The House of Sheikh Salman al-Huzayil

The story

The house of Sheikh Salman al-Huzayil (Arabic: القصر — منزل الشيخ سلمان الهزييل) is a three-story stone house built in 1924 on a hilltop at the northwestern entrance to Rahat, east of Kibbutz Shoval. It looks out over the grazing lands of the al-Huzayil tribe in the northern Negev, a branch of the Tiyaha confederation, and as far as the southwestern edges of the Hebron hills. The house was built by Sheikh Salman Ali al-Huzayil, who was born about the year 1882 and died in 1982. The British appointed him sheikh of the tribe in 1922; later he was sheikh of the sheikhs of the Tiyaha in the Negev and a judge in the matters of the tribal court in Beersheba, and he served for about sixty years until his death. He was known also for the breeding of Arabian horses and for traditional Bedouin medicine, and in 1946 he received the founders of Kibbutz Shoval on his lands. The house is built of ashlar stones with wooden beams, railway sleepers and concrete. In it his wives lived and his children grew up, and beside it stood the shig in which he received his guests; among those who visited it were the President of the State Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and the Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol and Menachem Begin. To the tent dwellers around it the building looked like a palace, and thus the nickname the Sheikh's Palace stuck to it. Today it stands abandoned, mostly ruined and crumbling. The Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel declared it a heritage site and decided to turn it into a heritage center and a museum for the history of the Bedouin in the Negev.

• Bedouin
• British Mandate
• People