Negev Bedouin

The Negev Bedouin (بدو النقب, Badū an-Naqab; הבדואים בנגב Habeduim Banegev) are traditionally pastoral semi-nomadic Arab tribes indigenous to the Negev region in Israel, who hold close ties to the Bedouin of the Sinai Peninsula. The alteration of their traditional lifestyle (sometimes forced by local governments) has led to sedentarization. Estimated to number some 160,000, they comprise 12% of the Arab citizenry of Israel. Of Israel's total population, 12% live in the Negev, and Negev Bedouin constitute approximately 25% percent of the total population therein.

Definition
In the strictest sense, the Negev Bedouin are defined today as Arab nomads, who live by rearing livestock in the deserts of southern Israel. The Negev Bedouin community consists of numerous indigenous tribes, who used to be nomadic/semi-nomadic. The community is traditional and conservative, with a well-defined value system that directs and monitors behaviour and interpersonal relations.

The Negev Bedouin tribes have been divided into three classes, according to their origin:
 * descendants of ancient Arabian nomads,
 * peasants (Fellaheen), who came from cultivated areas, and
 * descendants of those brought from Africa as slaves.

Prior to 1948
Historically, the Bedouin engaged primarily in nomadic herding, agriculture, raiding, and sometimes fishing. They also earned income by transporting goods and people across the desert. Scarcity of water and of permanent pastoral land required them to move constantly.



The first recorded nomadic settlement in the Negev dates back 4,000-7,000 years. The Bedouin of the Sinai peninsula migrated to and from the Negev repeatedly throughout their history. Similar migrations took place under early Islamic rule. The Bedouin established very few permanent settlements; however, some Bedouin did build in the Negev; some evidence remains of traditional baika buildings, seasonal dwellings for the rainy season when Bedouin would stop to engage in farming. Cemeteries known as "nawamis" dating to the late fourth millennium B.C. have been also found. Similarly, open-air mosques (i.e., those without a roof), dating from the early Islamic period, are common and still in use. The Bedouin also conducted extensive farming on plots scattered throughout the Negev. They held this semi-nomadic lifestyle up until the existence of Israel.

During the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian sent Wallachian and Bosnian slaves to the Sinai to build the Saint Catherine's Monastery. Over time these slaves converted to Islam, and adopted an Arab Bedouin lifestyle.

In the seventh century, the Islamic Umayyad dynasty defeated the Byzantine armies, conquering Palestine. The Umayyads began sponsoring building programs throughout Palestine, a region in close proximity to the dynastic capital in Damascus, and the Bedouin flourished. However, this activity decreased after the capital was move to Baghdad during the subsequent Abbasid reign.

The first major European impact on the traditional Bedouin lifestyle came after the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. The rise of the puritanical Wahabbi sect also forced them to reduce raiding caravans. Instead, the Bedouin acquired a monopoly on guiding pilgrim caravans to Mecca, as well as selling them provisions. The opening of the Suez canal reduced the dependence on desert caravans, thus limiting the Bedouin's income, while attracting them to newly formed settlements that sprung up along the canal.

During World War I, the Bedouin in the Negev Desert fought with the Turks against the British, but later withdrew from the conflict. The British Mandate in Palestine brought order to the Negev; however, this order was accompanied by losses in sources of income and poverty among the Bedouin. The Bedouin nevertheless retained their lifestyle, and a 1927 report describes them as the "untamed denizens of the Arabian deserts". The British also established the first formal schools for the Bedouin.

In Orientalist historiography, the Negev Bedouin have been described as remaining largely unaffected by changes in the outside world until recently. Their society was often considered a "world without time". Recent scholars have challenged the notion of the Bedouin as 'fossilized,' or 'stagnant' reflections of an unchanging desert culture. In fact, as Emanuel Marx has shown, Bedouin were engaged in a constantly dynamic reciprocal relation with urban centers. Bedouin scholar Michael Meeker explains that "the city was to be found in their midst."

By the 20th century, much of the Bedouin population was settled, semi-nomadic, and engaged in agriculture according to an intricate system of land ownership, grazing rights, and water access.

Exodus during the 1948 War and in its aftermath
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the vast majority of the Bedouin in the Negev region fled to Egypt, or Jordan (including the territories of the former British Mandate that came under their control). Of the approximately 65,000 that lived in the area before the war about 11,000 remained. Those who remained belonged to the Tiaha confederation. They were relocated by the Israeli government in the 1950s and 1960s to a restricted zone in the northeast corner of the Negev, called the Siyagh (سياغ) made up of relatively infertile land in 10% of the Negev desert in the northeast.

As of 1951, the United Nations reported the expulsion of about 7,000 Negev Bedouin into neighbouring Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai. But, many returned undetected. The new government failed to issue the Bedouin identity cards until 1952 and continuously expelled thousands of Bedouin who remained within the new borders. Expulsions continued into the late 1950s, as reported by Haaretz in 1959: "The army's desert patrols would turn up in the midst of a Bedouin encampment day after day, dispersing it with a sudden burst of machine-gun fire until the sons of the desert were broken and, gathering what little was left of their belongings, led their camels in long silent strings into the heart of the Sinai desert." In 1950 Israel decided to stop using the Arabic place names on its official maps, and adopt Hebrew names instead. . For 120 locations in the Negev the Hebrew traditional name was adopted instead of the Arabic one (e.g. Etzion Gaver). 175 Arab names were translated literally into Hebrew (e.g. A-Soweida >> Shḥoret), and 150 Arabic names were phonetically altered to sound more like Hebrew names (e.g. Jarf >> Garof, or Al-Koreim >> Karmah). 50 names were borrowed from the Hebrew Bible without having historical connection to the specific location in question. 30 names were invented from scratch, and 8 names remained in their Arabic form. Explaining this policy in 1949 to the committee he had appointed to devise Hebrew place names for the Negev region, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion wrote, "We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs' political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names."

The legal grounds provided for the displacement of the Bedouin from their lands was the 1858 Ottoman Land Law. Under the Tanzimat reforms instituted as the Ottoman Empire gradually lost power, the Ottoman Land Law of 1858 instituted an unprecedented land registration process in order to boost the empire's tax base. Few Bedouin opted to register their lands with the Ottoman Tapu, due to lack of enforcement by the Ottomans, the inability of Bedouin at the time to read and write, the Bedouins' disinteresty in paying taxes to the ailing regime, and the lack of relevance of written documentation of ownership to the Bedouin way of life at that time. Due to the relative infertility of the land and the fact that the nearest permanent settlement was Beer Sheba, Israel claimed the land fell under the Ottoman class of 'non-workable' (mawat) land and thus according to Ottoman law should be reverted to the state.

In the years after the establishment of Israel, the Bedouin almost completely ceased to move around with their herds as a result of State land confiscation. Between 1950 and 1966, the new State of Israel imposed a military administration over Arabs in the region   and designated 85% of the Negev "State Land". All Bedouin habitation on this newly-declared State Land was retroactively termed illegal and "unrecognized". The government then forcibly concentrated these Bedouin tribes into the Siyag (Arabic for "fence") triangle of Beer Sheva, Arad and Dimona,   and the Bedouin came to reside on just over 1% of the Negev.

Despite state hegemony over the Negev, the Bedouin regarded 600,000 dunams of the Negev as theirs, and later petitioned the government for their return. Various claims committees were established to make legal arrangements to solve land disputes at least partially, but no suggestions acceptable to both sides have been developed.

As a consequence of losing access to their lands, the Bedouin also lost access to their means of self-subsistence. Thus, throughout the 1950s many Bedouin men emigrated to newly established Jewish farms in the Negev in search of employment. However, they were not allowed to bring their families with them. Bedouin were generally discriminated against in employment, as preference was given to Jews, and as of 1958, employment in the Bedouin male population was less than 3.5%.

In the 1950s, Israel began to extend mandatory education to Bedouin citizens. As a result there was a massive increase in literacy levels; illiteracy decreased from around 95% to 25% within the span of a single generation, with the majority of the illiterate being 55 or older. The Bedouin also benefited from the introduction of modern techniques of health care in the region.

Grazing restrictions
In order to reinforce the invisible Siyag fence, the State employed a reining mechanism, the Black Goat Law of 1950. The Black Goat Law curbed grazing so as to prevent land erosion, prohibiting the grazing of goats outside recognized land holdings. Because few Bedouin territorial claims were recognized, most grazing was thereby rendered illegal. Since both Ottoman and British land registration processes had failed to reach into the Negev region before Israeli rule, and since most Bedouin preferred not to register their lands as this would mean being taxed, few Bedouin possessed any documentation of their land claims. Those whose land claims were recognized found it almost impossible to keep their goats within the periphery of their newly limited range. Into the 1970s and 1980s, only a small portion of the Bedouin were able to continue to graze their goats, and instead of migrating with their goats in search of pasture, most Bedouin migrated in search of work.

In 1979, Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon declared a 1,500 square kilometer area in the Negev, a protected nature reserve, rendering a major portion of the Negev almost entirely out of bounds for Bedouin herders. In conjunction, Sharon established the Green Patrol,   the 'environmental paramilitary unit' with the mission of fighting Bedouin 'infiltration' into national Israeli land by preventing Bedouin from grazing their animals, seen as creating 'facts on the ground'. During Sharon's tenure as Minister of Agriculture (1977–1981), the Green Patrol removed 900 Bedouin encampments and cut goat herds by more than 1/3. Today, the black goat is nearly extinct, and Bedouin in Israel do not have enough access to black goat hair to weave tents.

Sedentarization and establishment of urban townships


Counter to the image of the Bedouin as fierce stateless nomads roving the entire region, by the turn of the 20th century, much of the Bedouin population in Palestine was settled, semi-nomadic, and engaged in agriculture according to an intricate system of land ownership, grazing rights, and water access.

We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat - in industry, services, construction, and agriculture. 88% of the Israeli population are not farmers, let the Bedouin be like them. Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on. His children will get used to a father who wears pants, without a dagger, and who does not pick out their nits in public. They will go to school, their hair combed and parted. This will be a revolution, but it can be achieved in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction ... this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear"

In the 1970s, the government established seven urban townships and promised Bedouin services in exchange for the renunciation of their ancestral land. Denied access to their former sources of sustenance via grazing restrictions, severed from the possibility of access to water, electricity, roads, education, and health care in the unrecognized villages, and trusting in government promises that they would receive services if they moved, in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel resettled in seven legal towns constructed by the government. Within a few years, half of the Bedouin population moved into these townships.

According to a study published by Ben Gurion University's Negev Center for Regional Development, the towns were built in the absence of any urban policy framework, lacking business districts or industrial zones;   as Harvey Lithwick of the Negev Center for Regional Development explains: "... the major failure was a lack of an economic rationale for the towns... "    According to Lithwick, and Ismael and Kathleen Abu Saad of Ben Gurion University, the towns quickly became among the most deprived towns in Israel, severely lacking in services such as public transport and banks. The urban townships became concentration centers for tens of thousands of Bedouin lacking job prospects or access to self-subsistence agriculture, and came to be known as ghettos suffering from endemic joblessness and resulting cycles of crime and drug trafficking. The major source of employment became regional mines and the Ramat Hovav toxic waste facility and its factories, all very hazardous occupations.

The other half of the Negev Bedouin resisted sedentarization and concentration into urban townships in the hope of retaining their traditions and customs; these Negev Bedouin remained in rural villages, some of which pre-date Israel. However in 1984, the courts ruled that the Negev Bedouin had no land ownership claims, effectively illegalizing their existing settlements. The Israeli government defines these rural Bedouin villages as "dispersals" while the international community refers to them as "unrecognized villages". Few of the Bedouin in unrecognized villages have seen the urban townships as a desirable form of settlement. Extreme unemployment has afflicted unrecognized villages as well, breeding extreme crime levels. Since sources of income such as grazing has been severely restricted, and the Bedouin rarely receive permits to engage in self-subsistence agriculture, many Bedouin have turned to greatly augment the remaining source of income for the unemployed which is drug trafficking and prostitution.

The Negev Bedouin today


Around half the population live in seven towns built for them by the Israeli government between 1979 and 1982. The largest Bedouin locality in Israel is the city of Rahat. Other towns include Ar'arat an-Naqab (Ar'ara BaNegev), Bir Hadaj, Hura, Kuseife, Lakiya, Shaqib al-Salam (Segev Shalom) and Tel as-Sabi (Tel Sheva).

The other half of Bedouin citizens of Israel live in 39-45 villages which are not recognized by the Israeli government and are thus ineligible for municipal services such as connection to the electrical grid, water mains or trash-pickup. According to the Israel Land Authority, in 2007 40% of the Bedouin lived in Unrecognized villages, although the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) refer to Bedouin in unrecognized villages as half the Negev Bedouin population. The RCUV figures include the five villages which remain unrecognized despite incorporation into the Abu Basma Regional Council.

Today, many Bedouin call themselves 'Negev Arabs' rather than ‘Bedouin,’ explaining that 'Bedouin' identity is intimately tied in with a pastoral nomadic way of life – a way of life they say is over. Although the Bedouin in Israel continue to be perceived as nomads, today all of them are fully sedentarized, and about half are urbanites. Nevertheless, Negev Bedouin continue to possess goats and sheep: in 2000 the Ministry of Agriculture estimated that the Negev Bedouin owned 200,000 head of sheep and 5,000 of goats, while Bedouin estimates referred to 230,000 sheep and 20,000 goats.

Urban townships
Dayan’s vision of the transformation of the indigenous Bedouin into an urban proletariat has both manifested and failed: According to an article published in 2000, in the most established of legal urban townships, over 25% of Bedouin men (not to speak of the women) were unemployed. An additional 7 urban townships are planned by the government today; none feature any business districts.

According to a State Comptroller report from 2002, the townships were built with minimal investment and infrastructure in all seven townships has hardly improved since their construction three decades earlier. To this day "most homes are not connected to a sewage system and suffer from an unreliable water supply and damaged road system."

Unrecognized villages
Many of these villages were created in the 1950s when the Israeli army resettled Bedouin from the Sinai desert. These villages do not directly appear on commercial Israeli maps, and are denied basic services like water, electricity and schools, despite being located adjacent to regional electrical and water stations.

It is forbidden by the Israeli authorities for the residents of these villages to build permanent structures or engage in agriculture, though many do, risking fines and home demolition. The Israeli government frequently demolishes homes and sprays toxic pesticides onto crops in the unrecognized villages, including one episode where Bedouin homes were demolished to make way for the establishment of a Jewish town. All of the tens of thousands of Bedouin homes and structures in the unrecognized villages are under threat of demolition.

Today, several unrecognized villages are in the process of 'recognition' - these villages were incorporated into the Abu Basma Regional Council, but are yet to receive many services from the government - most remain without water, electricity and garbage services. Five of the towns incorporated into the council remain unrecognized. The process is mired in complexities involved with regards to urban planning difficulties and land ownership problems.

Service provision
As mentioned above, the unrecognized villages lack access to water, electricity, and transportation infrastructure, and have limited access to education and health facilities; in urban townships, the government has not provided sewage systems. Because the State cannot built water infrastructure in the unrecognized villages, residents buy water barrels or install their own piping, and use electric generators and solar panels.

Instances of improvement have recently emerged. In 2006, the formerly unrecognized village of Drijat—the only Arab village in the Negev that is not indeed Bedouin—became the first community in the world to be outfitted with a solar electricity system that provides power to the entire village. In 2008, a railway station opened near the largest Bedouin town in the Negev, Rahat (Lehavim-Rahat Railway Station), a noticeable improvement to the transportation situation.

Waste management
Urban townships were constructed without adequate sewage systems, and local municipalities have generally been unable to rectify this omission due to the lack of a tax base.

Unrecognized villages are denied municipal waste services including sewage systems and treatment, and trash pickup. As a result large-scale backyard burning has emerged, with serious impacts on Bedouin and their surrounding environment.

Health
According to the World Zionist Organization, although in the 1980s, as compared with 90% of the Jewish population, only 50% of the Bedouin population was covered by Israel's General Sick Fund, the situation improved after the 1996 National Health Insurance Law incorporated another 30% of Negev Bedouin into the Sick Fund.

The Bedouin infant mortality rate is still the highest in Israel, and one of the highest in the developed world. In 2003, the infant mortality rate among Bedouin citizens was 13.3 per thousand, more than three times higher than the rate of 3.9 per thousand among the Jewish population. However, due largely to improvements in health care, the infant mortality rate has dropped over the past few decades.

60% of Bedouin men smoke. Among the Bedouin, as of 2003,7.3% of females and 9.9% of males have diabetes. Between 1998 and 2002, Bedouin towns and villages had among the highest per-capita hospitalization rates. Rahat and Tel Sheva ranked highest. However, the rate of reported new cancer incidents in Bedouin localities is very low, with Rahat having the 3rd-lowest rate in Israel at 141.9 cases per 100,000, compared to 422.1 cases in Haifa.

The Centre for Women's Health Studies and Promotion notes that in the unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev, very few health care facilities are available; ambulances do not serve the villages and 38 villages have no medical services. According to the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHR-Israel) the number of doctors is a third of the norm.

In urban townships, access to water is also an issue: an article from the World Zionist Organization Hagshama Department explains that water allocation to Bedouin towns is 25-50% of that to Jewish towns. Since the State has not built water infrastructure in the unrecognized villages, residents must buy water and store it in large tanks where fungi, bacteria and rust develop very quickly in the plastic containers or metal tanks under conditions of extreme heat; this has led to numerous infections and skin diseases.

Education
Drop-out rates are very high among Negev Bedouin. In 1998 only 43 percent of Bedouin youngsters in the appropriate age group reached the 12th grade.

Enforcement of mandatory education for the Bedouin has been weak, particularly in the case of young girls. According to the aforementioned 2001 study by the Centre for Women’s Health Studies and Promotion, poor access to education has resulted in troubling data: more than 75% of Bedouin women had no schooling at all or had not completed their elementary school. This is due to a combination of internal Bedouin traditional attitudes towards women and lack of government investment in enforcing the Mandatory Education Law and allocating resources to Bedouin schools; Amnesty International decries "the lack of government investment for the Bedouin population in this region" which they say "stands in stark contrast to the resources allocated to developing infrastructure for Jewish communities in the Negev region, as well as in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories."

However, the number of Bedouin students in Israel has started to rise. Arabic summer schools are being developed. As of 2006 there were 162 male and 112 female students in Ben Gurion university. In particular, the number of female students grew sixfold from 1996-2001. The university had made special Bedouin-only scholarship programs available in order to encourage higher education among the Bedouin.

Women's status
According to a range of studies, including a 2001 study by the Centre for Women’s Health Studies and Promotion at Ben Gurion University, in the transition from self-subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry to a settled semi-urban lifestyle, women have lost their traditional sources of power within the family. The study explains that poor access to education among women has triggered new disparities between Bedouin men and women and compounded the loss of Bedouin women's status in the family. On the other hand, a 2009 study suggested that female genital cutting had virtually disappeared due to modernisation process under Israeli rule.

Poverty
As mentioned above, Bedouin citizens of Israel suffer from extreme rates of joblessness and endure the highest poverty rate in Israel. According to a 2007 Van Leer Institute study, 66 percent of Negev Bedouin as a whole lived under the poverty line (in unrecognized villages, the figure reached 80 percent), as compared with a poverty rate of 25 percent in the general Israeli population. According to a 2003 Ben Gurion University study, 71% of Bedouin citizens suffer from hunger; among those supported by social services, 87% of children are in danger of hunger. On the other hand Tourism and crafts are growing industries and in rare cases, such as Drijat, have reduced unemployment significantly.

Crime
The crime rates in the Bedouin sector in the Negev are alleged to be high. To that end, a special police unit, codenamed Blimat Herum (lit. emergency halt), consisting of about 100 regular policemen, was founded in 2003 to fight crime in the sector. The Southern District of the Israel Police cited the rising crime rate in the sector as the reason for the unit's inauguration. The unit was founded after a period of time when regular police units conducted raids on Bedouin settlements to stop theft (especially car theft) and drug dealing.

Notable is human trafficking from Egypt to Israel through the Sinai Desert, mostly of prostitutes, and illicit drug trafficking and this is due to the Bedouin's intimate knowledge of the area. It is claimed that the police and the IDF is doing little to stop this from occurring. Other characteristic crimes are racketeering (the collection of "protection" payments from local businesses), selling drugs and the theft of cars. Other crimes, e.g. domestic violence, alcohol related offences or burglary (house breaking) are lower amongst the Bedouin.

The reasons for the high crime phenomenon are contested, and are probably not as high as thought. After a group of Bedouin ran over a policeman in March 2008, Asaf Hefetz, a former Israel Police commissioner, claimed that while the police should act with a strong hand on the matter, the reason for the high crime rates in the "Wild South" is long-term neglect by the state and a low socio-economic level. Yaakov Turner, the mayor of Beersheba and himself a former police commissioner, believes that the Bedouin as a whole are not responsible for all the crime in their sector.

Bedouin and the environment
Concentrating the indigenous Bedouin into urban townships so as to preserve National Reserve spaces for recreational and tourist uses has been argued to be necessary to preserve the pristinity of the 'Last Frontier'. In 1979 Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon declared a 1,500 square kilometer area in the Negev, a protected nature reserve, rendering a major portion of the Negev almost entirely out of bounds for Bedouin herders. Today this reserve is used by the military and 85% of the desert is off-limits for civilian purposes. In conjunction with this move, Sharon established the 'Green Patrol,' the 'environmental paramilitary unit' with the mission of fighting Bedouin 'infiltration' into national Israeli land by preventing Bedouin from grazing their animals (seen as creating 'facts on the ground'). During Sharon's tenure as Minister of Agriculture (1977–1981), the Green Patrol removed 900 Bedouin encampments and cut goat herds by more than 1/3; today the black goat is nearly extinct, and Bedouin in Israel do not have enough access to black goat hair to weave tents.

Prominent Israeli environmental leader Alon Tal has openly referred to Bedouin construction as among the top ten environmental hazards in Israel, In a 2008 article Tal argued that the Bedouin are taking up open spaces that should be used for park land. In a 2007 report compiled by Israel's coalition of environmental groups, LIFE and Environment, the environmental justice organization Bustan contested Tal's view: "Regarding rural Bedouin land use as a threat to open spaces fails to take into account the fact that Bedouin occupy little more than 1% of the Negev and fails to call into question the IDF’s hegemony over more than 85% of the Negev’s open spaces." According to Bustan, the Bedouin have been stigmatized as "environmental hazards"; an advisor to the Ministry of the Environment reportedly told the organization, "The Bedouin are an environmental hazard. They throw their trash everywhere and they're having children all over the place. They steal our land and erode it with their goats. They take up all the open spaces." In contrast, scholar Gideon Kressel proposes that Middle Eastern states, particularly Israel, promote a brand of pastoralism that preserves open spaces for rangeland herding.

In the remaining portion of the Negev available for civilian purposes, a large number of citizens, Jews and Bedouin, live together in close proximity to a range of types of hazardous infrastructure. Several unrecognized villages, in particular, Wadi al-Na'am, are located close to the Ramat Hovav toxic waste dump, and residents have suffered from higher than average incidences of respiratory illnesses and cancer. Given the small scale of the country, in the past few decades both Bedouin and Jews of the region have come to share some 2.5 % of the desert with Israel's nuclear reactors, 22 agro and petrochemical factories, an oil terminal, closed military zones, quarries, a toxic waste incinerator (Ramat Hovav), cell towers, a power plant, several airports, a prison, and 2 rivers of open sewage. Jews and Bedouin both suffer equally from the effects of Negev health hazards; however the impacts on Bedouin citizens are compounded by the lack of access to health services in unrecognized villages.

Demolitions, development and demographics
Bedouin advocates argue that the main reason for the transfer of the Bedouin into townships against their will is demographic. The Bedouin comprise the youngest population in Israeli society and with an annual growth rate of 5.5%. For this reason the Bedouin are seen as a demographic threat to the maintenance of a Jewish majority in the Negev region.

In 2003, Director of the Israeli Population Administration Department, Herzl Gedj, described polygamy in the Bedouin sector a "security threat" and advocated various means of reducing the Arab birth rate.

In 2005 Ronald Lauder of the Jewish National Fund announced plans to bring 250-000-500,000 new settlers into the Negev through the Blueprint Negev, incurring opposition from Bedouin rights groups concerned that the unrecognized villages might be cleared to make way for Jewish-only development and potentially ignite internal civil strife. Some Bedouin advocates claim the Blueprint Negev is motivated by demographic considerations, aimed at the increasing Jewish population to offset the skyrocketing Bedouin population.

National Identity
Negev Bedouin, like other Arab citizens of Israel, navigate multiple cultural, national and civic identities.

Attitude towards the State of Israel
Each year, between 5%-10% of the Bedouin of draft age volunteer for the Israeli army, (unlike Druze, and Jewish Israelis, they are not required by law to do so ). The legendary Israeli soldier, Amos Yarkoni, first commander of the Shaked Reconnaissance Battalion in the Givati Brigade, was a Bedouin (born Abd el-Majid Hidr). Despite their uniquely high numbers in the Israeli Defense Forces over the decades, the percentage of Bedouin in the army fell drastically after the October 2000 events. It is believed that reduced willingness to join the IDF is because despite their service in the army over half are denied access to water, electricity, and trash pickup, and are denied the right to build roads to make schools and hospitals accessible. A 2001 poll suggests that Bedouin feel more estranged from the state than do Arabs in the north. A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article reports that, "Forty-two percent said they reject Israel's right to exist, compared with 16 percent in the non-Bedouin Arab sector." The article quoted Thabet abu-Ras of Ben-Gurion University: "You neglect what is basically a loyal, quiet, nonpoliticized population, and it ends up exploding in your face. There is no way around it." In contrast, a 2004 study found that Negev Bedouins tend to identify more as Israelis than other Arab citizens of Israel.

Ismail Khaldi is the first Bedouin deputy consul of the State of Israel and the highest ranking Muslim in the Israeli foreign service. Khaldi is a strong advocate of Israel. While acknowledging that the state of Israeli Bedouin minority is not ideal, he said "I am a proud Israeli - along with many other non-Jewish Israelis such as Druze, Bahai, Bedouin, Christians and Muslims, who live in one of the most culturally diversified societies and the only true democracy in the Middle East. Like America, Israeli society is far from perfect, but let us deals honestly. By any yardstick you choose -- educational opportunity, economic development, women and gay's rights, freedom of speech and assembly, legislative representation -- Israel's minorities fare far better than any other country in the Middle East."

Relationships with Palestinians
Before 1948 the relationships between Negev Bedouin and the farmers to the north was marked by intrinsic cultural differences as well as common language and some common traditions. Whereas the Bedouin referred to themselves as ‘arab’ instead of ‘bedû’ (Bedouin), farmers in the area ‘fellahîn’ (farmers) used the term Bedû, meaning "inhabitants of the desert" (Bâdiya), more often.

Because of their status in Israeli society as the principal Arab population that served in the army (in addition to a portion of the Druze), Bedouin have experienced a rift with the Palestinian population on several levels. On the one hand, many Bedouin have played a role in policing borders which they themselves traditionally moved across freely, ejecting Palestinian workers sneaking into Israel, and even preventing the free movement of other Bedouin to whom they are often related. Identifying themselves with the same national terminology applied to those they have played a role in occupying presents serious moral quandaries. Many Bedouin want to disassociate themselves from the ‘term’ Palestinian, which is associated with terrorism in Israel; already in an extremely tenuous situation, they fear that identifying themselves with Palestinians will further injure their status in Israeli society and their potential to gain respect for their rights as citizens. Some scholars regard these developments as an illustration of a strategy of 'Divide to Rule'.

A 2001 study suggests that regular meetings and cross border exchanges involving Negev Bedouin and their relatives or neighbors living in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or Sinai may be more common than expected, casting "doubt on the accepted view of relationships between the Bedouin of the Negev and their Palestinian neighbors." Reports from the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages regularly refer to "the indigenous Palestinian Bedouin."