Though its officials sniff at the idea of Saudi Arabia's "Bedouins" leading the Arab world, they have enough on their plate dealing with the mess that used to be their neighbour Libya.
And, after the killing of the Hebron settler, soldiers blasted the cave dwellings and water wells of Bedouins who live in the Hebron Hills.
More than half its residents then were Bedouins uprooted from the surrounding desert steppe, many of them housed in shanties and slums.
Activists have launched an online campaign demanding that the opposition Syrian National Coalition, the main representative of the opposition, issue passports.The global stateless population includes "bidoon" a miscellany of nomadic and ethnic groups, many of them Bedouins, never recognised by Gulf states and Rohingya Muslims denied citizenship in Myanmar.
Darfur's Arabs are savannah Bedouins: sometimes as black, indigenous and African as the villagers they slaughter, and with little in common with the Arab elites of the Nile that have ruled Sudan since independence in 1956.
To flatter him, flag-waving schoolchildren lined the streets, Egyptian bedouins with links to Mr Qaddafi's own tribe cheered him on, and the state-controlled media offered blanket coverage of his forays to the Egyptian Museum and the tomb of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president whom Mr Qaddafi still idolises as a hero of Arab nationalism.
Last week the Sharqiyah television station showed a candidate approach a group of bedouins and offer them a stack of blankets as a gift.
These Bedouins move south as soon as pasture sprouts in the fall and remain there until the grasslands disappear and necessitate their return to the northern hills.
The desert steppe, which has the country's lowest population density, is inhabited largely by Bedouins and oasis dwellers.
Tents have also been the dwelling places of most of the nomadic peoples of the world, from ancient civilizations such as the Assyrian to the 20th-century Bedouins of North Africa and the Middle East.
Fixed, permanently occupied villages were not typical features of nomadic life among the Bedouins of the Libyan steppe and desert, although towns have existed in the coastal zones since Phoenician, Greek, and Roman times.
