In the Negev/Naqab region of Israel, Bedouin Arab and Jewish citizens and the government are embroiled in disputes over access to land for homes, farming and factories, and over the status of Bedouin villages. Although this is often labeled as a “land conflict,” what is actually at stake? What does land mean for those who are clashing over it? Based on ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories collected in the Naqab region, this paper examines how contemporary land disputes also constitute a struggle over belonging and exclusion. Land has long embodied a complex set of values for those on all sides of this conflict. As many scholars have demonstrated, Zionist movements have looked since their early days to land, particularly shared labor in the land, as the material means necessary for preserving a threatened Jewish people. But, the particular lands sought by Zionists were already peopled, and taking them over has required severing these prior social attachments. Bedouin Arabs’ experiences of severed attachments have received less scholarly attention than Zionist nation-building, but to understand the tenacity of land claims in the Naqab today, I argue that we must attend to these experiences, as well. Minority groups in different social contexts face various pressures to accommodate to dominant social groups that range from multicultural recognition to assimilation. And nomadic groups throughout the world have and continue to face sedentarization policies that range from enticement to coercion. In Israel, Bedouin Arabs are denied inclusion in the state and access to substantive citizenship either through recognition of difference, as offered by liberal multiculturalism (since governmental bodies insist that Bedouin Arab residents not perform in supposedly authentic Bedouin ways, such as shepherding or living nomadically), or through recognition of similarity, as offered by assimilation. In this context of sedentarization policies and refusal of cultural recognition, loss of land has become a focus of anxiety over loss of culture and identity. Through both narratives of the past and contemporary land-use practices, many Bedouin Arabs of the Naqab look to land as the material means for anchoring the communal identity and cultural distinctiveness they feel to be threatened and disappearing.