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Civilizational Exceptions: Ottoman Law and Governance in Late Ottoman Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

This article examines the Ottoman extension of rule and jurisdiction to the Beersheba frontier of southern Palestine. As part of its Tanzimat reform policies, the Ottoman administration founded the new town and sub-district of Beersheba in 1900, and sought to implement a legal reform. Deviating from the formal law that requires the founding of a civil-nizamiye court, the Ottoman instituted a form of legal exception and authorized the local administrative council to sit as a judicial forum and for its Bedouin Shaykh members to serve as judges. Studies of Ottoman Beersheba have typically focused on Bedouin autonomy and tribal law. The few studies that discussed the judicial order, have mistakenly assumed the Ottoman institution of a “tribal court,” and its persistence thereafter. Interestingly, what began as a simple grant of legal exception, justified by civilizational discourses of ignorance and savagery, grew into a judicial complexity. Very soon jurisdictional tensions arose, integrating questions across various webs of legal orders, jurisdictions, and political networks that shaped the reform in Beersheba and beyond. In following various legal disputes from Beersheba to Gaza, Jerusalem, and Istanbul, the article challenges some of the prevailing research categories, dichotomies, and approaches in the study of Ottoman legal history and tribal societies, including the concept of ‘legal pluralism.’

Type
Original Article
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2018 

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Footnotes

The author thanks the following persons for reading earlier drafts and for their helpful comments and support throughout the writing of this article: Zachary Lockman, Ronald Zweig, Lauren Benton, Avi Rubin, Samuel Dolbee, Sandra Ashhab, Lena Salaymeh, and Umit Kurt. The author also thanks the staff of the State Ottoman Archives’ in Istanbul, Fuat Recep and Ayten Erdel; Abdulla Ugur for his assistance in translations; and the anonymous reviewers of Law and History Review for their valuable reviews. The writing of this article and the research were made possible by the support of the Social Science Research Council and the Palestinian American Research Center.

References

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2. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter from the Jerusalem governor to the ministry of the interior, 2 Mart 1318/March 15, 1902; BOA.İ.DH 1385/13, 14 Nisan 1317/ April 27, 1901.

3. The research time frame is treated as the Ottoman Tanzimat period with no particular distinction between the Hamidian and post-Hamidian period, including that of the Young Turks after 1908, despite some particular references to each period.

4. See, for example, Doumani, Beshara, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Agmon, Iris, Family & Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

5. For an important critique of such dichotomist approach see, Nora Barakat, “Marginal Actors? The Role of Bedouin in the Ottoman Administration of Animals as Property in the District of Salt, 1870–1912,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 105–34; see also, Nora Barakat, “An Empty Land? Nomads and Property Administration in Hamidian Syria” (PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 2015). Barakat's account is significantly important as it poses a serious critique of the study of tribal communities, and their juxtaposition vis-à-vis the state or other “sedentary” communities. Barakt demonstrates how these communities were active participants in the making of the new property regime and Ottoman reformed administration in the late Ottoman Period in today's Jordan.

6. See, for example, Kasaba, Reşat, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Köksal, Yonca, “Coercion and Mediation: Centralization and Sedentarization of Tribes in the Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2006): 469–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deringil, Selim, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the PostColonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 311–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Barakat, “An Empty Land?”

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12. For important exceptions in the study of the reform in the frontier, see, for example, Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference: Ottoman Rule in Yemen 1849–1911 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Thomas Kuehn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 1872–1919,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, African and the Middle East 27 (2007): 315–31; and Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).

13. Moshe Maoz, Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 9; Seth J. Frantzman and Ruth Kark, “Bedouin Settlement in Late Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine: Influence on the Cultural and Environmental Landscape, 1870–1948,” New Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2011): 1–24, at 5; and Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

14. See, ʿArif al-ʿArif, Al-Qada bayna al-badw (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabīyah lil-Dirasat wa-al-Nashr, 2004); Giedon M. Kressel and Joseph Ben-David, and Khalil Abu Rabi'a, “Changes in Land Usage by the Negev Bedouin since the Mid-19th Century,” Nomadic Peoples 28 (1991): 28–55.

15. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (New York: Tauris, 1998), 9.

16. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 225; see also Kuehn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism.”

17. Şerif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” Daedalus 102 (1973): 169–90.

18. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–39.

19. Talal Asad, “The Beduin as a Military Force: Notes on Some Aspects of Power Relations between Nomads and Sedentaries in Historical Perspective,” in The Desert and the Sown: Nomads in the Wider Society, ed. Cynthia Nelson (Berkley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1973), 61–74.

20. Douglas Howland and Luise White, “Introduction,” in The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Law, and Populations, ed. Douglas Howland and Luise White (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 1–18, at 6.

21. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 5.

22. Most scholarship dates the arrival of Bedouins to the area of today's Negev to the seventh century, whereas a small minority of Israeli researchers argue that most of today's Negev Bedouin arrived to the region during the eighteenth century. See Alexander Kedar, Ahmad Amara, and Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 173–75.

23. John Griffiths defined “legal pluralism” to refer to a situation in which “the sovereign commands different bodies of law for different groups of the population varying by ethnicity, religion, nationality, or geography, and…the parallel legal regimes are all dependent on the state legal system.” See John Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism?” Journal of Legal Pluralism 24 (1986): 5–8.

24. See Ido Shahar, “Legal Pluralism and the Study of Shari'a Courts,” Islamic Law and Society 15 (2008): 112–41; Karen Barkey, “Aspects of Legal Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires 1500–1850, ed. Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 83–108; Akif Tögel, “Ottoman Human Rights Practice: A Model of Legal Pluralism,” Yildirim Beyazit Law Review 2 (2016): 201–20; Cihan Artunc, “Legal Pluralism, Contracts, and Trade in the Ottoman Empire,” http://aalims.org/uploads/Artunc_aalims.pdf (May 15, 2018).

25. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

26. Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross apply the term “jurisdiction” to describe “the exercise by sometimes vaguely defined legal authorities of the power to regulate and administer sanctions over particular actions or people, including groups defined by personal status, territorial boundaries, and corporate membership.” Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross, “Empires and Legal Pluralism: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1–20, at 5–6; see also Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures.

27. Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, ed., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

28. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 6, fn. 12. Benton borrows the term from Gerald Neuman.

29. Avi Rubin, “Modernity as a Code: The Ottoman Empire and the Global Movement of Codification,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (2016): 828–56.

30. Avi Rubin, “From Legal Representation to Advocacy: Attorneys and Clients in the Ottoman Nizamiye Courts,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44:2 (2012): 111–127, at 113.

31. Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 87–111. For a summary and presentation of the Ottoman legal and judicial reform, and a discussion of different sources, especially those published in Turkish language, see Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts;  Hümeyra Bostan, “Institutionalizing Justice in a Distant Province: Ottoman Judicial Reform in Yemen 1872–1918” (Master's diss., Istanbul Şehir University, 2013).

32. The Law of Municipalities was introduced in 1877. See Mundy and Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, 50; and Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 28, 32.

33. On the pre-reform Ottoman land and land law system see Colin Imber, “The Law of the Land,” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (London: Routledge, 2012), 41–55; and Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner, 1987).

34. Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 24, 28–29; and Mundy and Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property, 50–51.

35. Each court was divided by the law into civil (hukuk) and criminal (cezâ) sections, although the actual separation between them at the subdistrict level was not very clear. Further, the law of the Nizâmiye Judicial Organization founded the councils of elders (ihtiyar meclisi) in towns and villages as peace tribunals to settle minor civil disputes upon the consent of parties involved. See Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 33.

36. Rubin, “Legal Representation,” 114.

37. Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 23. See the Yemeni experience for an illustration of this policy, Kuehn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism.”

38. BOA.İ.DH 1380/1318.N/18, 7 Teşrinisani 1316/November 20, 1900, decision of the Council of State.

39. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter of Commission of Reform and Accelerated Transactions (known as the ‘Tesrî-i Muâmelât ve Islâhat Komisyonu,’ hereafter “the Commission”) to the Ministry of Imperial Land Registry, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902.

40. BOA.DH.TMİK-S 25/62, 27 Mayıs 1315/8 June 1899, letter from the Minister of the Interior to the Grand Vizier.

41. Kushner, David, “The District of Jerusalem in the Eyes of Three Ottoman Governors at the End of the Hamidian Period,” Middle East Studies 35 (1999): 8485CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Al-ʿArif, Al-Qada bayna al-badw. It should be noted, however, that we have no sources or evidence as to the actual cases and their adjudication in communal courts before the nineteenth century.

43. The Gaza Şerîat Court Sijil/Register, 1273–77 hijri- 1857–60. The few cases that appear in the state-şerîat court registry concerned Bedouin house purchase or sale in Gaza, and some economic activities with non-Bedouin. On Bedouin's adjudication before the Hebron court, see Susynne McElrone, “Villagers on the Move: Rethinking Fallahin Rootedness in Late Ottoman Palestine,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 54 (2012): 56–68. On Bedouin use of the Syrian state-şerîat courts during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, see Astrid Meier, “Bedouins in the Ottoman Juridical Field: Select Cases from Syrian Court Records, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” Eurasian Studies 9 (2011): 187–211.

44. BOA.ŞD 2280/10, 9 Haziran 1308/June 21, 1892, interrogation file of the Ministry of the Interior; Ahmad Amara, “Beyond Stereotypes of Bedouins as ‘Nomads’ and ‘Savages’: Rethinking the Bedouin in Ottoman Southern Palestine, 1875–1900,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 15 (2016): 59–77.

45. BOA.BEO 1644/123228, 29 Mart 1317/April 11, 1901; BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter of the Commission.

46. Makdisi, Ussama, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 768–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism,’” 311.

47. Mostafa Minawi, “Beyond Rhetoric: Reassessing Bedouin–Ottoman Relations Along the Route of the Hijaz Telegraph Line at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 75–104, at 78.

48. BOA.BEO 1644/123228, 29 Mart 1317/April 11, 1901; BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter of Commission.

49. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter of Commission; see also BOA.DH.ID 124-2/71, 15 Kanunusani 1327/January 29, 1912.

50. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter of Commission.

51. Benton and Ross, “Empires and Legal Pluralism,” 4.

52. As Brinkley Messick accurately shows, Islamic law came to be narrowly defined as Islamic (divine) law, contrasted with “secular” law, and tied to discursive notions of “traditional” versus “modern” law. Instead, it should be viewed more broadly as a discourse of rules, practices, and ideas, which are divinely sanctioned and span over several socioeconomic, political, and familial spheres. Messick, Brinkley, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1996), 5466Google Scholar.

53. Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism,’” 311.

54. Ottoman efforts for the settlement and sedentarization of tribes began in the eighteenth century and reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century; see Kasaba, A Moveable Empire, 54. On changes and turns in Ottoman policy see Köksal, “Coercion and Mediation.”

55. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902, letter of Commission; see also BOA.DH.ID 124-2/71, 15 Kanunusani 1327/January 29, 1912.

56. The decision did not elaborate on the nâib's position, but he was probably to preside over the hearings in the council. Also in many nizamiye courts at the subdistrict level, it was the şerîat naib who presided over the nizamiye. Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 34. Similarly, under the British rule in Palestine, the governor of the Beersheba subdistrict was authorized to preside over the tribal court of appeals that was established by the British; see, Likhovski, Assaf, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar. On the reformed institution of the naib in general, see, Akiba, Jun, “From Kadi to naib: Reorganization of the Ottoman Judiciary in the Tanzimat Period,” in Frontiers of Ottoman Studies: State, Province, and the West, ed. Imber, Colin and Kiyotaki, Keiko (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 4360Google Scholar.

57. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 30 Kanunusani 1320/February 12, 1905; BOA.ŞD 2296/43, 12 Kanunesani 1317/January 25, 1902, letter from the minister of the interior to the Grand Vizierate, 2 Teşrinievvel 1318/March 17, 1902. There is an unclear time gap between the decision of the Council of State (December 26, 1903) and the approval of the Special Council (February 12, 1905).

58. BOA.ŞD 3026/34, 16 Şevval 1324/21 Teşrinisani 1322/December 4, 1906, appeal decision of the Jerusalem Administrative Council, 12 Kanunusani 1319/January 25, 1904.

59. Salama was authorized to represent his father based on an absolute power of attorney from 1902 in the Beersheba şerîat, and a later power of attorney before the Jerusalem şerîat court. See Jerusalem şerîat court register, wakalat (power of attorney), 11 Şaban 1321/November 2, 1903. A copy of it appears in Salman Abu-Sitta, “The Denied Inheritance: Palestinian Land Ownership in Beer Sheba,” The Palestine Land Society (2009): 1–34; see also, BOA.DH.ID 124-2/71, 15 Kanunusani 1327/January 29, 1912; and BOA.DH.ID 124-2/94, 18 Teşrinievvel 1328/October 31, 1912. The power of attorney of Abu Mahfouz was given on two different dates, 23 Şevval 1319/February 2, 1902 and 15 Zilkade 1319/February 23, 1902; see, BOA.ŞD 3026/34, 16 Şevval 1324/21 Teşrinisani 1322/December 4, 1906, appeal decision.

60. In the appeal, Abu Huqeib claimed that the land had been under the use of his ancestors for more than 200 years, and that it was registered in the tapu under Abu Huqeib's name. Responding to these claims, Salama Abu Mahfouz claimed that the question of tapu registration came before the Beersheba council, and had been duly rejected because this registration had been obtained during the Tayaha–Tarabin fighting and was therefore illegal. As for the source of their land rights, Abu Mahfouz claimed that his father had revived this land more than 50 years prior. Further, his father had dug three water wells on the land, and had been cultivating it since then. According to Abu Mahfouz, it was only in the last year that Hasan Abu ʿAbdoun had by force begun to cultivate half of the land. See, BOA.ŞD 3026/34, 16 Şevval 1324/21 Teşrinisani 1322/ December 4, 1906, appeal decision.

61. BOA.ŞD 3026/34, 16 Şevval 1324/21 Teşrinisani 1322/December 4, 1906, appeal decision.

62. Avi Rubin, “Legal Representation,” 115–18.

63. BOA.ŞD 3026/34, 16 Şevval 1324/21 Teşrinisani 1322/December 4, 1906, cassation statement to the Council of State, submitted on 4 Mart 1320/March 17, 1904.

64. BOA.DH.ID 124-2/71, 15 Kanunusani 1327/January 29, 1912, letter from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Justice.

65. Ibid.

66. The case was between Hasan Abu ʿAmar from the ʿAzazma and Treasurer (amīn al-sundūq (Ar.)) Tawfiq Effendi. The Beersheba Administrative Council ruled in favor of Tawfiq Effendi, who began soon after to plough the disputed land. Unhappy with the decision, Abu ʿAmar wanted to appeal the decision and obtain a motion preventing Tawfiq Effendi from using the land. See BOA.İ.ZAN 108/17, 6 Mayıs 1328/May 19, 1912.

67. In Turkish “dâhil-i temeddün oldukça,” see BOA.DH.TMİK.S 65/72, 23 Eylül 1322/ October 6, 1906; and BOA.DH-İD 124-2/94, 8 Teşrinievvel 1328/ October 21, 1912.

68. BOA.DH.TMİK.S 65/72, 23 Eylül 1322/October 6, 1906; BOA.DH-İD 124-2/94, 8 Teşrinievvel 1328/October 21, 1912; see also BOA, SD. 31 Mart 1328/April 13, 1912, decision of the Jerusalem Administrative Council sent to the Council of State.

69. BOA.DH.TMİK.S 65/72, 23 Eylül 1322/October 6, 1906, decision of the Council of State; see also BOA.ŞD 5 Kanunusani 1327/January 18, 1912, telegraph from the Jerusalem governor to the Ministry of the Interior; BOA.DH-İD 124-2/94, 8 Teşrinievvel 1328/October 21, 1912.

70. BOA.İ.ZAN 108/17, 6 Mayıs 1328/May 19, 1912.

71. According to the law, the appeal should go to the Jerusalem nizâmiye appeal court and then to the Cassation court in Istanbul. When the council referred plaintiffs to appeal the decision in the Gaza nizâmiye court of first instance, the Beersheba council de facto considered itself to be operating as a council of elders (ihtiyar meclisi), whereas now the appeal would go to Jerusalem, thus promoting the status of the Beersheba council de facto to a court of first instance.

72. BOA.İ.ZAN 108/17, 6 Mayıs 1328/May 19, 1912, response of the Ministry of Justice to the Grand Vizier, on 13 Eylül 1328/September 26, 1912. Two weeks later, the decision was conveyed to the Jerusalem governor see, BOA.DH.ID 124-2/71, 15 Kanunusani 1327/January 29, 1912.

73. BOA.DH.MUI 3/12-1, 6 Eylül 1325/September 19, 1909. BOA.BEO 3857/289215, 1 Şubat 1326/ February 14, 1911; BOA.BEO 3908/293068, letter from Vizierate to the Treasury, 11 Haziran 1327/June 24, 1911.

74. Nezâret-i Adliye—the Ministry of Justice—was first established as the Ministry of Trials (Nezâret-i Deâvî) in 1836, later to be reformed and renamed the Ministry of Justice in 1870, in charge of the judicial system; see Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, 36–37.

75. On Yemen see Messick, The Calligraphic State; Kuehn, Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference; and Bostan, “Institutionalizing Justice.”

76. Kuehn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism,” 328–30.

77. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 4 Mart 1318/March 17, 1902. The decision, dated 14 Teşrinievvel 1315/October 26, 1899, was attached as a copy to a letter of the Ministry of Justice to the minister of the interior, 23 Ağustos 1319/September 5, 1903.

78. BOA.DH.MKT 120/20, 30 Kanunusani 1320/February 12, 1905; BOA.ŞD 2296/43, 12 Kanunesani 1317/January 25, 1902, letter from the minister of the interior.

79. Kuehn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism.”

80. Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 61Google Scholar.

81. Reinkowski, Maurus, “Double Struggle, No Income: Ottoman Borderlands in Northern Albania,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (2003): 239–53Google Scholar.

82. Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts.

83. Mundy and Saumarez-Smith, Governing Property; and Amara, Ahmad, “The Negev Land Question: Between Denial and Recognition,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42 (2013): 2747CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. The British maintained such exception in both Palestine and Transjordan. On the construction of a separate legal sphere for the Bedouin, defined as nomadic and tribal, in Jordan, see Massad, Joseph, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 5758Google Scholar; on Palestine, see Likhovski, Law and Identity. The British policy of exception and of incorporating Bedouin custom appear in the establishment of tribal courts and tribal courts of appeals, and in the enactment of special laws targeting the Bedouin, such as the Bedouin Control Ordinance, applied in both Palestine and Transjordan.

85. On the current land dispute and house demolitions in the Beersheba region in Israel, the Negev, and the utilization of Ottoman and British legislation by Israeli government and judiciary see Kedar, Amara, and Yiftachel, Emptied Lands.