Memory, the Rebirth of the Native, and the “Hebrew Bedouin” Identity

Abstract

In April 1903, the kishinev progrom sent a wave of shock through European Jewry.* The publication of a report by the Zionist poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the powerful poems he wrote under the impact of the pogrom heightened the Jewish public’s awareness ofthese atrocities and the precarious conditions of Jewish life in czarist Russia. Russian Zionists organized a committee to aid the children whose parents had been murdered in Kishinev and requested th at the Zionist Congress would assume a communal responsibility for them . In December 1903, Israel Belkind, a Zionist educator and First Aliyah1 leader, brought a group of Kishinev orphans to Palestine to launch his plan to establish a Jewish agricultural boarding school and socialize its students to become “Eretz-Israeli Hebrew farmers”. In a photo taken about a year following their arrival to Palestine, these boys are featured as a group, each one wearing a white kafiya with a black igal on top, holding a nabut in his hand. The obviously posed photograph was not meant to reflect the children’s ordinary attire but the very choice to pose with those Arab accessories is quite telling: it was designed to embody the success of the Zionist project in transforming children who were exilic Jewish victims to natives who have become part of the local landscape.