State Control Policies and the Path Towards Ethnic Cleansing: The Case of the Palestinian Arab Bedouin in Israel

Abstract

The notion of nation is quite recent. It is intertwined with that of equal citizenship and nationality, the aim of the state is to uniform those who are going to become its citizens, under a homogenous state design. But it is this process of state uniformity that is flawed: state’s mechanisms of categorization result from a process of inclusion and exclusion—majority and minority—that cannot help but create marginalization. For this reason, gypsies, vagrants, nomads and pastoralists (Berbers and Bedouins) become national minorities to be controlled under the majoritarian power of the state. Because “all majoritarianisms have in them the seeds of genocide” (Appadurai 2006: 57), states tend to pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing in order to eliminate the dirty spots from their national purity. On the basis of this consideration, the case of the Palestinian Arab Bedouin is an example of how the state can control, suffocate and cleanse its own national minorities and ethnic groups.