The coronavirus pandemic is hurting everyone in Israel — rich and poor, Jews and Arabs — but poorer communities face much greater difficulties in dealing with its ramifications, including in education. When the whole education system in Israel — from preschool to high school to higher education — moved to remote learning by means of the internet, the gap between rich and poor grew wider because of the latter's lack of access to technology. This phenomenon is especially notable among the Arab Bedouin population in Israel.

Most of the Bedouin, about 250,000 (2017 figure), live in the south of the country. A fifth of them live in unrecognized villages without infrastructure. They are the poorest group in Israeli society, and as a result, their educational achievement is especially low. According to data of the Council of Higher Education published in February 2019, relating to the academic year that started in 2017, the rate of Bedouins who started studying for a bachelor’s degree was only 14%, compared to 46% of Jews. The rate of Bedouin students among Arab students was only 28% that year. While this is a large increase compared to the previous decade, this rate is still exceptionally low. According to Knesset data, the rate of matriculation among Bedouin students is 32% compared to 68% among the general population (excluding Bedouins and ultra-Orthodox Jews).

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of Bedouin students who receive a full matriculation certificate, as well as in the number of Bedouin students in higher education. But they still lag behind the entire population. One of the main problems of the education system in the Israeli-Bedouin society is the lack of infrastructure in general and the lack of technology in particular. The internet network is old and thus very slow in many of the more distant villages and especially in those that are unrecognized. The internet is supplied only via cellular networks, and there are hardly any PCs and laptops in residents’ homes.

According to data by the nongovernmental organization Abraham Initiative, there are about 102,000 school-age children in the Negev. Of those, 36,000 live in unrecognized villages or in the villages of the Neve Midbar or Al-Kasum regional councils, which lack internet networks or other infrastructure. Twenty-thousand students live in neighboring towns, also with no infrastructure. Thirty-thousand pupils live in neighborhoods with infrastructure but are part of families with at least eight children and only one computer at home. From this, we learn that half of the Negev’s Bedouin students do not have access to an internet network.