Just hours after it became apparent that the perpetrator of the Oct. 18 attack in Beersheba was Mohannad Khalil Salam al-Okbi, a Bedouin from an unrecognized village near the locality of Hura, the forum of Bedouin mayors held an emergency meeting in Rahat, the largest Bedouin town in Israel. They realized that the entire Bedouin community might be stigmatized as supporting violence against Jews. At the end of the meeting they issued a strong condemnation: “The terrorist that perpetrated the attack today does not represent the Bedouin community, which supports coexistence and a shared life in the Negev.”

Okbi is the first Bedouin to carry out an attack against Israelis, although this is not the first time that Bedouin residents have been charged with security offenses. In July 2015, for example, the Shin Bet reported that six Hura residents, four of whom were schoolteachers in the Negev, had been arrested on suspicion of disseminating Islamic State doctrine in the locality and in schools there. They reportedly even planned to join the radical Islamic organization.

This week, Bedouin leaders rejected out of hand any link between the attack in Beersheba and the dire condition of the Bedouin population in the south of Israel. They even tried to downplay the tension between the southern Bedouin community and the Israeli establishment and law enforcement agencies against the backdrop of the demolition of illegally constructed houses and the wide feeling of disenfranchisement in their community.

“What we have here are good neighborly relations and friendships that have been fostered for years, and no one will ruin this,” Muslach Abu Assa, the director-general of the al-Kasom Regional Council, which incorporates several recognized and unrecognized villages in the Negev, told Al-Monitor. “No policy will drive the sector to such acts, and no one will have a hand in this.”