Draft talk:Negev in biblical times

Maccabees and Romans

Older historians regularly cited Avi-Yonah, who claimed that Idumaea was indeed conquered. Today, this is no longer done. To my knowledge, no one has explicitly refuted Avi-Yonah, but I would prefer not to mention it at all, since Avi-Yonah is pure fantasy.

How A.-Y. imagines the conquest of Idumaea can be seen here. The cited passages report only that Maresha and Adoraim were conquered. All other marked places are fiction:

1. That Beersheba belonged to Judaea is derived from the fact that the same was true for Malhata. That this was true for Malhata is derived from JosAnt 18:6:2 147, where, however, it is explicitly mentioned as "Malhata in Idumaea".
2. "Orda" is read by A.-Y. for "Jorda", supposedly with Maisler and against Thomsen, who wanted to read "Arad". Maisler's paper has nothing to do at all with (J)orda, but deals with an Amarna letter listing gifts. Thomsen does not want to read "Arad" either, but "Jarda", after correctly deriving from the relevant passage in Josephus (JosAnt 3:3 51) that the place in question lay explicitly in the east of southern Judaea, which A.-Y. simply ignores and locates it on the very western edge of his assumed Judah.
3. Most egregious is A.-Y.'s treatment of Adoraim. As mentioned, like Maresha, Adoraim was conquered by the Judeans according to Josephus. A.-Y. first takes from a Zenon papyrus that Adoraim was supposedly the district capital of an assumed "Eastern Idumaea". The papyrus in question, however, only states that 6 salted fish were delivered to Adoraim. Second: In Josephus, there are two lists of cities that Pompey or Gabinius took from the Maccabees and Judaea and returned to their original inhabitants. One list includes Adoraim, stating explicitly that Adoraim did not continue to belong to Judaea. In the other list, among other differences, Adoraim is not mentioned, but Dora (=Dor). Thus, A.-Y. also wants to read "Dora" instead of "Adora" in the first list and thereafter assume, "that at least Eastern Idumaea - including Hebron with the tombs of the Patriarchs - remained with Judaea". In another city list listing capitals of Judaea, he similarly wants to read adorois for gadarois), and so in the end, he edited Adoraim out of one list, into the other list, invented a Maccabean "Eastern Idumaea," and made it into a Judaean district with Adoraim as its capital. This is not a plausible text reconstruction, but malicious alternative history with a transparent ideological motive - "at least to keep Hebron with the tombs of the Patriarchs in Judah". --DaWalda (talk) 13:30, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Speicher

• In 1920, Zionists had conducted their own survey of the northern and central Negev and had analyzed, among other things, how long a tribe had lived in the Negev, which official documents they could present to prove their land rights, what percentage of their land was owned by Effendis (see above), and what percentage of their land they cultivated agriculturally. The results showed that the Azazima cultivated "[o]nly a very small part of the area [...] (less than 20%) [...] in the most fertile points near Wadies" of their area, the Tarabin "only about 35%" of their area, the Tiyaha "only about 40%", and the Jabarat "only 60%". Overall, this survey roughly recorded 100,000 hectares as agriculturally cultivated land.
  The British, instead, estimated in the 1921 Abramson Report that the Bedouins were cultivating nearly 280,000 hectares. The discrepancy can likely be explained by the fact that the Zionists recorded the land that was actually cultivated that year, while the British also registered fields that were fallow or similar:
• Beersheba's District Officer Aref al-Aref's estimates from 1934 came closest, suggesting that 100,000 hectares were currently being cultivated and 300,000 hectares were agricultural land. Similarly, the following year, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries estimated that just under 211,000 hectares were currently under cultivation, from which the Zionist Epstein projected up to 350,000 hectares as agricultural land.
• In 1941, Jacob Verman and Daniel Zohary had explored the Negev mountains. According to this survey, barley was cultivated by Bedouins in practically every region of the Negev highlands except for the Wadi Boker area and the Nahal Ramon area near the Ramon Crater.
• However, according to a British survey from 1946, only about 164,000 hectares of arable land in "the extreme north-west of the sub-district" of Beersheba were given, reusing an estimate from 1930. The rest of the Negev was allegedly only suitable as grazing land. This stark discrepancy with the survey of Verman / Zohary likely stemmed from the British not wanting to leave the Negev to the Zionists for a Jewish state, in order to give their puppet state of Transjordan access to the Mediterranean Sea and to prevent Egypt, also subservient to them, from being isolated from the rest of the Arab world. Similarly, in 1947, the British estimated the land cultivated to 200,000 hectares and specifically noted for the same reasons: "These tribes [...] will always describe themselves as Beersheba tribes. Their attachment to the area arises from their land rights there and their historic association with it."

To claim that Israeli settlement policies, beginning with the expulsion of Bedouins from Palestine during the Nakba around 1948, the expropriation of Bedouin landowners from the 1950s, the forced relocation of the remaining population to the "Siyagh" primarily from the 1960s, and the ongoing displacement from the remaining land through Zionist agriculture, the designation of "nature reserves", and the planting of pine forests, promoted Bedouin agriculture, is a severe case of historical revisionism (see more below). DaWalda (talk) 12:06, 13 May 2024 (UTC)