The Bedouin population in the Negev numbers about 150,000 people. For long overshadowed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about half of the population lives in poor and squalid ‘townships’ that were set up for them, since the 1960’s, by the Israeli Government, under a policy that aims at ‘concentrating’ the Bedouin population in small and circumscribed areas, so as to vacate as much land as possible for future Jewish settlements. The other half of the Bedouin population resides in some 45 villages that are not officially recognized as such, and which came into being through a combination of Bedouin resistance to the ‘townships’ policy (which required that they give up on their land claims) and forced expulsions of Bedouin populations into a concentrated geographical zone (the ‘Siag’) in the 1950s and 1960s. These villages range in size between a few hundreds and a few thousands of inhabitants and the traditional lifestyles of the Bedouin population cannot be preserved within such a crowded and under-resourced environment.
