In photos: A photographer’s journey with the Palestinian Bedouin

By Yahya Salem, CNN

(CNN) — Slovakian photographer Petra Basnakova made a series of remarkable and personally transformative discoveries during her three-year-long journey among Palestinian Bedouin families.

“This photography journey was a wakeup call for me because it completely transformed my personality,” Basnakova told CNN. “I’ve grown up and found my inner peace, and I started to appreciate things I didn’t before.”

The resulting photobook, “Born of Sand and Sun,” was born of pure chance. On a trip with friends to the Nabi Musa shrine east of Jerusalem — part of her first trip outside of Europe — Basnakova diverged onto her own excursion deeper into the Judean Desert, known as El-Bariyah to her hosts, who prefer the desert’s Arabic name. Blanketed by an unfamiliar heat, she remembered sitting to rest her head on an oil stone, only to be awakened by a “miracle” — a Bedouin boy on a white donkey herding two black goats, signaling for her to follow him.

Basnakova did so instinctively, she told CNN. In mere minutes, the initial gulf of differences between her and her desert guide — complexion, culture and language among them — was diminished by a mutual recognition of humanity, and an innate sense of wonder and adventure.

“We embarked on a journey of trust, two strangers from different worlds, which led us to the most precious thing — family,” Basnakova wrote in her book.

The familiarity with which Basnakova was embraced is a vibrant throughline in her monograph which shows shepherds gazing with pride at their flocks, fretting children clinging to the safety of their mothers’ garments, and mothers kneading dough with their daughters, passing onto them practices of an evanescing Bedouin lifestyle.

“With time, they became like my sisters or mothers, and I found them to be very brave and strong,” Basnakova said of the Bedouin women she spent time with. “To me, they were like superheroes.” They confided in her some of their most intimate secrets and desires, and found solace in her lent ear — and camera — which they hoped would preserve their aspirations for a better and just life.

Palestinian Bedouin are semi nomadic people — their current population totals nearly 300,000 — who have lived in the Negev/Naqab region, stretching from Gaza to the Dead Sea, now a part of southern Israel, since around the fifth century. Traditionally engaged in agriculture, herding and dairy production, their historical attachment to the area dispels any notion that they are rootless nomads, or that their home is a “land without a people,” as Israel’s early founders would often claim.

Due to their relatively unprotected status under Israeli law, and their lifestyle and livelihood facing alarming erosion, the United Nations Development Programme stated in a 2017 report that Palestinian Bedouin — specifically those now residing in the West Bank, where Basnakova spent most of her time — suffer “the brunt of the occupation,” citing restrictions on their freedom of movement, forced displacement due to the expansion of settlements considered illegal by most of the international community, and settler violence.

Basnakova prefaces her book by writing that it is not intended to be a political statement. In fact, her dislike for political labels goes as far as a stylistic decision to drop the names Israel and Palestine entirely for an all-embracing term, “Holy Land.” But she is unapologetic about the unjust realities captured in her photographs, and detailed firsthand accounts of Israeli forces and settlers’ attacks and aggression, violence which has increased in the wake of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

“I asked them: why are you doing this? Who gave you the right to do this?” Basnakova said, recalling a confrontation with settlers attacking a group of Bedouin women herding. “They told me, ‘Because we can’.”

According to Basnakova, the settlers mocked her for her protest, before killing several goats in the Bedouin herd and leaving.

Basnakova’s book bursts with all sorts of ironies she describes as “visual metaphors” — donkeys lazing next to decrepit cars, satellite dishes installed on the desert sand and goats grazing sandy, parched expanses. In their makeshift villages, Basnakova admired Palestinian Bedouin’s ability to turn scrap into a “kingdom,” and anointed them as “desert architects.” But perhaps the starkest juxtapositions are the ones captured in the contrasts between impromptu Bedouin encampments, often erected and demolished at the apparently arbitrary whims of displacement, sitting in front of modern Israeli settlement housing, luxuriating in amenities the Bedouin could only dream of.

In her book, Basnakova reminisces over a serene Ramadan night when Nadia, a Bedouin matron and a prominent figure in Basnakova’s journey, thanked her for being a bridge of empathy between Palestinian Bedouin and the rest of the world. In that moment, Basnakova recalled that her heart “stopped beating” under the pressure of the responsibility Nadia had just bestowed on her.

But it was also in this moment that Basnakova said she realized her “mission” to document Bedouin past, present and destiny. Even the most vulnerable patrons of an unforgiving desert can confront tribulation with the command of unconquerable spirits.

“This is what really fascinates me: how generous they are, how brave they are, because they don’t have anything,” she said of the Bedouin people. “But at the same time, they have everything. And by everything, I mean they have hope that one day they will be finally free.”

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