Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which humor, sarcasm, and irony, characteristic of the popular poetry of the Negev Bedouin in Israel, served as instruments of coping with the great turmoil and uncertainty brought about by the 1948 Arab–Israeli war and its aftermath.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to closely look at an ancient living tradition – the popular poetry of the Bedouin (called in Arabia Nabati poetry), which is almost forgotten today among the Bedouin who dwell in the Negev, in the southern part of Israel. East of Israel, in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, this old tradition, which dates back to pre-Islamic times, is very much alive and even cherished as a national cult.

This paper aims at exploring a crucial historical moment of great turmoil and uncertainty in the lives of the Negev Bedouin – the 1948 Arab–Israeli war and the first years in which those Bedouin who remained within the borders of the newly founded Jewish state were put under military government. Under these traumatic circumstances of humiliation, threat, and despair, we find – alongside what could be called a ‘magmatic silence’ – diverse expressions of this living tradition.

These verses, uttered by Bedouin popular poets between 1949 and 1952, contain various poetic mechanisms of coping with a totally new and uncertain reality of living under Jewish control, mostly in restricted areas east and north of the town of Beersheba. This paper will examine humoristic, sarcastic, and ironic ways of dealing with these uncertain living conditions through an in-depth reading of poems and fragments of poems from that period. These verses attest to the poets’ resilience and to the power of poetry to cope with the hardship and suffering of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war and its aftermath.