The first Bedouin woman to earn a Ph.D. navigates between Bedouin, Arab and Israeli cultures as she blazes new pathways in higher education.
Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, the eldest of four daughters and one son born to the first Bedouin physician in the Negev and his wife, an Arab from northern Israel, never had to fight for her right to an education. On the contrary, "For my father, it was not an option not to go to school," she says. "You could study anything at all, as long as you didn't sit at home."
Sarab, the first female Bedouin to hold a doctorate in Israel, is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University's Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research. Her latest book, "Palestinian Women in Israel: Life and Struggle from the Margins," co-edited with Naomi Weiner, will be the topic at a February 27 conference in the mixed Jewish Arab Beit Berl College near Kfar Saba.
The approximately 180,000 Bedouin Arabs living in the Negev, Israel's vast southern desert region, are mostly divided among homogenous cities such as Rahat and unrecognized encampments where these traditionally nomadic clans have dwelled for millennia. But Sarab grew up in Beersheva, the Negev's unofficial capital. "I see myself connected to local Bedouin culture, Arab northern culture (because of my mother) and the surrounding Israeli culture," she says. "I grew up like an insider/outsider in each of these three cultures."
Life under the microscope
Sent to a Jewish school after seventh grade for its superior academics, she found herself uncomfortably under the microscope as the first Arab uprising (intifada) terrorized Israelis from 1987 to 1993. "It was difficult as the only Arab girl in the school during the intifada. A lot of my Jewish friends used to examine my loyalty every time there was a bombing or some other event. So it was not easy," she explains.
The first girl from her tribe to go to college, she was one of just eight Bedouin women at BGU when she started her studies in 1995; now there are hundreds. That is partly because in 1998, BGU established the Robert H. Arnow Center for Bedouin Studies and Development with the aim of encouraging and supporting young Bedouins seeking a higher education. Many parents, they discovered, did not object to their sons or daughters attending university but simply could not afford it.
Today, the Arnow Center provides a platform for advanced research, academic conferences and a series of publications to advance knowledge about the community and introduce it to the general population.
According to Prof. Rivka Carmi, president of the university: "There is no denying that there is a long way to go to achieve parity in socio-economic conditions and education, but we at BGU believe the center will continue to provide a valuable vehicle for change, growth and advancement."
Sarab did her postdoctoral studies in 2007 at the Gender Studies Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, on a scholarship from the Yad Hanadiv Foundation did further postdoctoral studies in 2008 at the International Department of Development Studies at the University of Oxford.
Pioneers in education
Her first book, Mudrot ve'Ahuvot (Excluded and Loved: Educated Bedouin Women's Life Stories; 2008) includes interviews with 17 female university graduates from Bedouin Negev villages. This was an outgrowth of her 2006 Ph.D. thesis, "Pioneer Women in Higher Education: The Meaning of Pioneering among Educated Women in the Negev."
The topic evolved from a drama in her personal life. She chose to marry fellow BGU student and civil-society activist Hassan Abu-Queder, a Bedouin from outside her tribal limits. "This kind of match was forbidden, so we had to struggle and fight for our marriage," she relates. "This was the trigger for me to write about the topic of Bedouin women in higher education, about what happens after graduating in their professional and personal lives."
Sarab explains that the culture of the insular Negev Bedouins is quite different from that of the smaller Bedouin tribes of the Galilee, up north. "The Galil Bedouin live near or with other Arabs, so they have different models to learn from. That's why we find the Bedouin in other Arab countries or in the north are more open and less conservative than the Negev Bedouin," she says.
Sarab notes that some of the women she interviewed for her book had attended high school in northern boarding schools, as did her father, and returned to the Negev with new values. Living tribally, southern Bedouins "can absorb changes in more appropriate ways without creating as many conflicts as those living in more modern townships who are exposed to modern values in a rapid way," she says.
The road to peace
The down side is that residents of unrecognized villages lack modern infrastructure and have few educational and employment opportunities. "The Israeli government must recognize these villages and work in cooperation with them to improve conditions," says Sarab, who is now a full-time lecturer occupying the D.E. Koshland Jr. Family Career Development Chair in Desert Studies. She teaches courses on the Negev Bedouin and other indigenous peoples, as well as Arab feminist literature of the Middle East and North Africa. Among her latest awards was a 2009 Rich Foundation Award for the Advancement of Women in Academia.
She and Hassan, an accountant, live with their three little boys - aged seven, five and 18 months - in a Jewish neighborhood of Beersheva. "The other option was to live in my husband's unrecognized village, where there is no electricity or [running] water," she explains, "and I don't want my children to suffer. I want to provide them with good opportunities in normal surroundings."
To offset the disadvantages of not living amongst other Bedouin, the couple send their older boys to a local bilingual school run by the Hagar Association, where Jewish and Arab children learn side by side.
"I think if something would bring real peace and understanding to our region, it is this school," she says. "They grow up knowing each other as human beings with day to day contact between them and their families, and with an understanding of each other's narratives and history."
