Weaving together memoir, auto-ethnography, political analysis, and cultural critique, Lavie equates bureaucratic entanglements with pain--and, arguably, torture--to examine the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its non-European Jewish women citizens.

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

Weaving together memoir, auto-ethnography, political analysis, and cultural critique, Lavie equates bureaucratic entanglements with pain--and, arguably, torture--to examine the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its non-European Jewish women citizens