An Egyptian Bedouin with his camel in the Sinai Peninsula
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"People are tired of oppression here. We go into the street and get searched and arrested. There is discrimination here," says Om Ahmed, who has two adult sons in jail and two on the run. "The police don't treat our sons the way they treat the Egyptians' sons."
But current tensions are rooted in a cyclical history of mistrust. The Sinai Bedouin stand accused, in Egyptian schoolbooks and the popular imagination, of collaborating with Israel in its wars with Egypt, fueling mutual antagonism. More recently, Bedouin were implicated in a series of terrorist bombings that killed 130 people at Sinai beach resorts from 2004 to 2006. In the aftermath, some 3,000 Bedouin were arrested; up to 1,000 of them are still in detention, according to Ahmed Ragheb, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. He says that about 1,000 more are in prison for smuggling and related charges. The government has denied using abusive measures in Sinai, and there are no official statistics on the number of Bedouin in detention.
The Bedouin's harsh reality produces an anomalous politics that is sympathetic to Gaza's militant Hamas government while simultaneously praising Israeli justice and the late Saddam Hussein. The Bedouin see a cultural connection with Gaza's Palestinians, many of whom share tribal lineages. But as anger toward the Mubarak regime deepens, some also express nostalgia for the Israeli occupation of Sinai, which lasted from 1967 to 1982.
"We like Israel more [than Egypt] because there's justice," says Ibrahim, a young cement smuggler. "If you are a person living inside Israel, you live better than you would in Egypt, without any smuggling," he says. "They don't let you just sit on the street ... And Israel would never arrest your wife and father if you are the one wanted by the state."
Some smugglers who have amassed wealth have become self-styled Robin Hoods of the desert, delivering food and blankets to the forgotten poor — many of whom still live without water or electricity in huts built of twigs among the dunes. "I'll bring a doctor tomorrow," promises Mohamed, one of Sinai's most powerful arms smugglers, after hearing the plea of a woman and her sick father living in a fly-infested dwelling of trash and debris, miles from any village.
But their life outside the law constantly threatens to erupt in violent conflagrations. The smugglers who run the show are gun-toting, trigger-happy cowboys of the desert, subverting police checkpoints through roadless sand dunes and hills in an army of Land Cruisers with no license plates and tinted windows. They carry Glock pistols, AK-47s and even a few M-16s. "I'm a wanted man. We're all wanted men, and we're all armed," says Abdullah, a tunnel owner who sleeps in a different place every night and says he would rather die than be captured.
And when Egypt's steel wall seals off trade with Gaza, tensions could explode in Sinai. "This is the beginning," says Abu Daoud, sipping tea next to an evening campfire. "The people are still poor, but there has to be a revolution someday. It has to happen because there is no democracy and there are no rights here."