What You Need to Know About the Rescued Bedouin Hostage in Israel

The release from Gaza of Qaeda hostage Farhan Alkadi, a member of Israel’s Bedouin community, has brought attention to a minority group that has previously lived on the margins of Israeli society and had a complicated relationship with the government.

Let’s take a look at the community and some of the issues associated with it.

What is the Bedouin minority in Israel?

The Bedouin community is part of the Arab minority in Israel. The larger Arab community in Israel, also known as Palestinian citizens of Israel, makes up about 20% of the country’s population. They have citizenship, but the traditionally nomadic Bedouin community is particularly impoverished and suffers from neglect and marginalization.

The group has long been embroiled in land disputes with Israeli authorities, which exert a major influence on the lives of many of its members and sometimes spill over into legal battles and demonstrations.

This group is headquartered in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.

How has Israel’s war with Hamas affected the community?

The rescued hostage was one of several Bedouins kidnapped on October 7. He worked as a guard at a packaging factory in Kibbutz Magen, one of several farming communities that were attacked. The Bedouin community also suffered losses, with many of its members killed on October 7.

Hamas militants kidnapped about 250 people in an attack in Israel that killed about 1,200. The Israeli military response killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and displaced 90% of the Gaza population from their homes and caused widespread destruction across the territory.

On October 7, a group of Bedouins rushed to the aid of participants in an Israeli music festival, saving lives.

The war continues to take its toll.

Many members of the Bedouin community do not have “protected spaces and are within range of rocket attacks” against Israel, said Sarah Abu-Kaf, a member of the Bedouin community and an assistant professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who focuses on mental health among the Arab community in Israel.

“On the other hand, they have family members in the Gaza Strip and they are exposed to the suffering of the people in the Gaza Strip,” she added.

What problems concern the Bedouin minority in Israel?

There are several. One significant, long-standing source of tension is that tens of thousands of Bedouins in the Negev struggle to make ends meet in villages that the Israeli authorities do not recognize. The villages are largely cut off from basic services, and the government wants to demolish them. These include the small village of a rescued hostage, most of which is slated for demolition.

Israel has sought to relocate Bedouins to existing cities, arguing that this would allow the state to provide modern services and improve their quality of life. Many members of the community see such moves as a way to push them out and uproot them from their ancestral lands, disrupting their traditional way of life.

In 1948, on the eve of Israel’s founding, there were between 65,000 and 100,000 Arab Bedouins living in the Negev, according to the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, an Arab-Jewish rights organization that also tracks the demolitions in the Bedouin community. By the end of the war in 1948, only 11,000 of the community remained in the Negev, while most had fled or been expelled, including to Jordan and Egypt, it said.

“You can’t put Bedouins in a community where they have no chance of survival,” said Wahid Alhoziil, director of a forum for Bedouin civilian victims of the October 7 events. “The government must see the Arab sector as an integral part of everyday life and give them space to express themselves, invest in education, jobs, housing, and not just destroy without offering solutions,” added Alhoziil, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army.

In addition to the unrecognized villages, other community members lived in government-planned settlements or villages that eventually gained recognition.

Overall, even excluding unrecognized villages, the community has many unmet needs and a gap between Bedouin and Jewish communities that could be bridged through government investment in areas such as education and job creation, said Alean Al-Krenawi, a professor of social work at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a community member.

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Co-author of the article: Josef Federman, journalist, Associated Press.

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Associated Press religion coverage is supported by an AP partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.