[dotancohen]

I would like to hear your personal experience, then. I've heard similar things from many Arabs, I often ask questions to understand their culture better. Most of my contact is with Beduins, just because we live close to each other.

[catlover76]

> Most of my contact is with Beduins, just because we live close to each other.

I think that's a pretty niche subset of Arabs, for one thing.

Why bother trying to generalize based on folky anecdotes like that? Like, I think you are smart enough to know that such a casual pronouncement isn't an articulation of a reliable rule for understanding the behavior of large groups of people.

[dotancohen]

When I'm specifically discussing their culture, and I find aspects pretty much uniform between the Sabuaia Beduins and the Arabs of Haifa (where I lived for a few years), then I generalize. I haven't been to Haifa for quite a while, which is why I mentioned the Beduins specifically.

[selimthegrim]

You think the settled Arabs were big fans of the Bedouin?

[dotancohen]

The settled Arabs don't really know much about the Bedouins, and neither do the Jews. The settled Arabs of today really don't have much an opinion of the Bedouins, but I suppose that might have been different in generations past. Both populations have separate conflicts with the Jewish state.

Both the settled Arabs and the Bedouins tell that the settled Arabs came long after the Bedouins. The settled Arabs say that the Bedouins were here before they came, but the Bedouins were only in the بر (which is somehow different than صحراء but I don't know what the difference is, both seem to mean "desert" in my language). Now the Bedouins are found further north too. The settled Arabs came mostly from Egypt and some from Syria, and some from other places. They came looking for work and land, and married with the local populations. They consider themselves local since time immemorable because they married with the local populations, though they will tell of their forefathers in Egypt.

The Bedouins say that they came a few hundred years before, from Saudi Arabia. Some Bedouins also tell of great-great grandfathers from Egypt. They actually will be very frank about not liking the settled Arabs, and they will be just as frank when talking about their relationship with the Jews. I happen to know of injustices that the Jews did to the Bedouins that the anti-Jewish crowd would absolutely love to parade, if they only really cared about the welfare of the people and not just the establishment of an Arab state to displace the Jewish state.