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
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Photo shows the official opening of Beersheba by the Ottoman Turkish government before World War I. By 1906, the town consisted of 50 buildings, including a mosque and a police station
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Beersheva, c. 1900. The town was founded in 1900 by the Ottomans as an administrative center from which they could keep the Bedouin in check. The town quickly grew to be the 'capital' of the Negev. The Bedouin Sheiks of the region settled there--and began building with stone for the first time