Today, that area is home to 200,000 Bedouins, whose birthrates are the world’s highest. Roughly a third of them are polygamous, and about half live in seven towns that Israel built between 1968 and 1989, where crime is high and streets are strewn with garbage. Israel has in recent years recognized 13 villages, legalizing dwellings long slated for demolition, but has moved slowly, if at all, to modernize them. There remain 35 unrecognized villages like Abdeh, with a total of 70,000 residents, who could face forced relocation.

The most contested element of the plan — known as Prawer-Begin after its authors, Ehud Prawer, the government’s director of planning, and Benny Begin, a former cabinet minister — is its proposed resolution of nearly 3,000 land claims totaling 230 square miles. After Israeli courts rejected 200 such claims, most based on handwritten deeds, the government created a complex formula to compensate Bedouins based on the location of the land, whether they are still cultivating it and how quickly they apply.

Most would get half or a quarter of the land, plus some cash. The rest of the land would be seized by the state for its own use, or redistributed to Bedouins from far-flung areas of what officials call “the diaspora.”

“We are not against development,” said Thabet Abu Rass of Adalah, an advocacy group for Arab rights in Israel. “The question is why, whenever the State of Israel wants to develop the Negev, it’s always at the expense of the Bedouin.”

The Bedouins and their advocates say that they simply want to maintain their small agricultural villages, and have developed an alternative plan to put them on the grid, but that the government has ignored it.

One such place is Alsra, whose residents had a sign made to mark it that uses the same colors and fonts of those that the government places on roads across Israel. But the Bedouins added the phrase “established in the Ottoman Empire,” along with a picture of a bulldozer and a house to symbolize the demolition orders pending since 2006 against the village’s 70 structures.

Khalil Alamour, a high school teacher and father of seven, persuaded Waze, the popular Israeli GPS system, to put Alsra on its maps, and he provides pirated Wi-Fi to his neighbors. A one-inch pipe brings a trickle of water to the 500 residents, who dug 10 cisterns and pay to have sewage pumped out every 18 months.