The Fastest Green And Yellow In The World

There are northern and southern Bedouin tribes in the Israeli. The ones in the industrialized north have melted into the Israeli Arab society. and the ones in the south have not.

About 160,000 Bedouins are living in the south. “Do they live in tents?” someone asks, a romanticized image of this once-nomadic people in mind. The reality is quite different.

Half have chosen to live in government-“recognized” villages, where they get electricity, running water and schools. The other half live in their own villages, a word that hardly describes the clusters of shacks you glimpse by the side of the road or off in a distant field.

Men have more than one wife, typically two or three. Sixty-five percent marry first or second cousins. Each wife averages eight to nine children. By age 50, a man could have 300-plus grandchildren.

“They’re the fastest-growing population in the world,” says Dr. Ohad Birk, head of the Genetics Institute at Soroka University Medical Center and a member of Ben-Gurion University’s faculty of health sciences.

Dr. Birk, a short man with blond hair, studies genetic diseases among the largely inbred southern Bedouins. They do not carry more genetic mutations than the general population. But because of the age-old custom of tribal intermarriage, the odds of marrying someone with the same mutations increase.

A Bedouin tribe of 10,000 can have one to three diseases. The diseases are common to that tribe. Dr. Birk, for example, has found the gene for diabetes in tribes. Other diseases are not only rare but extremely severe. In one, infants are born seemingly healthy, but by age 2 or 3 they take ill and by 8 or 9 they die. In another, children are born with eyelids but no eyes.

Soroka Hospital which is located on the BGU campus, serves the entire Negev region. It has trained Bedouin maternity nurses to go into the villages and draw blood from pregnant women. If a suspect gene is found, the women are invited to the hospital for further testing and counseling.