Roughly 200,000 Bedouins live in the Negev Desert of Israel, all of them citizens and most of them concentrated in an area around the city of Beersheva. Granted Israeli citizenship in the 1950's, they lived under military rule until the 1960's and have since resisted government attempts to move them into seven larger, recognized towns. Thousands of Bedouin still live in dozens of unrecognized settlements across the northern Negev. If the Prawer-Begin law is passed by Israel's Knesset, as many as 40,000 Bedouins will be forcibly removed from their homes.
A look back at the Bedouin presence in the Negev in photographs, 1900 to the present.
The Bedouins of the Negev Desert, Looking Back Through the Years
21
Bedouins and British officers celebrating the end of the 1930 locust campaign at Beersheva. The first in a succession of swarms appeared in the Jordan valley at the end of October 1929. The extensive use of poison baits in the Beersheba area led to concerns that arsenic was being washed out by winter rains and contaminating cisterns used to collect rain water.
22
Bedouins watching camel races at celebrating marking end of locust campaign, June 30, 1930
23
Beersheva Bedouins, ca. 1930
24
Sheikh Hamed Al-Sane at Beersheva, ca. 1920 - 1933. The Bedouin were often exoticized, romanticized and sentimentalized by Europeans, as this portrait would suggest