WHAT THE NEGEB IS
By OWEN TWEEDY
THE Negeb has suddenly become a storm-centre. We read of it in every newspaper ; we hear of it in every news bulletin ; we are shown where it is on tactical maps. But if there are as many as a hundred persons in this country who have been down the Wadi Ai-aba from the South end of the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Akaba, or who have seen more of the arid main plateau to the west than the excellent ten-year-old motor road which crosses its extreme north-east corner, I shall be very surprised. There were certainly no Nicaraguans, Guatemalans or Panamanians who even knew where or what it was when Palestine was partitioned on paper at Lake Success in 1947.
Its name, the Negeb, means in Hebrew the " South Country," and tradition has linked it more than once with early Biblical history. The first reference is in the story of the casting-out of Hagar. " And Abraham sent her away and she departed and wandered in the Wilderness of Beersheba" (Genesis xxi.). And there, after she had abandoned her son out of sight to die of thirst, " God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water ; and she went and filled a bottle with water and gave the lad drink." Next it is referred to in Psalm 63, " Oh God, Thou art my God ; early will I seek thee ; my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is." And as a sub-title, the old Hebrew editors have written, " A Psalm of David when he was in the Wilderness of Judah." The final reference concerns the building of Solomon's Temple. " And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. . . ." Ezion- geber is a site on the coast just north of Akaba.
With the rise of the Nabatean Kingdom in what is now southern Transjordan (Ho B.c. to A.D. 105), the trade route from Petra, the flourishing Nabatean capital, to the Mediterranean and the markets of the West had to cross the Wadi Araba and then negotiate the waterless desert ; and along its length in the northern Negeb townships grew up. The ruins of their civilisation—with great cisterns for the storage of drinking-water—were excavated some forty years ago by Sir Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence. Later again, in Islamic times, the great Egyptian Pilgrims' Way—the Darb el Haj—from Cairo to Medina and Mecca skirted Ezion-geber's ruins before turning south from Akaba into the Hejaz. Still the Negeb and its few inhabitants never really got on to the map. Organised on tribal lines from the days of the Hittites and the Edomites and the Amorites who had lived there, this scant population somehow coaxed a precarious nomadic subsistence from the sparse annual rain-grown crops on their tribal lands and from the flocks and camels which shared their hardships and their privations. The Negeb nomads' hard-won grain gave them coarse bread ; their goats and their camels gave them meat and milk ; their women folk wove rough clothing from the camels' and the goats' hair ; and justice was by Desert Law. Indeed up to the time of the British mandate in Palestine, neither the Turks nor any previous overlord had attempted to register the lands of these ten-thousand odd desert- dwellers. Nor was it until 1906, when British intervention stopped gt Turkish attempt to encroach territorially on Egyptiin Sinai, that
there was any question of the delimitation of a frontier to the west, while on the east no one ever bothered about so futile a matter. The tribes knew their own grazing and cultivation lands and Desert Law kept the ring.
Territorially the Negeb is about the size of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire all together. It stands comparatively high on a wind- swept, sun-baked plateau which slopes up gradually from the foot- hills of the Sinai frontier to the high cliffs to the east that look down sheer into the scorching Wadi Araba. Tapering like a wedge from the southern Judean Hills around Beersheba down to its narrow sea-frontage on the Gulf of Akaba, 7o miles away, the width of the plateau varies from about forty miles in the north to some few miles on the Gulf itself. And throughout it is a vista of small, sad grey hills and nasty shallow valleys with a soft, white, glaring and highly porous limestone surface. It is in fact a most unattractive part of the world. This is the place which has now been allotted to the Jews and the Jews want it. Why ?
For the answer we must go back to 1917 when the Balfour Declara- tion of a National Home for the Jews gave Zionism a foothold in Palestine. In 1922 the British mandate, amplifying this policy, undertook in close co-operation with the Jewish Agency to encourage ." close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes." The Negeb was not required for public purposes ; but soon the Jewish Agency was com- plaining that the Mandatory was hampering this " close settlement " policy by failing to offer proper land facilities. Accordingly Sir John Hope Simpson visited Palestine on mission in 193o to report on the availability of cultivable lands for this purpose. About the Negeb he wrote: "Given the possibility of irrigation, there is practically an inexhaustible supply of cultivable land in the Beersheba area. Without irrigation, the country cannot be developed." The Palestine Government took action. I quote from the 1937 Royal Commission Report. " In Beersheba a dam and reservoir were built. Only about 7 per cent of the water falling in the large catchment area behind them passed into the reservoir formed by the dam ; and at the end of the rains there remained in the reservoir only J of r per cent. of the water which had fallen in the catchment area, the balance of the 7 per cent having percolated away into the reservoir bed, which is simply the natural ground, the area being too large for anything in the nature of waterproofing to be effected." Next the Palestine Government sought to develop water supplies from well-boring. The results produced copious supplies, but so impregnated with mineral salts as to be pronounced useless for crop irrigation or human consumption.
But the Jewish experts do not accept these facts and figures, and Zionist opinion still claims that the Negeb can be the great settle- ment area of the future—presumably on the basis that, given unlimited funds for capital expenditure, unlimited catchment water in waterproofed reservoirs or water from wells to be bored and purified can be made available. The fact is that the Zionists have to find Lebensraum for their immigrants. In only the first eleven months of last year 92,000 arrived, of whom 35,000 have been settled in Arab villages from which their owners had either fled in panic or had been expelled by Jewish troops. And this spate of immigra- tion will continue and more Lebensraum will have to be found. Hence presumably the Negeb gamble on water and on the hope of inexhaustible Jewish dollars from America to store it.
And so we come to the Arab League and its reactions. To Arabs generally the insertion of this Jewish Negeb wedge between the Egyptian and the Transjordanian Kingdoms creates two " hostile frontiers " in the strategic hinge of the Arab League. It points a Jewish sword southwards at the heart of Mecca. Eastwards it suggests a Jewish determination to capture all the Dead Sea and its potash resources by a turning movement from the south. In the west it encourages ideas already rampant, after the recent frontier aggression, of further Jewish designs to absorb the whole Palestine Railway up to Kantara and the Suez Canal. But the root of all these specific fears is suspicion. For the Arabs are firmly convinced that all this Jewish settlement talk in the Negeb is a blind, and that the State of Israel has deep expansionist Middle-East designs—for which Beersheba and Akaba are needed as bases.
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