COLUMN ONE : Tents Fold for Israeli Bedouins : The once-nomadic people are being forced off their land into towns in the name of progress. But they are learning the politics of protest.

The saga of traditional Bedouin life, a world once defined by the tent, the sword and limitless horizons, is coming to an end in Israel with a rush of conflict and controversy.

While the dominant Israeli culture is pulling the once nomadic Bedouins into a new way of life, the government is using court orders and house demolitions to force the Bedouins off the land and into seven towns.

Some of the Bedouins, traditionally independent, resist with poignant gestures.

Mohammed abu Duabis, an elderly farmer whose ragged head-cloth is an emblem of his poverty, lives in a tin shack in the middle of a field of wheat that he has been told to abandon for the nearby cement settlement of Rahat.

Abu Duabis measures his age from the “time the Turks ruled,” making him at least 70 years old, and he sets the bounds of his land by stones and a single pine he planted decades ago. He refuses to leave despite the pressures from the government, explaining with a Bedouin proverb that he “has to take care of his mother and father”--that is, the land.

Relatives come to bring him provisions of sugar and flour and he spends his days sweeping clean the ditches that collect water for an ancient cistern dug into the crusty loess. Age and pathos appear to have spared him the demolition of his shack. He will probably die in his isolated outpost, acquaintances say.

But where clans are fighting for larger holdings and broader principles, the government has moved in with a vengeance. Five houses in a 75-member family encampment of Musa abu Zayad’s clan have been destroyed by court order. Goat-skin houses are left intact because under old laws, it is illegal to destroy a tent-like structure.

Another house is scheduled for demolition in February.

“They want us to tear it down ourselves!” complained Abu Zayad. “And they fine us if the pieces are not hauled away.”

The demolitions and the squeeze on the Bedouins is the closing chapter in the destruction of a primordial way of life. It is an epic that might be familiar to an American Indian.

Not far from the traditional roaming grounds of the Bedouins, Israeli kibbutzniks have set up a monument to the approaching end: a museum of Bedouin culture, where mannequins dressed in desert garb sit in mock-up tents. Live Bedouins have been known to step into the exhibits and pick up the inert musical instruments to play.

Many Bedouins accept both the inevitability and even desirability of change but want it tempered by half steps rather than having to make a leap for which many are unprepared.

“We would like resources. We want to keep farming, to keep our wheat, horses and goats” said Suleiman Hozyel, a local schoolteacher. “Gradual, gradual. That is what we want.”

But as in many of the roiling conflicts of Israel, land is at issue. The government controls the vast majority of land in the Negev, a triangle of desert and semiarid territory in the far south. And despite the evident availability of wide open spaces, Israel is unwilling to cede control to the Bedouin minority in its midst.

“With all due respect, the whole Negev cannot be left for occupation by 70,000 Bedouins,” said Ehud Olmert, the minister of Arab affairs for the government. “What’s the logic of investing millions in agriculture if it will not pay off? The goal is to modernize and get more out of the land, not less.”

Without the land, Bedouin culture resembles more and more that of their Arab cousins to the north: settled, relying on salaried work, hemmed in by cement and some say, a second-class status in the Jewish state.

Bedouins once knew no frontiers, folding up their tents and silently stealing away into Egypt or what is now Jordan with their herds and family connections. They won land by conquest and still speak of a romantic time when land control was defined by the dagger, not a piece of paper. In current political terminology, they might have been described as Fourth World, a mobile nation that remained separate from the settled states through which they roamed.

In the 19th Century, when the Ottoman Empire encompassed what was known as Palestine, the Turkish rulers attempted to fix tribal boundaries and take administrative control of the Negev for fear that colonial powers hovering at the new Suez Canal might pour into the region.

Rule by Britain followed the collapse of the Ottomans, and the Bedouins were largely left on their own. The British demanded only that the frequent tribal fights over land and clan be given over to court proceedings. The nomadic flavor of Bedouin life already had begun to fade; tribes acquired the best farmland and some of the larger landowners began to live off income derived from harvests worked by sharecroppers. Camels, the transport of the desert, were hitched to plows.

Israel’s independence disrupted the Bedouins’ virtual autonomy. Bedouins who fought against the Israelis fled. Tribes that later filtered back into areas they had abandoned in the fighting were often expelled by military authorities. On the rolling landscape near Beersheba, visitors can still see clumps of stones marking houses destroyed by Israeli fighters.

Eventually, new tracts of land in a “reservation” were carved out for Bedouin tribes, although over the years the government cut into even these and reduced the amount of land and pasture for farming. Some of the land went for military use, especially after 1982 when Israel needed airfields to replace bases lost when it returned the Sinai to Egypt.

Successive governments devised plans to concentrate the Bedouins into towns. One such plan collapsed when the space allotted for each family was deemed too little for any self-respecting Bedouin householder; Bedouins pride themselves on having children numbering in double figures.

Disguised coercion was also tried. Green Patrols, organized by the government to protect the Negev environment, turned into vigilante squads that uprooted Bedouin-planted trees and seized herds of sheep and goats.

The battle for land continues. The rationale for government control is no longer security or ecology. Instead, it is the need to concentrate the Bedouins in order to provide services to them.

“Modernization is inevitable. The Bedouins want all the services of modern life, all the schools, the water, the electricity; well, they cannot live in tents and work on computers,” said Olmert, the Arab affairs minister.

Israel recognizes Bedouin control over about 40,000 acres of Negev land; the Bedouins claim 250,000 acres. Also at issue is how much Israel pays the Bedouins to give up rights to the land. The price is about $100 an acre, a figure that Bedouins view as low.

The settlements open to the Bedouins are not especially strong magnets for giving up the old way of life. Rahat, a town of 17,000, sits in a bleak landscape of chockablock houses on dirt streets. There is no industry and schools are primitive. Most workers in Rahat work at dead-end jobs in other Israeli towns.

“People on the land look at Rahat and see unemployment and no prospects and wonder: Why should I move? At least out here, I have my land,” noted Mansour abu Ajaj, a Bedouin adviser to Olmert, who was born in a tent but was educated at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev and joined the bureaucracy three years ago.

Well-known Bedouin customs survive amid the changes. In the traditional guest tent at the center of Musa abu Zayad’s family complex, a young boy rolled out the carpet for newly arrived guests and an older man prepared coffee, the staple offering of hospitality. Women stayed hidden elsewhere; a little girl who peeked in fled when a guest caught sight of her.

Despite the canvas surroundings, signs of change had clearly penetrated the life of the tent. There was a color television in the corner. Plastic jugs had replaced clay and brass. The rugs were machine woven and the shepherd boys wore Nikes instead of sandals.

Other camp structures were made of varied materials. One house was made of goat hair, another of cardboard, another of metal, still another of preformed concrete. A few, including one scheduled for demolition this month, were made of cinder block.

“The worst curse you can put on someone in our culture is, ‘May your house be destroyed,’ ” said Abu Zayad, who claims to own about 60 acres of rolling wheat land. “There was a time when we defended our land by the sword. The sword is useless against the paper the government brings.”

Abu Zayad admits that in some ways life in Rahat would be easier than in the family complex. The family would no longer have to depend on water delivered by tank truck. Medical care is handy.

But it is hard for Abu Zayad to understand why the Bedouins cannot be set up in farms like the Israeli Jews. Just a stone’s throw from Rahat stands a kibbutz landscaped with well-watered bougainvillea and lawns.

“Are we less than they?” Abu Zayad asks bitterly.

For the first time, the usually fractious Bedouin community has organized protest rallies to make its case to the government. A demonstration at the Israeli Parliament has netted a series of meetings with Olmert and one with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The Agriculture Ministry is considering land allocation for greenhouses, corrals and even pasture.

Last year, Bedouins in Rahat were permitted to elect their own town council for the first time; leftist groups dominated the voting. The new breed of politician is picking up rhetoric from the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to link Bedouin concerns with a sense of Arab nationality.

“We see from the Palestinian experience that we have to speak up for our rights,” said Hasin Obra, a Communist council member and insurance salesman in Rahat.

Most protest is still confined to the independently minded clans who struggle in a passive but steady way. Abu Zayad, for example, has begun to plant olive trees on the land he claims, believing that the Israelis would not uproot settled agricultural produce.

Arab Affairs Minister Olmert retorts that the notion that a grove of olive protects ownership is a myth and will not stand in the way of house demolitions.