The Bedouin living today in the State of Israel (some 25 tribes in the Galilee and 18 tribes in the Negev, including about 60,000 people in 1983) are the descendants of tribes that infiltrated the area hundreds of years ago and turned it into a base for their wanderings. The majority of the Bedouin population which lived in Israel at the end of the nineteenth century were descended from different waves of nomads who penetrated the area in the Ottoman era, whereas earlier waves had become assimilated into the country's population. Penetration of the Bedouin into Palestine and their dominance in different parts of the country was possible because of the weakness and corruption of the central Ottoman rule. Since that period, the Bedouin have known several masters of the country, beginning with the Ottoman rulers who govemed the country throughout most of the area, followed by the conquest of Palestine by Egypt in the nineteenth century, British Mandate rule after the First World War, and finally the present State of Israel. Before the State of Israel was established, the country was sparsely populated and most of its inhabitants were Arab villagers, who were not markedly different from the Bedouin in their communal structure, typical of Arab society, or in their cultural and religious values. The State of Israel confronted the Israeli Bedouin with a reality unknown to them in the past. The country's population has become dominantly Jewish, a population differing drastically, in its values and life-style from the Arab population, including the Bedouin. Never before were the Bedouin subject to the rule of a state which decisively enforces law and order within its boundaries, certainly more effectively than the country's previous rules. The country's economic structure has changed radically from that of an economy based primarily on subsistence agriculture to a diversified one based on modern industry, modem ways and means of communication and agriculture employing advanced technology. For the first time, the Bedouin have been included in the framework of universal services provided by the state, such as education, health care, etc. For the first time in their history, they have become citizens of a state with a democratic regime, in which they participate in elections to the state's goveming bodies and in which their vote is equal to the vote of any other citizen. This, however, does not exhaust the changes the Bedouin have experienced.