Back to the Land: A new generation of activists is raising the global profile of Indigenous Arab Bedouins and resisting Israeli government efforts to seize their territories

The Indigenous Arab Bedouin have lived in southern Palestine for centuries, mainly in the city of Beersheba, known as Bir al-Saba’ in Arabic. The community preserved its traditional Islamic culture under Ottoman and British rule, and has continued to do so under the sedentarization polices of the Israeli state. Various regimes have come and gone in the Naqab, a region that today accounts for more than half of Israel’s landmass, but the Bedouin have remained loyal to their ancestral lands.