A: Well, I wasn't there. I was born in 1996. But according to what my grandfather and grandmother told me... we were simply a minority and we didn't have enough forces and we weren't ready for a war. The Arabs who lived here, and especially the Bedouins...
Q: Where did your family live then?
A: My family then lived in the northern Negev [desert in Israel]... And my answer is we weren't ready for war and we simply wanted to live.
Q: You lived in tents then.
A: Yes, we lived in tents then.
Q: Did they evict you?
A: Yes.
Q: So where did you live then after you left?
A: After the war, there were only 11,000 Bedouins and originally there were 100,000 Bedouins in all the Negev. The government concentrated the Bedouins which was called the reservation area.
Q: Where was that?
A: The reservation area was in the northern Negev. I think it was a triangle. Arad, Dimona...
Q: But was it a city? What was it?
A: It was a military administration. It was the army that was the authority and there was no police, and we were a type of outcasts. We were under military administration until almost 1966... then the government decided that we didn't pose a threat to the existence of the state of Israel even though the Israeli intelligence in the 1950s defined the Arabs of Israel as a non-risk factor to the state of Israel. But it took them many years to start to think of development plans and the existence of the Arabs.
During that time in the Negev there were built more than 200 moshavs, communities, kibbutzes and individual farms for Jews only and only after 1967, the Six-day war, they started to think about Bedouoins and only one thing, to concentrate the Bedouins, to move the Bedouin population, which sadly was not successful. Only half the Bedouin population is in cities and that population suffers greatly from different problems: problems with education, problems with unofficial education, problems with land, family problems, incompatibility with the land they are on, social incompatibility with the modern life and urban life. Because Bedouins are not urban peoples. And the other half are located in unrecognized villages and they don't have basic rights like connection to water and electricity, sewage infrastructure, roads infrastructure, basic infrastructure. And they fight daily for a piece of bread.
That's it in general. There is a bigger story to this, but I will stop here.
~ anonymous Arab Israeli, "Arab Israelis: Why did you surrender to the Jews in 1948?," The Ask Project, 13:14 mark, June 4, 2023
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