The New York Times · New York, New York · 19 May 1969

CP-1969-017

Israel Hopes to House Negev Bedouins, a People of Space and Sky

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE, Special to The New York Times

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Transcribed from the clipping

BEERSHEBA, Israel, May 13—In the Negev wilderness of southern Israel, where the turn of a new road can reveal a scene of black-robed Arabs tending sheep in the barren hills straight out of the Old Testament, the Israeli Government is building a modern village for Bedouins.

About five miles from the Negev city of Beersheba a freshly asphalted road leads to Tel Sheva, a small, permanent settlement for the nomads of the desert. Housing for Bedouins is something like refrigerators for Eskimos, and no one is at all sure if the experiment is going to work.

The Bedouin tribes, moving from one meager grazing spot to another in this landscape of harsh grandeur for thousands of years, have provided literature with some of its most sublime clichés—ships in the desert and Arabs folding their tents and silently stealing away.

Along the road to Tel Sheva, the dark winter tents, still in use in May, cluster in traditional temporary encampments. But even the Bedouins are changing. Nearly half of the 30,000 believed to have been in the Negev before 1948—it is hard to find out who, if anyone, has taken a census of nomads—left after the state of Israel was established.

Of those who remained, some have become near-permanent employes of the new towns the Israelis have established in the south. They go to work daily from their camps, which are untouched by chance. These are the Bedouin “sophisticates.” They are skilled mechanics and good workers, and have advanced to pinup girls and omnipresent radios.

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Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person.

Context added by this archive

Date check: DATE AND PAPER CONFIRMED ON THE PAGE. The running head reads “THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, MAY 19, 1969”, which matches both `pub` and the slide-label date of 1969-05-19 exactly. The dateline reads “BEERSHEBA, Israel, May 13”.

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