "People here are very poor", a Jewish activist explained to me. From a methodological point of view, this overwhelming presence of the means of communication once more encouraged me to consider the engagement of the activists for social justice in their specific dimension as located within nodes of connections and multiple power relations. In other words, by focusing on zones of friction it becomes possible to problematize the taken-

for-granted linkage between ethnos, territory and the state, in this case between el-Shams as a traditional village and the Bedouins as a monolithic group. By following the central distinction of Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) between "categories of analyses" and "categories of praxis", groups and their local attachments are relevant as categories of practice, but must not be considered as analytical models themselves. As Gil-White states, "as analysts of naturalizers, we need not be analytic naturalizers" (1999: 234). Despite the majority of journalists, officials and activists, I decided to understand better the apparently contradictions such as the overwhelming rhetoric of a catastrophe and the lacking signs of ordinary life in order to try to go beyond a view that naturalizes the dynamics of belonging in el-Shams. Most conventional perspectives on the conflict between Arab-Bedouin representatives and the regional government are based on a different angle of interpretation. Activists, academics and government representatives often contribute to a "culturalization" of the conflict by basing their analyses on clearcut and static social categories, overseeing cross-cultural elements, and major global forces. Policies of official land planning and administration, for example, are often based on a strict separation of social, political and cultural spheres between the various social groups that are currently living in the Negev. Anyone who travels through the Northern Negev can immediately notice, even from the windows of his or her car, the extent of shanty towns that are developing along the main roads and in the peripheries. Israeli citizens of Arab-Bedouin origin that have not been integrated in official development policies of the Negev have created these. Shacks and tents, roads and bridges of clay, mosques lit by oil generators and an abundance of corrugated metal sheets are those signs that could be at first glance interpreted as the demonstration of an inherent cultural difference between the Arab-Bedouin citizens and the more Westernized Jewish majority. These informal villages, currently about forty in number, are defined by the authorities as "Bedouin dispersion" (pzura) and came to public attention as "non-recognized Arab- Bedouin villages" (kfraim bilty mukarim). At the center of the dispute over land, approximately half of the Bedouin citizens are claiming to live currently in these informal villages, which lack most government services, including paved roads, hospitals, and electricity (Havatzelet 2006; Meir 2005). However, critical sociologists and political geographers inspired by postcolonial theory and recent writing on inequality in Israel9, focusing on how these social divides are rather an expression of the politics of differences that are constituting different "ethno-classes" (Yiftachel 2005). From this point of view, it becomes evident how in the contemporary Negev the authorities have always been tempted to allocate the lands of the desert to more powerful groups, such as the army, or to business or new settlements10. According to major anthropologists (Kressel 1996; Marx 1967; Meir 1997), also Bedouin society itself was divided

into three major groups: the "Bedouins", the traditional elite of land owners, "farmers" (felahin), people who originally immigrated from Egypt and cultivated the semi-arid land for the Bedouin upper class, and finally so-called "blacks" (abid), former slaves who still live in so marginalized conditions that even humanrights activists normally do not notice them. Today, many younger Arab-Bedouin citizens, however, have moved to the peripheries of other major Israeli cities up north or have gone abroad (Dinero 1997; Parizot 2006). A significant number of Arab-Bedouin citizens are identifying with the mainstream Israeli concept of belonging, have served in the army and do not relate themselves to indigenous identity claims11. Even though the Arab-Bedouin groups were granted full Israeli citizenship in 1967, making them legally equal to all other Israeli citizens, only in the late Sixties did the regional authorities started to plan seven so-called "Bedouin cities", more recently expanded to fourteen. The authorities offered to all ArabBedouin citizens plots to build homes for free or for very favorable conditions (Havatzelet 2006). Those Arab-Bedouin citizens who previously did not own land have now been now able to upgrade their social status through the ownership of such plots, challenging implicitly the traditional power structures. The implications of these differences are often overlooked. Consequently, inequality in the Negev exists not simply between "Bedouins" and "Jews", but at several interrelated levels. Furthermore, official politics constructed through separated policies and allocation of resources different "ethno-classes" that structures Israeli society into a Western Jewish (askhenazim) upper class, an Arab-Jewish middle class (mizrahim) and ArabPalestinians including the various Arab-Bedouin groups in the informal villages (Yiftachel 2002). Such classes are highly heterogeneous, unstable, and dynamic. One of the most striking expressions of the "ethno-class"-logic is the demolition of buildings by the police and their illegal reconstruction. An inter-ministerial committee, the so-called Markowitz Committee, noted in 2000 the extent of unrecognized constructions by Arab-Palestinians throughout the Israeli state (excluding the occupied Palestinian territories). In the Negev alone, officials counted 30,000 "illegal Arab structures", including business buildings, gas stations and a network of oil generators for electricity (Schechla 2001). Also government officials requested the demolition of many of these structures, they actually demolished between 2000 and 2006 only 200 structures, a relatively modest number, were actually demolished (Havatzelet 2006). In short, this "do-ityourself urbanism" outlines the dimension of the underlying conflict between representatives and administration over resources in the Negev. However, beyond official discourses, the presumption of the Arab-Bedouin citizens as a homogeneous group is constructed and reproduced also by actors

who seek to oppose official politics such as the advocates for social justice, media, and academics as the ones that invaded el-Shams after its demolition. Similar as outlined by James Der Derian in his innovative research Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (2009), the consequences of their practices can be understood if considered as part of an emergent network, where cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, and do-good ideologies converge in qualitative new forms of power relations12. In the case of the contested ghost-village, such dynamics become clear in the way how, surprisingly similar to official discourses, nearly all of the alternative actors base their practices on the presumption that space is divided into bounded social groups and functions rhetorically through the naturalization of cultural traits and a supposed "space-place unity" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The most well-known analyses describe places like el-Shams as part of a "forgotten minority" (Dukium 2006) or an "invisible world" (Schechla 2001: 21)13. Yet, these discourses are articulated through relatively powerful official channels in the name of ArabPalestinians such as international new media networks, Israeli leftist academic writing, and official international political lobbying. This certain complicity between activism and academy has probably contributed to the absence of critical evaluation of these strategies of mobilization. More specifically, the emergence of a set of NGOs, various political groups and so-called "Arab-Jewish coexistence" alliances after the Oslo peace accords (1994) resulted in proposed policies based on more inclusive visions of belonging, searching for models of "egalitarian coexistence" and "fair resource distribution". The living conditions in the "unrecognized villages" and their risk of demolition are often at the focus of attention of those groups, because they make the inequality immediately visible. Popular groups like Dukium - The Forum for the Coexistence and Civic Equality, provide a clear example of how activism inspired by the concept of "coexistence" can evoke the idea of shared values. Starting off with a humanistic vision of equality, its activists call for the unconditioned "recognition" of all informal Arab villages in the Negev, which means in practice the construction of more schools, hospitals, and road access in those areas. For example, the group has succeeded in replacing in public discourses the administrative concept of "Bedouin dispersion" with the term "not recognized village" which directs the responsibility for action towards the authorities. A dozen other groups with impressive-sounding names such as The Center for Jewish-Arab Equality or the Arab-Jewish Partners for Sustainable Development are proposing similar policies based on various repertoires of action and strategies of mobilization. At a more abstract level, their activism also concerns the definition of the nation state itself, divided between an ethnonational ("Jewish state") and a more inclusive understanding of citizenship, covering all citizens in the area independently of its ethnic belonging ("Israeli state").

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Fig. 3 An activist group visits el-Shams during its reconstruction. March 10, 2007 (Photo: Koensler) In the words of William F. Fisher, at first glance it seems that this set of interrelated groups has helped to "extend the boundaries of what is thinkable" (1997: 459). Their discourses have changed the way the conflict in the Negev is perceived in the public eye and they have been able to put the problem of ethnic diversity on the regional political agenda. At a closer look, their voices rarely question the static representation of ethno-cultural divisions, overlooking a series of other internal differentiations as outlined above. Even though an impressive body of literature has developed with alternative proposals for sharing land and resources beyond the concept of the monolithic ethnic identities, these proposals in the Middle East as elsewhere are often

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underestimated or silenced. However, with the emergence of the so-called "postZionism" debates in Israel14, essentialist assumptions of modernist narratives have increasingly been questioned. There have been also few recent studies that have pointed out the interconnected and highly heterogeneous character of social reality in Israel/Palestine. For example, Parizot (2001) proposed that the social composition of the Negev should be understood as part of a wider "IsraeliPalestinian space", underlining its interconnectedness and interdependency. Also Israeli anthropologist Dan Rabinowitz examines in Transnational Israel/Palestine? (2000) critically the modernist national order, arguing for a critical evaluation of contemporary politics of identity. In Changing PalestineIsrael Ecologies Michael M.J. Fischer asserts "a claim for more comprehensive mapping, more polyphonic narration, more mis-en-scne vision with room for multiple points of view, not for neutral balance, but to give a pragmatic handle on how to intervene effectively, which means also enrolling more allies" (2006: 169)15. In such a perspective, it becomes possible to assert the intricate interconnectedness and interdependency of social life in the Israeli-Palestinian space, especially in a conflict where the same words can mean something different along the lines of partial connections16. This does not mean taking sides, but seeking to understand through which situated actions, projects and dynamics multiple realities are emerging. Place, Space, demolition tourism and "REAL LIFE" My point in this section is to show how uncritically reproduced space-place relations - for example through the concept of "local community" - become crucial for the friction between such multiple realities. Some weeks after the first demolition of el-Shams, all the tents and shacks were reconstructed with the aid of local activists. Shortly after, I observed together with a small group of activists, how the police demolished all twenty metal shacks and tents again. The next morning, five employers of a NGO related to the International Red Cross arrived in the dusty valley, accompanied by an official from Jerusalem. Only a few people assisted the humanitarian workers in quickly unloading twenty bags containing emergency tents17. When I arrived at the valley of el-Shams, the tents had already been unloaded from a truck. A cold wind blew across the valley and made conditions uncomfortable for everyone. Ali al-Rishad, the thin and hunchbacked spokesman of el-Shams, shook hands quickly with the Red Cross officials from Jerusalem and escaped elsewhere with his new Ford. A group of young boys quickly distributed the gray bags between the different piles of rubble, leaving them unpacked. The NGO workers were in hurry, "because of the cold weather", as they said, they wanted to leave immediately. Therefore, they

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chose to take their specific concept of "local community" simply for granted without further questions. During this period, Smadar, a Jewish activist currently employed for an ArabBedouin representative organization, was proud of herself for having successfully organized the humanitarian aid. Her role of a Jewish activist speaking out for the rights for Arab-Bedouins echoes much of the importance to understand ethnically framed claims beyond bounded identities. One morning, while sitting behind her desk in her office in Be'er Sheva, busy with her paperwork and calls for project financing, she confessed to me in her energetic and strong voice: When we brought the emergency tents to el-Shams, that was really a special moment for me. Everything happened very fast. It was a time when I felt that my work was really important. It was an action which you knew would result in some people having a place to sleep that night. And you get great satisfaction as a result.18 But this is not all. Smadar's satisfaction was also the result of a meeting a few weeks before in the hotel "King Salomon" in Jerusalem. While waiters were filling the glasses with water in a meeting room on the ground floor of the hotel, a delegation of NGOs, formed by Smadar and her colleagues, met with an official of the consulate of a European government in order to discuss the possibility of cooperation in regard to veterinary work for Bedouin sheep. However, there were still a number of difficulties to overcome. Then, when the European NGO reached the news of the demolition of el-Shams, Smadar did not hesitate to act immediately. She picked up the phone and called the consulate official again. When I interviewed the official some days later, he recalled the events in these words: I had already seen on al-Jazeera that a Bedouin village in the Negev had been demolished. And now it had been demolished again. It was a disaster. When the Bedouins called me again, there was that woman like, what was her name? Smadar? No, maybe she is Jewish. However, we decided to act immediately and to contact the Red Cross. I personally negotiated the case with the Red Cross, and Magen David Adom was also involved. Then we organized the transport of a dozen emergency tents.19

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Fig. 4 An emergency tent at the demolished ghost village village of elShams. February 6, 2007 (Photo: Koensler)

What need to be noted first is that the "community" of al-Shams comes here into existence through discursive practices that are almost confusing the Jewish NGO worker Smadar with the supposed "Bedouins" community, implying the idea of a homogeneous group. A small mistake, maybe unimportant. But it indicates how "spatial meanings" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 70) are stablished. By applying Bourdieu and Wacquants (1992) distinction between categories of analysis and practice, I argue that exactly this tendency to confuse the categories of NGOs and the "local people" is at the root of friction and misunderstanding involving current international policies of social justice and its "grassroots" and "bottom up" financing practices. Therefore, some powerful redefinitions of reality are imposed at this level, restructuring social experiences of place, space, and community.

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In addition, this imprecision serves to mystify a series of important social forces of the context. I noticed that it was also the unquestioned practice of other officials of large international foundations such as Oxfam GB or the New Israel Fund, which financed a wide range of NGO projects in the Negev. During brief "official trips", those officials met occasionally in person the "local community" in order to keep in touch with the "grassroots level" of their funding policies. In short, they came out in order to experience "real life". The deep heuristic confidence in the value of these visits can amaze only an anthropologist. In an interview, a program manager of Oxfam GB described the visits in these formal words: When I come down to the Bedouins, when I see the lack of infrastructure and the demolition of houses, I try to understand it through a "family perspective". That is, I try to imagine the difficulties of individual families. We are primarily a humanitarian organization, rather than one that defends human rights. This means that we want to protect human beings in all kinds of situations. When your house is under threat of demolition and if you do not have an alternative place to go, this seems very similar to a situation of humanitarian emergency and so we offer assistance.20 Significantly, none of the officials and program managers I have met during nearly two years of fieldwork distinguished between "the Bedouins" and the international or Israeli organizations seeking to represent their interests. In their variant of international humanitarian jargon, NGOs are considered as natural representatives of a vague category defined simply as "the community" or "the people". Consequently, in this perspective, the donation of the ten emergency tents is presented as a necessary, impartial intervention to the people. However, recent literature on humanitarian aid underlines that it must not be taken as politically neutral intervention existing outside its wider socio-political context. In example, Mariella Pandolfi (2005: 162) defines this apparatus as a "mobile sovereignty", based on "a network of procedural actions and discourses that legitimate its presence in the name of an ethical temporal rule and a metahistorical category definable as a culture of emergency". In this perspective, the unloading of the emergency tents are part of an attempt to establish such a mobile sovereignty imagined as politically neutral and meta-historical, producing a temporary control of the territory. Virtually none of the various visitors, including international NGO officials and Embassy representatives, have been interested in verifying who are the inhabitants of el-Shams beyond a generalized idea of "local community". This reveals how common sense assumptions shape the relation between space and culture, and with it produce new realities. And so emergency aid is delivered to a ghost-village.

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WHO SPEAKS IN THE NAME OF WHOM? However, the reality of el-Shams multiplies also through the use of different categories and interpretative schemes applied by the various actors that are involved in the conflict. In this section I try to outline some of the contradictory aspects of these categories as they develop along the flows and connections of el-Shams. However, this does not mean that there is a clear-cut dichotomy between international activists and those who live in a different manner at the local level. This relationship turned out much more intricate, as the following examples will demonstrate. One Suterday morning I took a tea at the home of Faisal Abu Taleb in a town planned by the Israeli government for Bedouin citizens. After studying in Montreal and Tel Aviv, Abu Taleb became the director of a NGO that represents the unrecognized Arab-Bedouin villages in the Negev. We met for one of our regular English exercises. His wife had just brought us a new plate of biscuits, when Faisal started talking about emergency tents in elShams. I claimed that actually no person was in the need of the emergency tents brought to el-Shams and that Faisal must have known that. He replied by trying to justify the idea of donating the tents: Listen, it was because there were those contacts with the Red Cross. Each time we have re-financed the reconstruction of el-Shams, everything has been demolished after a few weeks. We cannot continue this way. And there are some people who believe that my organization can pay for all that. They think I have a hole from which falls continuously new money for sheet metal, concrete and all that. Instead I must be very careful. Look: speaking with Ali [another NGO worker], we thought that it was a good thing, the tents, so they can occupy the land, but when they see the bulldozers arriving they can fold their tents and hide them without too much damage. Ali had this idea, I believe. But I liked it immediately [laughs].21 My silence left him no other option then to go back to our English exercises. But a short while after he added that he had received from Palestinian foundations 50,000 shekelim (about 10,000 U.S. dollars) for the last reconstruction in el-Shams. Most of this money has been passed directly to Akhil al-Rishad, the "local spokesperson" of el-Shams who actually resides in another government planned town for Bedouins and has worked as a school principal before being retired last year. It was not clear, however, how and for what purpose he distributed this money to the supposed "community". In other words, within this gray zone it is not clear who speaks in the name of whom. Along the

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different zones of contact, everybody seems to represent the community itself: for the international official it is the NGO, for the NGO director it is the spokesperson and for the spokesperson probably it is somebody else and so forth. From a more anthropological perspective, the easily foldable tents could be interpreted at first glance as a method of "resistance from below". But as outlined above, the use of the tents was a fantasy developed by two NGO leaders in their metropolitan office in Be'er Sheva, questioning any clear opposition between the "grassroot"-level and "upper" social classes. Realities that echoes something more intricated, complex, interconnected. But as the story continues to travel, further connections engaging continuously more realities. Some people experienced the demolitions of el-Shams as personally more challenging. For example, for an activist of Jewish origin from Be'er Sheva, a solidarity visit to the rubble of the shacks redefined her own collective belonging. After the visit, she expressed her troubled feelings in a personal email to me: It [the visit] was one of those experiences which has stirred me up so much emotionally that I have to deal with that side first. I am not sure how well my judgments faculties are working as I am experiencing emotional and moral overload. Just to put down points in succession, one feeling I came home with was about my role out there. I sat and listened, and I did that pretty well but was that also not part of the evil that was done there that day? To sit and listen when the man's house had been destroyed, when people were putting up a tent so they would have somewhere to sleep that night, when their mattresses had been destroyed, when they had nowhere to make tea and nothing to make tea with, when they had not eaten all day. Her solidarity visit enables her to "switch sides", at least for a moment, and to embrace what could be described as the Palestinian mainstream narrative of the conflict, so to say, before returning to her "Jewish" home in a suburb of Be'er Sheva. She refers indirectly to a generalized "Israeli responsibility" for the plight of "the Palestinians", of whom the presumed victims of the demolitions in elShams are considered an integral part. However, while such practices are an expression of the effective porosity of boundaries, her narrative still seems anchored to a more dualistic and static logic of belonging. Through the solidarity visit, not only are such boundaries crossed, but collective belonging is renegotiated, embedded in the ethical dimension of the historical narratives of the Middle East. The version of reality that comes into being through this solidarity visit is not the same as the one that is constructed through the emergency apparatus; it does not present itself as neutral or meta-historical, but

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rather as based on profoundly subjective experiences embedded in a sense of breaking with political boundaries. However, the very same case can also serve to re-affirm a different set of ethno-political boundaries. For example, an NGO that aims to defend the civil rights of the Arab-Palestinian population within Israel, called for help for a "big day of reconstruction" of the demolished shacks in el-Shams. A press report, distributed the day after, stated "Our Arab families face daily the policy of ethnic cleansing through the demolitions. (...) [The president of the organization] also called for mass support for the reconstruction of the village. He also asked for help from major international organizations for human rights"22. Both sets of practices -the solidarity visit with its "moral overload" and the day of reconstruction- construct an apparently self-evident opposition: it is always "the state" that refuses to recognize "the Bedouins". But, as I try to show, this partial truth is subverted by other realities engaged at different scales. In an even more incisive vein, some of the new media activism constructs and uses categories that create an even harsher dichotomy. In the posting of a NorthAmerican based blog, My Left Wing, we are told about the demolitions in elShams. On the base of an electronic newsletter from a Negev based social justice NGO, Mr. Shergald, under the headline Israel's War Against the Bedouin, comments the demolitions in el-Shams as follows: [R]eporting on Israel's Bedouin people is a sad and most disturbing experience. That ongoing events reported [by the newsletter] about Israel's treatment of its Bedouin population could be happening in modern times is inconceivable. Our friends the Israelis could not be acting so callously toward the rights of other human beings, in this case, their own Arab citizens.23 Interestingly, the categories of the conflict in this statement are shifted toward a more clearly marked opposition between "Bedouins" and "Israelis". By publishing the story of el-Shams on his blog, his compassion for the imagined suffering of the imagined community becomes also a tool to state the moral superiority of democratic and humanistic ideals. In this process, the practices embedded in different interpretative schemes can be understood as both the result and part of changes in the global infosphere related to the wave of new media activism that often presents itself as allied with groups in the "global South", a term that also implies a special attention to the plight of the Palestinian people. The recent debates in Cultural Politics about the logic of speed and velocities of power as interpretative schemes for contemporary cultural processes may clarify some of these implications. Mr.

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Shergalds interest in the demolished buildings provides evidence for some aspects of the "speed effects" described by the philosophical work of Paul Virilio (1986; 2000), John Beck and Paul Crosthwaite (2007). They state that the material transformation of the world through accelerated actions and flows is seen to be accompanied by the experiential, phenomenological impact of acceleration in ways that suggest that forms of representation themselves must be reconsidered and re-situated. (2009: 24) This argument can be extended to Ingrid Hoofds (2009) point that new media activism relies on a convergence of the humanist project and the logic of acceleration through technology, claiming that such activism perpetuates and reproduces a "kinetic elite" (Armitage and Roberts 2002). Hoofd argues that such links run through a series of "false oppositions such as the people and the state" (2009: 205). By relying on imagined really oppressed groups, the advancement of new media activism seems instead inherently linked to neo-liberal logic of accelerated circulation as an end in itself, serving primarily the kinetic elite. In the case of el-Shams, several kinds of oppositions (Bedouins vs. the State; Bedouins vs. Israelis; Israelis vs. Palestinians) reveal not only one false opposition, but an astonishing polyphony that implies different concepts of the "really oppressed group" in order to serve different ends and purposes. At home with fried chicken, MTV, and Al-Jazira Meanwhile, at el-Shams things were slightly more complicated than the practices and discourses of NGO officials, journalists and media activists have suggested yet. During a long period of my fieldwork, I could not forget the face of Ahmed, a guy of my age as he burned the Styrofoam sheets of his caravan, which were all that remained after the first demolition of el-Shams. For a couple of weeks I called this man nearly every day. For a while he came regularly to visit me at Be'er Sheva in order to teach me how to make Arab coffee. Or we met in the valley of el-Shams, where we also made coffee on a small camping stove, or we raced around the valley in his old pick up jeep. Most of the time we were the only people in the destroyed valley, so we hung around by the camping stove or chatted for hours. I told him about my life in Europe and my research, he told me about football and Islamic philosophy. When he lived as an Arab-Bedouin citizen in a Jewish kibbutz, he said once, he was working as a truck driver and he "did everything", referring to his dissolute lifestyle. Often I did not know if he was exaggerating his wild love stories and drug experiences or if time had transformed his memories. To sum up, his lifestyle apparently differed from what is presented as the classical "Bedouin" type, attached to a traditional lifestyle in his ancestral land, as implicitly assumed by most activists. However, he kept strong emotional ties to the area of el-Shams. With the passing of time, he taught

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me to "recognize" and enhance the area of el-Shams: we went to collect special spices, we found stones with symbolic forms. In short, we were "living" the landscape. However, each time I came without an appointment, I found the valley always completely empty. Everywhere the bulldozers had left signs of destruction, and their tracks stretched to the horizon; a bleak atmosphere, that reminded me at the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. At the center of the valley, some shacks and tents were reconstructed and furnished in a spartan way, others were still empty. It became clear that being in El-Shams was not being part of a village or a local community. It was something different, something halfway between being on a camping site or a recreation area and being part of a political struggle for land rights. However, I decided not to ask too much, to keep silent. I was anxious not to lose my friendship with Ahmed. Then, unexpectedly, one afternoon in spring, after nearly five months of friendship, he told me: "Come on, let's go to my home today". He loaded me into the back and we drove about five kilometers to the east and reached the outskirts of Azaq, one of the so-called "Bedouin cities" created by the government. In a valley close to the edge of their town, just outside the municipal boundaries, there was a group of perhaps ten houses in the barracks, stables, destroyed machinery, and piles of rubble. Quit different from the shacks in el-Shams, houses that were built of masonry, and had one or two floors, some with sloping roofs and others with balconies. In this suburb, there were different signs of ordinary daily life; clothes hanging on wires, new prestigious cars, small gardens, piles of household waste. We entered a large corridor and went into a sitting room furnished with a set of sofas and a huge TV screen. After asking his wife to prepare tea, Ahmed went to change his clothes. Back from the dusty valley, the new outfit signaled that he was entering another world. "Bedouin life" was now even more far away. While having tea, we watched a program on the war in Iraq on al-Jazeera, switched to Lady Gaga on MTV, and then ordered one of his younger cousins to buy us two fried chickens for dinner from an internationally known fasd food catering. In the evening, with a cup of strong coffee in his hand, Ahmed, encouraged by my questions, started to talk about his relation to elShams. He spoke of the need to reclaim his grandfathers ancient land in the name of his extended family. For this purpose, he said, one of his cousins, who often appeared on the media in order to represent "the village", has decided to construct "something on the land". Apparently they wanted to use it and to protest against the fact that it was declared a natural protection area by the regional government. "It's one way to do something", he stated proudly, while finishing the last chicken wing. However, later he added that he did not participate with the same enthusiasm; agriculture and a bucolic lifestyle were not for everyone. I was confused. Besides the certainly complex question of

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traditional land ownership claims, I could not make sense of the one aspect that el-Shams was never inhabited by anyone, it was a ghost village. The humanitarian aid, shortly after, came to a fairly predictable end. On 7 April 2007, I witnessed with only a few people how two bulldozers demolished the rebuilt barracks once again. This time the police sent a special crane in order to pick up the white Red-Cross tents and to throw them into a large truck along with other waste. It was a very melancholic atmosphere. Meanwhile, also the flow of solidarity came to an end. The presence of NGO officials and journalists diminished, probably because they had moved on to other cases. At that point, I was the only person who continued to visit el-Shams regularly in order to use some elements of this complicated story for my own academic purposes, situating myself somewhere in between a network of zones of friction.

Fig. 5 No signs of emergency in an emergency tent at el-Shams. March 2, 2007 (Photo: Koensler)

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Conclusion: Practices of reality, realities of practice From a perspective that follows connections beyond local sites, this vicissitudes, in conclusion, give first of all a chaotic and profoundly disturbing impression made of multiple, contradictory realities. Destruction was followed by reconstruction. Reconstruction was followed by re-destruction. In the name of civil rights, in the name of environmental protection, in the name of moral superiority. Nightmares, immense frustration, anger and humiliation were projected onto ephemeral constructions. During my fieldwork, I considered elShams as a dramatic metaphor for the indeterminate lives not only in a IsraeliPalestinian border zone. At a more abstract level, I could notice how multiple realities came into being and circulated globally through different "practices of reality"; spectral apparitions that fractualizing the real. In a unique way, these flows around el-Shams make evident that "reality is never directly itself", as Slavoj iek (2005: 262) puts it. In the global infosphere, reality is not only separated from the real itself, but also from other, sometimes more powerful realities. To push this argument further: the mediatic reflexions of the vicissitudes of elShams are providing evidence how a certain, prevailing category of "local community" produces different "effects of truth" (Foucault 1966). In this case the practices of naturalization and objectification of such common sense categories are one of the main tool that allows multiple realities to come into being along zones of frictions. Moreover, the way how power relations of el-Shams are presented is renegotiated within the infosphere around the globe: What at one level becomes a "ghost village", at another becomes a humanitarian catastrophe, and at another becomes a tool to reaffirm moral superiority. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 123) remind us that "the world is constructed by social actors, but these actors are not constructing the categories that they use", calling for a relational way of thinking that questions the apparently self-explanatory character of such categories. Or, the other way around, in order to prevent humanitarian aid finishing up in the garbage it may be useful to understand how multiple, contingent, and interconnected social realities are coming into being.

NOTES
1) All names of private persons and of most minor localities are changed in order to assure their anonymity. 2) Interview with an official of the "Authority for the Advancement of the Bedouin", Be'er

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Sheva, 23/07/2007. The area is actually part of the development project "Be'er Sheva Metropolitan Plan" that aims to create a "green belt" surrounding the peripheries of the desert city. 3) An earlier version of this article has been presented as a paper at the workshop "Local encounters with the global. Diversity of anthropological fieldwork approaches in globalization studies" coordinated by Regina Roemhild and Vintila Mihalescu at the biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) 2008 in Lubljiana (Slovenia). I thank both participants and conveners for their insightful comments and critiques. My thanks also to Stefano Boni, Massimiliano Minelli and Cristina Papa for useful comments on drafts of this article. 4) The main part of the fieldwork has been carried out between March 2006 and September 2007 in collaboration with a set of small Non-Government-Organizations (NGOs), civil equality associations and several solidarity groups. This research has been financed by a scholarship of the doctoral program "Methodologies of anthropological research" (Universities of Siena, Perugia, and Cagliari, Italy). 5) The relationship between locality and sociality has been rethought in recent years from different perspectives, especially in relation to debates on globalization (Coleman and Collins 2007; Marcus 2007). On the one hand, the process of erosion of the territory-sociality nexus is highlighted under the pressures of global flows, but on the other hand, by processes of "re-territorialization" through actors that reaffirm the local nature of social reality (Appadurai 1996; India and Rosaldo 2002;). 6) In his overview on the debate about "multisited ethnography", Nieswand (2008) speaks about a "neo-classic counter movement" within anthropology, that aims to preserve the "scientific standards" of long-term fieldwork in single-sited communities. Not casually, these approaches often derive from scholarship at the margins of the academic mainstream. 7) As one of the most striking elements of such a contemporary redefinition of power relations, the "infosphere" refers to the emerging virtual space characterized by communication technology. As an analytic tool in social science, it has be defined as "encompassing the overall universe of electronic communication and networking. Our definition of the infosphere expands further when we consider that it includes not only the actual connections that join diverse electronic media, but also the idea of a space 'out there' that one can enter: a network connected to, but removed from the 'real' spaces that one inhabits in everyday life" (McDowell, Steinberg, and Tomasello 2008: 10). 8) See, for example, Michal Grinberg, "Bedouins Clash With Police and Again Receive Demolition Orders", Ha'aretz, December 17, 2006. 9) Some of the groundbreaking work has been brought forward by authors associated to the "post-Zionist debates". This label emerged from academic circles around the "new

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historians" such as Benny Morris (1999), Uri Ram (2003) and others, but migrating also into art, literature and popular culture (Kimmerling 2001; Nimni 2003; Pappe 1997; Silberstein 1999). 10) Significantly, separate ethnic policies are not a new dimension of official land control policies. During both the government of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1917) and the administration of the British Mandate in Palestine (1917-1948) the authorities tried to register the land of the Bedouins in order to extend state control and to increase tax collection. These attempts regularly met resistance from the people. As a result, many lands have been registered as mawat, that is "unused land" owned by the state (Marx 1967). But far from being just dissidents, many Bedouin sheikhs decided, or were persuaded, to serve in the military of the Ottoman Empire or the British forces (Parizot 2004). The tensions between Bedouin groups and the government, therefore, can be linked to the attempts at social control and "proletarization" by Ottoman and British rule to date (al-Krenawi and Slater 2004; Marx 2000). 11) Precise numbers are difficult to gain, due to the fluid character of belonging and shifting identity categories. Based on my qualitative data collected during fieldwork, I would estimate roughly, despite other voices, that more or less about half of the citizens of Bedouin origins actually have significant periods in their life stories where they would not identify themselves with the category "Bedouin", but with categories such as Palestinian, Israeli, Arab or other. However, this point, in order to become a compelling argument, would need some more systematic and up-to date quantitative research. 12) As Der Derian pointed out by drawing on data of the recent US war-history, this type of network empowers new actors engaged in a "low-risk, virtual battlespaces" described as "in some ways as the political pornography of modernity" that contribute to a fractualization of the monolithic reality within the global "infosphere" (Keynote at the Australian National Universitys conference on "War 2.0: Political Violence & New Media", 21/10/2009). In this article, however, I am more interested to understand how its power relations are situated in concrete inter-human experiences. Such "ethnographic attention" highlights how this network is as well contested, instrumentalized, and subverted by different actors. 13) This last point may be related to the way that social movements in the Negev present the theme of coexistence between Jews and Bedouins. An employee of Oxfam said during an interview in his Jerusalem office: "There are many people who have taken over the cause of the Bedouins for a variety of reasons. It is an emerging cause, attractive, yet little known. Here in the Negev, we must distinguish between those who are really close to the people and those seeking only to take advantage of their case" (February 17, 2007). 14) See note 9 for references related to these debates. 15) The recently developing literature on global connections of NGOs in the Israeli-

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Palestinian is an another example of such an awareness (cfr. Bouillon 2004; Hanafi and Tabar 2005). 16) However, methodological approaches that are using cross-cutting partial connections and contradictions as a heuristic resource must not necessarily be connected to the debates of globalization (Minelli 2008; Strathern 1996). 17) This humanitarian aid was preceded by a conflict over the competence of el-Shams. As an Israeli territory, theoretically the area of el-Shams would be at the competence of the Magen David Adom ("The Red Star of David"), the Israeli agency corresponding to the Red Cross. Instead, the areas of competence of the Red Cross are the Occupied Palestinian territories. However, as the Israeli agency stated that there was no humanitarian emergency in the Negev, a small NGO related to Red Cross took over the case. 18) Personal fieldnotes of the author, 7 March, 2007. 19) Informal interview with a senior program manager of the Cooperation Office at the Consulate General of Italy, East Jerusalem (March 8, 2007). 20) Interview with an official at the Oxfam GB office in Jerusalem East (February 17, 2007). 21) Personal registration and fieldnotes of the author, 15 March, 2007. 22) See "One of the Biggest Crimes of Demolition: Israel Demolishes 17 Houses in the Negev", website of the "Association of the 40", June 12, 2007 (accessed at February 17, 2008). 23) See blog posting "My Left Wing", 7 March 2007. Available at http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=15256 (accessed February 17, 2008).

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