Israel's largest Bedouin community fights to keep swimming pool segregated
The first and only swimming pool in the Bedouin town of Rahat is struggling to balance Israeli equality laws with the community's preference for gender-separated swimming.
Liberal Western democracies tend to have a hard time with the customs and rules of conservative communities. This is true in France, particularly when it comes to issues like veils and burkinis, and of the United States with abortion. It is certainly true of Israel, where there are several religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Israel’s Arab community has many conservative features of its own.
It has been just a month and a half since the first swimming pool for the Bedouin community — a third of the country’s entire Arab population — opened Aug. 28 in the town of Rahat. Rahat is the biggest Bedouin town in Israel, with a 2016 population of 65,000 in the city proper and tens of thousands more in the surrounding Bedouin communities. Though the Bedouin are Muslim, for the most part they live separately from the rest of Israel’s Arab sector. They are a very conservative community, particularly when it comes to women’s rights. Polygamy is common despite being illegal under Israeli law.
