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Prior to the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, when the Negev became part of Israel, an estimated 65,00090,000 Bedouins lived in the Negev. According to Encyclopedia Judaica, 15,000 Bedouin remained in the Negev after 1948; other sources put the number as low as 11,000.[58]In 1999, 110,000 Bedouins lived in the Negev, 50,000 in the Galilee and 10,000 in the central region of Israel.[59]
All of the Israeli Bedouin were granted Israeli citizenship in 1954.[60]
The Bedouin who remained in the Negev belonged to the Tiaha confederation[61] as well as some smaller groups such as the 'Azazme and the Jahalin. After 1948, some Negev Bedouins were displaced. The Jahalin tribe, for instance, lived in the Tel Arad region of the Negev prior to the 1950s. In the early 1950s, the Jahalin were among the tribes which, according to Emmanuel Marks, "moved or were removed by the military government."[62] They ended up in the so-called E1 area East of Jerusalem.
About 1,600 Bedouin serve in the Israel Defense Forces, many as trackers in the IDF's elite tracking units.[63]
Famously, Bedouin shepherds were the first to discover the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish texts from antiquity, in the Judean caves of Qumran in 1946. Of great religious, cultural, historical and linguistic significance, 972 texts were found over the following decade, many of which were discovered by Bedouins.