Bedouins Israel

A shoeless girl with tiny legs and a dirty face trips on the hard gravel, cries and races off to find comfort in a helter-skelter arrangement of corrugated tin shacks, bleating animals and threadbare tents. This Bedouin Arab child has an ever-shrinking refuge. All around her encampment, bulldozers, dump trucks and excavators relentlessly chew through the hillside to expand a booming model city for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

A shoeless girl with tiny legs and a dirty face trips on the hard gravel, cries and races off to find comfort in a helter-skelter arrangement of corrugated tin shacks, bleating animals and threadbare tents. This Bedouin Arab child has an ever-shrinking refuge. All around her encampment, bulldozers, dump trucks and excavators relentlessly chew through the hillside to expand a booming model city for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Bearing a small white flag that signals the imminence of a wedding, a large communal tent stands out starkly amid the cluster of masonry houses that give drab architectural definition to Rahat. Once a common sight in the Negev Desert, the patchwork goat-hair dwellings of Israel's 120,000 Bedouin have all but disappeared, symbolizing the end of 6,000 years of nomadic life.

Bearing a small white flag that signals the imminence of a wedding, a large communal tent stands out starkly amid the cluster of masonry houses that give drab architectural definition to Rahat. Once a common sight in the Negev Desert, the patchwork goat-hair dwellings of Israel's 120,000 Bedouin have all but disappeared, symbolizing the end of 6,000 years of nomadic life.

Negev Desert, Israel - It was night in the Negev Desert, and our bus driver Mich'ael had just turned onto a narrow dirt road. I was on Day 6 of a 10-day culinary Birthright trip and was exhausted. My 29 colleagues and I had spent the earlier part of the day exploring the old city streets of Jaffa, making our way down cobblestone walkways, through hidden alleys and into small shops. I had tried to stretch my weary legs as much as possible before boarding our bus for the 90-minute drive south to the next stop on our journey, an overnight stay with a Bedouin tribe . Birthright is a free educational trip to Israel for Jewish youth ages 18 to 26, provided by a group called Taglit Birthright.

For the sixth time in a decade, farmer Ismail Mohamed Salem watched Israeli bulldozers raze his home in this disputed Bedouin village. Hours later, he sat next to the rubble and vowed to rebuild — yet again. "This is my land," said Salem, 70, as his grandchildren lay sleeping on straw mats next to the demolished structure, now a 20-foot pile of twisted aluminum, broken concrete and splintered wood. "Why should I leave?" Salem's home was among 45 demolished early Tuesday as part of a long-running dispute between Arab tribes in the Negev desert and the Israeli government.