The Nomadic Alternative – Page 79

Movement. Movement in turn becomes morality, since failure to find fresh grass spells disaster. He may claim to own his migration path, but in practice he only exercises a temporary right of passage and the land holds no interest for him once the herds have passed on.

All he asks is his freedom to keep a sequence of fixed appointments along a given route. The settler's fields chain him to a single place. If he left his irrigation channel or melon patch, he would face ruin.

The current tragedy of the Near East stems from the interaction of these two contrasting concepts of land tenure. When they sold their lands to immigrants from Europe, Arab proprietors in Palestine imagined they were selling to a people who would work the land as a subservient agricultural caste. The framework of society, as they knew it, offered no other place to the settled farmer. Unimaginable to an Arab landowner that the farmer could or would block his freedom of passage through lands that were his by custom, or that waterworks would make the desert bloom. A society which knows itself to be perfect cannot subscribe to the idea of change. In practice patterns of migration may fluctuate, but in theory they are immutable.

The very word 'Arab' means 'a wanderer in the desert' or 'man of the tents' as opposed to 'hazara', 'the man who settles in a house'. The whole of Arab culture – its unity and its gaping holes – is the immediate product of the Bedouin mentality. Modern political frontiers follow the boundaries of agricultural field systems and as such make no sense to the nomad. Fixed frontiers are for him a form of insanity and symptomatize the disease of settlement. The Way stands in for his religion. If a frontier guard blocks the Way, he is in practice telling a religious man, "There is no God", and that invites religious retribution.