In her polka-dot hijab and ankle-length traditional abaya, Eman Bin Nasser doesn’t look like the face of Israeli high tech. But Bin Nasser, who lives in a ramshackle, tin-roofed structure in the Negev desert, is a software engineer at a high-tech firm in Beersheva.

The 30-year-old mother of two is the first Bedouin woman from her village, Wadi al-Naam, to have a university degree.

“Most of my family don’t even know what I mean when I say I work as a software engineer, so I just tell them I work for a company in Beersheva, and they get that,” says Bin Nasser, seated in her office at Siraj Technologies, a company specializing in connecting devices to cloud platforms in a field known as the Internet of Things.

At home, she barely has internet service, relying on a solar-powered router her husband set up that provides intermittent access. Her sprawling village of 15,000, situated just a few hundred yards from a toxic waste plant, is not connected to Israel’s electricity grid.   

Bin Nasser is one of a growing number of Bedouin women who are changing the face of a community that has for decades constituted Israel’s poorest, least educated and most disadvantaged group of citizens.
The enormous challenges they face only intensified this year in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war that began not far from their homes near the Gaza border.   

About 300,000 Bedouin live in the Negev—out of some 350,000 in all of Israel. While the Bedouin, who descend from nomadic Muslim Arab tribes, constitute just 3 percent of the total population of Israel, they make up roughly a quarter of the population of the Negev. Bedouin towns and villages consistently rank on the lowest socioeconomic rung in the country. Bedouin youth have the lowest high school matriculation rate and the highest dropout rate (17 percent dropout compared to 3 percent among Jewish students).

Bedouin women face the additional challenge of living in a patriarchal society in which polygamy is not uncommon and girls are often married off early, some as young as 13, even though the legal age of marriage in Israel is 18.

On top of this, a land dispute with the State of Israel has left about 100,000 Bedouin in the Negev living in encampments, known as “unrecognized villages.” These communities, including Bin Nasser’s, lack electricity, running water, internet and paved roads. Due to the dispute, every year thousands of homes are demolished by the state, which maintains they have been illegally built. 

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, these unrecognized Negev communities have been subjected to heavy rocket fire but lack bomb shelters, safe rooms and air-raid sirens. Often the Iron Dome doesn’t intercept missiles headed for the remote places where they live. In fact, the only casualty of Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel in April was a 7-year-old Bedouin girl who was seriously injured by shrapnel at her home in an unrecognized village. 

Since Hamas first launched its 2023 attacks, at least 22 Bedouin have been killed, either shot by terrorists on October 7 or killed by rocket fire from Gaza.

In addition, eight Bedouin were kidnapped, four of whom remain in Hamas captivity, with one believed to be dead. Three others were freed, including one who was rescued in August, and one who was mistakenly killed by Israel Defense Forces’ fire while attempting to flee.

Thirteen Bedouin were recognized as heroes from October 7 for saving other Israelis fleeing the Hamas attackers, particularly at the Nova music festival. Among them was Yousef Ziadna, a 48-year-old minibus driver from the town of Rahat, who rescued some 30 festival-goers.

Many Bedouin say they feel victimized by both Hamas and by Israel. As Israeli citizens, they have been suffering Hamas attacks. But they also feel the pain of civilians in Gaza, where many have relatives. Expressing that concern or any kind of identification with Gazans has at times enraged Jewish Israelis. Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, has defended at least 95 university students who have been suspended, expelled or even arrested for posts on their private social media accounts, usually for citing quotes from the Koran or for expressing solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Despite these numerous obstacles, Bedouin women in recent years have been blazing new trails in their traditional community—graduating from high school, pursuing higher education and entering the job market.

About 20 to 25 percent of Bedouin women work outside their homes, about double the rate of a decade ago. Most opt for traditional vocations like teaching and nursing. Yet a small but growing number are becoming pioneers in other professions, such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics and, lately, in high tech.

“Siraj Technologies is the first place I have worked, and it’s perfect for me,” says Bin Nasser, who studied software engineering at Sami Shamoon College of Engineering in Beersheva. “It’s comfortable that nearly all the workers are Bedouin; it feels like family.”

The company was founded seven years ago by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) of the same name, Siraj, which strives to expose the Bedouin community to science and technology and integrate members into the country’s high-tech sector. According to data from 2021, 1 percent of high-tech professionals in Israel are Bedouin.

“Even if there are talented Bedouin software engineering graduates, they find it hard to break into Israeli high tech, both because they lack the networking that is so important in that field and because they lack role models,” explains Fahima Atawna, who, until recently, served as executive director of the NGO Siraj.

The company, located in a sleek-looking industrial park in Beersheva, seems to be a place where there is little friction between modernity and Muslim tradition. “Workers here don’t need to explain why they need to step out now for prayer, or why they need to fast on Ramadan,” she says.

Atawna is something of a trailblazer herself. The 40-year-old resident of the Bedouin township of Hura has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, a master’s degree in public health and is also a certified ambulance driver and medic—a far cry from her own mother, who was illiterate.

“If my mother missed the boat because she didn’t know how to read or write, we will miss the boat if we don’t know how to use technology,” says Atawna, who, in August, became vice president of community outreach and resource development at Synergy7, a consortium that aims to establish cutting-edge R&D labs in Beersheva.

At present, five of the 25 engineers, all Bedouin, employed at Siraj Technologies are women. But company manager Othman Alshedh expects this ratio to increase dramatically given the number of women currently studying science and engineering in university.

Indeed, women made up 43 percent of Bedouin engineering and architecture students in 2019, compared to just 16 percent in 2007, according to a report by NAS Research and Consulting based on figures from the Council for Higher Education in Israel. Of the 168 Bedouin university students studying a range of quantitative sciences in 2020-21, 77 percent were women. Of the 203 Bedouin studying medicine and related fields in the same year, 84 percent were women.

The figures reflect shifts in the traditional Bedouin society, where women have been expected to marry young, raise children and run the household. The uptick in the number of girls studying is attributed to several factors. These include the success of various programs aimed at encouraging this trend; improvement in infrastructure, such as roads that enable greater access to schools; and more flexible attitudes among some Bedouin tribes and families regarding women’s roles. And then there is the sheer determination of individual Bedouin women.

One 32-year-old female interviewee, who asked not to be named, put it this way: “In my generation, a woman knows that either you get married during or right after high school—or you go on to study in university. That’s the only thing that can save us from having to marry young.” 

Nadaa Alkraan is part of the young generation of Bedouin women aiming high. The third-year computer science student at Ben-Gurion University was one of some 40 young Bedouin—34 of them women—who visited the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa last year, as part of an enrichment program. 

“How do you say innovation in Arabic?” asks an Arabic-speaking guide at the Peres Center. “Ibtikar,” pipe in several of the young women, all wearing dark hijabs that formed a striking silhouette against the neon-colored screens telling the story of Israeli high tech.

Alkraan hopes to be part of that story one day. “My dream is to set up my own startup,” says the petite 21-year-old who is the first woman from her unrecognized village to attend university.

The 10th of 12 children in her family, she literally had to pave her way to get to where she is today. “Our village was always being flooded by the rain in winter. It was very difficult to walk to the main road, so we, the villagers, built our own path to the road,” she recalls. That facilitated access to many things, including afterschool programs like the one she attended at the Tamar Center, which organized the Peres innovation center visit for alumni.

The Tamar Center was founded in 2015 by Bedouin businessman and philanthropist Ibrahim Nsasra. Its goal is to identify and encourage outstanding Bedouin high school students from the some two dozen different tribes in Israel to study and succeed at STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

Hanan Jbarin is director of the computer science track in Tamar’s afterschool enrichment program, one of several programs run by the center. Part of her job is helping students overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of a higher education.

Last year was even more challenging because of the war. The afterschool program, ordinarily held in Beersheva, was moved to Hura, a Bedouin township, because parents were afraid to let their children frequent a predominantly Jewish city when the overall climate in the country was so tense.

But even without that additional complication, Jbarin has her work cut out for her.

“When they enter my class, they are in culture shock,” says Jbarin, herself a graduate of a Tamar Center program. “Not only have many of these students never met with Jews—many have not even met Bedouin from another tribe.” 

The first time Jbarin, a 24-year-old who lives in Hura, asked for a boy and a girl to volunteer for an activity together, her students were alarmed. “In the community, a girl can’t speak to any boys, not even to her male cousin,” she says. “In my classroom, I encourage and expect girls and boys to speak to each other.”

Over time, she says, they adapt. “I tell them: ‘You will get to university and that is the first shock you will have—it’s not the world you know. Sometimes what is hard isn’t the studies, but the things around it. I want to help you get used to what’s ahead.’ ”

While the growing number of Bedouin women opting to pursue higher education is impressive, it makes it easy to overlook some of the less glamorous but significant milestones reached by other women in the community in recent years. Merely working outside the home or driving are acts that, for many, require courage and determination.

Sahar, a 39-year-old mother from Rahat, the largest Bedouin town with its 80,000 residents, exemplifies that spirit. Nearly 20 years ago, she decided to get a driver’s license. “My husband objected; it wasn’t acceptable for women to drive then,” she says. “When I wouldn’t give in, he expelled me from our home, and I went back to live at my parents’ home.

“We came close to divorce,” recalls Sahar, who preferred not to give her last name. But she continued to take driving lessons, with the support of her father. After obtaining her license, she moved back in with her husband, eventually giving birth to and raising six children.

“I knew one day things would change and women would be able to drive and have opportunities, and I wanted to be ready,” she explains.

Today, like an increasing number of Bedouin women, particularly the younger ones, she drives to work—with her husband’s full consent. “He saw that the world had changed,” she says with a triumphant smile.

Sahar works for Nazid, a catering company located in Idan Hanegev industrial park, on the outskirts of Rahat. She is one of 30 employees, predominantly Bedouin women, at the company, which prepares and transports packed meals to tens of thousands of school children around the country and to some businesses and organizations, including the IDF, a new client that signed up during the war.

“Our vision was always to provide a place of employment for Bedouin women,” Eman Alatawneh, Nazid’s human resources director, says. “Men in our society can work anywhere; they can travel across the country for a job. For women, whose actions are scrutinized more carefully, it’s more challenging.”

Like the Tamar Center, Nazid was also founded by Nsasra, the philanthropist. “We have a lot of divorced women, single mothers and older women on our work force,” Alatawneh says. 

The 33-year-old, who has a master’s degree in public policy and management from Ben-Gurion University, is believed to be the first Bedouin director of human resources in the country. “Before I started this job,” she says, “I sought out someone in the field from my community to learn from but there was no one.” Instead, she was directed to a 1,400-page Hebrew textbook on the subject, which she read in a month and keeps accessible on her phone.

However, there were some challenges that no textbook could have prepared her for. Soon after the Hamas attacks on October 7, she found herself comforting a Jewish employee who had been surrounded by terrorists at her home in Ofakim on that day. To allay the Jewish employee’s fears of returning to work in Rahat, Alatawneh beefed up security measures at the factory to ensure that no outsiders could enter. Not only did the employee return to work, Alatawneh recalls, “she even came to a company event in Rahat to mark the end of Ramadan and joined in the singing and dancing.

“No matter what happens outside,” Alatawneh continues, “I can say that within the workplace we have managed to create an island of sanity, where we see one another as people.”

Alatawneh is one of those Bedouin women who pay a steep personal price for pursuit of a better future. She still recalls the euphoria she felt after completing her undergraduate degree at Sapir Academic College: “I came out a different person, ready for the world. By 24, I felt I had everything I needed to succeed: a degree, a driver’s license, Hebrew and self-confidence.”

A few years later, she married but ended up getting divorced after her husband would not support her professional aspirations. But she has no regrets. “I am proud I made the choices I made,” she declares.

The Bedouin women breaking new ground in Israel have had to overcome numerous challenges—some personal, like Alatawneh, and others more practical, like Bin Nasser, the software engineer, who contends with limited electricity and unreliable internet at home, and the lack of bomb shelters during times of war.

“For some Bedouin women, it’s a real struggle for survival,” says Fahima Atawna, the former head of Siraj. “But despite this, you see women with such hope and ambition—they are determined to be in a good place, a good modern place.” 

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Leora Eren Frucht is a Canadian-born feature writer and editor living in Israel.