55 SPECIAL COLLECTION INHABITING THE MARGINS: MIDDLE EASTERN MINORITIES REVISITED Seeing and Unseeing Like a State: House Demolitions, Healthcare, and the Politics of Invisibility in Southern Israel Na’amah Razon, University of California, San Francisco ABSTRACT A 2005 amendment to Israel’s Public Land Law and the 1994 National Health Insurance Law (NHIL) are two policies that highlight the complex re- lationship between the Israeli state and the Negev/Naqab Bedouins. While the Land Law sanctioned house demolitions and the erasure of Bedouin villages, the NHIL granted Bedouins access to healthcare and increased their visibility within the medical system. In this article, I draw on these con- tradictory policies of inclusion and exclusion to argue that the treatment of Negev/Naqab Bedouins as equal citizens within Israel is contingent on state officials’ seeing only particular aspects of this community. Crucially, this means that state officials actively make invisible the unequal and ex- clusionary politics that marginalize Bedouin citizens. While the case of the Bedouins in Israel is a specific one, I suggest that attending to how state officials make particular individuals, communities, and histories invisible clarifies how states, both in Israel and beyond, maintain the state’s ideol- ogy of equality despite a hierarchy of privilege. It is through the production of invisibility that neglect and exclusion come to be justified and obscured, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 1, p. 55–82, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2017 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved.