Bedouins

On a refreshingly cool morning, before the sun drenches every exposed grain of sand in this vast desert, Hemeid Sobhy sets out on foot from the Bedouin village where he lives with his parents and sisters. Neatly dressed in jeans, sport shirt and sturdy sandals, he walks 40 minutes to the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. He passes through a narrow door in the monastery's thick walls and makes his way past an ancient church and a warren of buildings, clustered along winding pathways.

Israel formally abandoned hope Sunday evening of finding any survivors of last week's massive bomb attack on a Red Sea resort in Taba, just across the border in Egypt, which left about three dozen people dead. After three days of searching the ruins of the seaside complex, Israeli soldiers and volunteer medics packed up their equipment and the scraper-type devices used to comb for human remains at the scenes of countless suicide bombings inside Israel.

Couscous is to me the ultimate "comfort food." The mere scent of the delicate grain drenched in saffron-scented broth brings back childhood memories of meals shared with family and friends while I was growing up in Morocco. To this day, one of the many things I look forward to when I return home to Casablanca for a visit is to indulge in this special meal as often as I can. The grain couscous is a staple of Moroccan kitchens and is consumed in much the same way as rice is in China.

An Israeli military court Monday found a former army sergeant guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of a British peace activist in the Gaza Strip more than two years ago. It marks the first time during more than 4 1/2 years of conflict in the Mideast that an Israeli tribunal has found a soldier guilty of shooting a foreigner, although the army has informally acknowledged responsibility for such incidents in the past.

Mary Rimdzius' friends in Kuwait had told her for months that Americans should be worrying about Iraq instead of Iran, but the Long Beach woman didn't believe them. She had also heard the rumors of 30,000 Iraqi troops in the desert, but they couldn't be true either, she reasoned. She even made jokes about the rumored troops, writing her family that those forces "must be nearly fried out there." And when she dropped a departing friend off at the airport the night of Aug.

Amm Abd Rabu Abu el-Nour missed most of World War II. "News from outside didn't reach the oasis back then," the Bedouin elder, 74, recalled as one of his granddaughters entered his dirt-floor salon with a cup of strong sweet tea. These days, with talk radio, round-the-clock TV and daily newspapers, the world elsewhere is as familiar to el-Nour as his vast Western Desert backyard. "It is now 24 hours Iraq, Bush and Saddam," el-Nour said with a smile as he offered a guest his own cup of tea.

The 32 pyramids cluster majestically atop a black sandstone hill in the Sudanese desert, visible for miles. But the only people who see them are the Bedouins--who take them for granted, just as their forefathers have for thousands of years--and an occasional foreigner. It is a royal burial site from the ancient Meroitic civilization, which rivaled the Pharaonic empire of ancient Egypt to the north.

SHEIKH ZUWEID, Egypt — The Bedouin tribal leader hurried up a sand dune in the moonlight and scanned the troubled land below: the Israeli border to the east, the Mediterranean Sea to the north and, to the south, a desert of militants, smugglers and African migrants, some of whom almost certainly will die miles from their dream. Ahmad Sallam could hear the waves. His clansmen moved like whispers as they collected brush for a campfire. The tribes have held sway for centuries in Egypt's harsh Sinai peninsula, but they are facing a new threat from Islamic militants who have grown bolder since last year's overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

The residents of this Bedouin village say they were sleeping when the American planes zoomed overhead, signaling the beginning of a battle on the other side of the moonscape of desert ridges that separates them from the Syrian border five miles away. An hour or so later, the bombs began to fall on Mugr Altheed, destroying five concrete houses and a dozen or so vehicles, and sending villagers scattering into the star-filled night.

Ezry Keydar and Nadav Ben Israel, two Israeli filmmakers, began making a documentary last year about a Bedouin man's dream of restoring camel races and cultural pride. But even before the film has been finished, his dream has become theirs. Camel racing in Israel may sound outlandish, but there's a serious point. Keydar says Israel is systematically pushing camels — a symbol of Bedouin culture — into extinction. Keydar lives in the desert, respects its harsh ways and wants Bedouins and camels to stay part of Israel's natural and cultural landscape.