The Great War in the Middle East from a Poetic Bedouin Perspective: A Close Reading of Two Poems about the Sinai Campaign and the Battles in the Negev During World War I

Through a close reading of two Bedouin poems about the World War I era, this article examines how Bedouin in northern Sinai and Palestine’s southern coastal plain perceived the moment at which the Ottomans lost their hold over this region. By anchoring symbolic expressions from each poem in their historical, cultural, and poetic contexts, this inquiry sheds some light on the feelings and outlooks of ordinary people in response to the war’s massive transformation of the area in which they lived.