On Monday, May 22, at least 16 Palestinian families (almost 170 people) were forcibly expelled from their homes near the Ein Samiya spring and the Palestinian village of Kufr Malek, 27 kilometers northeast of Ramallah.
The spring is wedged between Kufr Malek and the illegal Jewish-only colony of Kohav HaShahar and the nearby illegal outpost of Moaz Ester. The Bedouin community, part of the Ka’abneh clan, has lived in that area for more than three decades, comprising 16 families living as herders and working in agriculture.
On Wednesday evening, May 24, the Ka’abneh clan finished moving the last of their belongings to a new location a few hundred meters away from their former homes. It was a forced resettlement following weeks of settler and police harassment that made life unbearable for the community.
“What happened yesterday was a neo-Nakba,” Abu Najeh Ka’abneh, 81, told Mondoweiss on Thursday evening outside of the village of al-Mughayyir, where the community had relocated.
“Record, record,” Abu Najeh said firmly. “Don’t get the information wrong. I’ll speak slower, but focus and write.”
Sitting among a circle of men from his community as children dart in and out of the main sitting tent, Abu Najeh spoke with frustration and fear as he recounted the harrowing experience of the past week.
“The attack on Monday, May 22, was preceded by several days of continuous harassment,” Abu Najeh told Mondoweiss. “On May 16, settlers came and stole 37 sheep from our community in Ein Samiya, and I called the Red Cross to help us,” he said.
Abu Najeh had reached out to the Red Cross because the Israeli police had assaulted a 51-year-old herder from the community on May 16, claiming that his sheep belonged to one of the settlers of the Kohav HaShachar settlement.
“When the herder, Ata, wanted to say something, the police handcuffed him,” Abu Najeh said, taking a deep breath before continuing. “And when the herder — he’s the owner of the sheep — used his phone to try and call one of us, the police took it from him.”
The community’s youth eventually saw the altercation with the police and spread the news about the incident until it reached Abu Najeh. “This is a kidnapping, no?”
According to the community members, Ata was released at around 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, the 16th. “He was fined 1500 shekels, and his 37 sheep were never returned,” Abu Najeh testified. “The price of a single sheep is between 1200-2000 shekels. Do the math,” Abu Najeh said, repeating once more the number of sheep stolen: “Thirty-seven.” The man’s entire livelihood depended on the livestock, with a family of 20 dependent on him for their daily needs.
A few days later, Abu Najeh and 170 others in his community were forced to pack up what they could manage to carry from their homes and belongings.
“As Palestinians, who must protect us? Shouldn’t it be our representatives?” Khader Ka’abneh, another member of the Bedouin community, told Mondoweiss. Standing up from his seated position, Khader began to release his pent-up indignation. “Unfortunately, during the Oslo Accords, our issues were not discussed, and what we experienced days ago is an even bigger Nakba.”
For the Bedouin communities across Palestine, the herding lifestyle they uphold allows them to travel around Palestine’s landscape, further solidifying the presence of Palestinians in various areas around Jericho, the Jordan Valley, and the Mua’arajat — all at risk of Israeli annexation. Yet the burdens of surviving, coupled with the internalization of a feeling of duty towards protecting the land from settler theft, weigh heavily on Palestinian Bedouins.
“That was the only home my family has known,” Umm Najeh, Abu Najeh’s wife, told Mondoweiss as she sat on a plastic chair in a newly erected Bedouin tent less than 12 hours after the expulsion. “I have given birth to all eight of my children on that land.”
Umm Najeh’s eldest son is 32 years old, and her youngest is 12. Neither knows a home outside of the hills they have wandered with their sheep near Kufr Malek their entire lives.
“The children are constantly afraid of them,” Umm Najeh said as Jamal, 12, passed the tent where she and other women from the community sat, rebuilding their homes and arranging what little remained of their belongings.
Slow ethnic cleansing
“The settlers just kept coming more often, every night and almost daily,” Umm Najah told Mondoweiss as she washed and chopped some parsley for dinner.
“Look, before we used to be able to call the police to interfere when settlers attack,” Abu Najeh explained. “Now, in the last two years or so, the police themselves have been initiating the assaults.”
According to the community, Israeli border police have not only been guarding settlers during their rampages but have at times directly joined in on the violence. “If the police saw our blood spilling in front of them from the settlers, they would still call us liars,” Abu Najeh explained.
Palestinian Bedouins mostly live in Area C, which according to the Oslo Accords comprises more than 65% of the West Bank, and is under settler and Israeli military rule. This means that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has no jurisdiction in the area, so for Palestinian Bedouins, the only recourse in the face of settler violence is to appeal to the Israeli authorities.
In addition to the intensified violence to which the Ka’abneh community has been exposed over the past five years, the Bedouin clan has also become financially drained due to the theft of their sheep and livestock. Coupled with settlers’ night incursions aiming to push them out, they were eventually forced to relocate to the village of al-Mughayyer — the product of a policy of slow ethnic cleansing by making life so unbearable that they leave.
The community fears they may be seen as having given up on their lands in Ein Samiya. “There are people that say we just chose to leave,” Khader told Mondoweiss, in a voice more angry than pained. “I see on social media, some said we just chose to leave. But those five years of settler attacks on our children and women, that was enough pain. That was enough,” he said.
At that moment, his 12-year-old son Jamal held up his arm, hiding underneath a black scarf tied to his neck, serving as a makeshift sling — he had broken his arm running away from settlers in the moments leading up to the community’s violent expulsion on May 24.
“We couldn’t take it anymore. I swear, I promise, if we had support — at least take the women and children to keep them safe — we would have stayed and remained guardians of the land,” Khader said.
“Yesterday was the biggest Nakba we experienced,” Abu Najeh said. “Look at us, we don’t know how to sit, how to eat.”
“In two days, we had to rebuild a home,” Umm Najeh pointed to the cluster of small metal barracks and tents which now served as the community’s temporary home. “Look at this, we were able to at least rebuild these rooms for receiving guests, and here we are with the grace of God, rebuilding still,” she said with a smile that seemed to hold back a flow of tears.
‘The settler is the state, and the state is the settler’
During the first three months of 2023, Israeli settlers in the West Bank escalated their attacks on Palestinian farmers and herders. The Israeli human rights organization, B’tselem, recorded at least 108 different incidents where settlers, often joined by the police or the military, assaulted farmers, uprooted trees, and beat Palestinian civilians and children. As for the year before that, 2022 saw a record high of settler attacks in the West Bank, while between 2010 and 2019, thousands of settler attacks were also recorded. In February of this year, Israeli settlers committed a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwwara outside of Nablus, killing a Palestinian man, injuring dozens, terrorizing thousands in an arson rampage, and costing millions of shekels’ worth of property damage.
The displacement of the Bedouins of the Ein Samiya region is a part of this trajectory of rising settler violence, but it is also tied to the evolution of the neighboring settlements of Moaz Esther and Kohav HaShachar.
The Kohav HaShahar settlement, founded in 1980 for 280 Israeli settler families, is situated between the Palestinian towns and villages of Ramon, the final Palestinian town before the Jordan Valley. Currently, over 400 settler families live in the settlement, which advertises itself as a “religious settlement with a community that permeates warmhearted and caring family life.”
On the other hand, the Moaz Esther illegal outpost is marketed as the only “all-girl hilltop” promoting women’s participation in settlement expansion as a duty incumbent upon every Jewish person. The outpost was founded in 2006 in memory of Esther Galia, killed in a drive-by shooting near the settlement of Rimonim at the peak of the Second Intifada when Israeli forces committed crimes against humanity in the West Bank and Gaza.
By February 2020, Israeli authorities and police had dismantled two Israeli settler tents at the illegal outpost of Kohav HaShachar, clashing with settlers and arresting at least one rioter who hurled stones and assaulted police. However, following the Unity Intifada of 2021, when Palestinians engaged in collective mass mobilization from the river to the sea for the first time in decades, Israeli violence from settlers and the army increased. At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was facing corruption charges, gave the green light for joint settler, military, and police violence against Palestinians.
“You need to focus, and please understand,” Khader Ka’abneh tells Mondoweiss. “The settler is the state and the state is the settler. They are one and the same.”
While Israel has attempted to separate the settlers in the West Bank from those in the army, Israeli policymakers represent settler aspirations. Those aspirations have tended to gather steam during periods of heightened Palestinian resistance. In 2018, for instance, then Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel had vowed that “our revenge is settlement and holding tight to the land,” which he said following the stabbing of Israeli settler Adiel Kolman during the peak of Israel’s attempts to solidify control over East Jerusalem.
“I hope we’ll continue to advance construction in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and make a clear decision that between the Jordan [River] and [Mediterannean] Sea there will only be one sovereign state — the State of Israel,” Ariel affirmed alongside Nir Barakat, then Mayor of Jerusalem.
Abu Najeh confirmed that period as one of heightened settler and military theft of land and property. “In the last five years, the police have been bringing settlers who have sheep, and they would come to those herding areas,” Abu Najeh explained.
A lifetime of expulsions
Tender and shy, Umm Najeh laments the lands she has known for over three decades. “That was my home, a dear place to me,” she told Mondoweiss. “I had all my eight children on that land,” she said. “Here we are now, displaced.”
Unlike Umm Najeh, the most recent expulsion, and the string of harassment and theft that preceded it, is not where the story of Abu Najeh begins — he has been forcibly expelled from his land four times ever since 1969.
“Pay attention. Record,” Abu Najeh reiterated as the 81-year-old narrated the trail of dispossession that colored his life. “I was born in the area of Hebron, and grew up in al-Ouja, where I stayed until 1967, when we were given documents to stay there.”
Al-Ouja, an area ten kilometers north of Jericho consisting of the Ouja valley, receives a stream of water originating from Ein Samiya near Ramallah. From there, the Ouja stream flows into the Jordan River. Due to the herding lifestyle of Bedouin communities, natural water sources and their relationship with the wider ecosystem dictates how they select their area of living.
“In September of 1969, [Israeli authorities and forces] gave us 24 hours to gather everything and leave for the Ramallah area,” Abu Najeh said, recalling his first experience of expulsion. That September was when the Ka’abneh community moved to the Mua’rajat area near Ramallah.
Six months later, in March of 1970, the community was forced out of their homes again, marking Abu Najeh’s second experience of expulsion.
“It was raining and [the army] came and began forcing us out. They did it in the rain.” The Israeli army was pushing the family out under the pretext of using the area for military purposes. “[The military] took us almost 3-4 kilometers away in their vehicles,” Abu Najeh recalled.
“They practiced on us, on our homes, so they can drive us out.”
Abu Najeh
Israeli authorities displaced the community to an area 500 meters away from where they began building a new home six months earlier. This pushed them further into Ramallah, but the terror campaign didn’t stop there.
“Four or five military tents came and stayed for three or two months,” Abu Najeh said. “Then they came and started shooting bullets at us and our homes. The bullets would enter the homes and the children would run,” Abu Najeh said. “[The soldiers] left all the empty lands around us and began shooting in our direction,” Abu Najeh said bitterly. “You understand why? So they can expel us, drive us out,” he said.
That was when their third expulsion took place, as the Ka’abneh clan escaped the Mu’arajat under Israeli gunfire and resettled in the Ein Samiya region. Before the fourth and most recent expulsion in May of this year, the community had spent several uninterrupted decades living near Ein Samiya. “Allah kept us safe from them, and so we managed to go to Ein Samiya, where we have been since the 70s,” Abu Najeh said, his tone betraying a nostalgia for the home that he has now known for decades.
During their third expulsion in 1970, the Israeli army had converted their lands in the Mu’arajat region into closed military “firing zones.”
“They practiced on us, on our homes, so they can drive us out,” Abu Najeh said.
This policy of building “firing zones” and “military bases” continues to this day as an instrument of slow ethnic cleansing, sectioning off vast swathes of land for military use and hence justifying land theft based on “national security” needs.
In the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea areas in Jericho, Israeli authorities declared almost half of the region as a “firing zone.” These areas, which have the largest land reserves, constitute almost a third of the West Bank and are home to almost 80,000 Palestinians, 15,000 of whom are Palestinian Bedouins, sprawled across a few dozen community clusters. All of them are slowly being driven toward Ramallah.
“Indirect and direct forcible transfer is currently at the forefront of Israel’s ideological agenda in area C,” a report published by MAAN Development Agency in 2015 reported. “Firing zones, initially established as a means of land control, are now being used to create an environment so hostile that Palestinians are forced to leave the area or live in conditions of deteriorating security,” the report concluded.
The web of experiences tracing four different expulsions allows Abu Najeh to judge the unfolding of the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing project over the years. “This year is worse than the war of 1967,” he said.
Losing to the ongoing Nakba
The experiences of the Ka’abneh clan have taught them that this recent expulsion will not be their last.
“Tomorrow is darker than today, and the day after will be darker than tomorrow,” Abu Najeh said bitterly around a group of men from his community the day after the expulsion from Ein Samiya.
The community’s skepticism of a less violent future stems from the repeated memories of expulsion and assault by settlers. In the early 1970s, almost as soon as the Ka’abneh clan found some stability in Ein Samiya, Israeli courts began pushing one expulsion order after another. The community has spent year after year fighting them in court.
“Since 1980 we have been fighting through courts against every expulsion order,” Abu Najeh told Mondoweiss. The orders from Israeli authorities for the expulsion of the community began in 1974, according to Abu Najeh.
This year, mirroring the experience of the Ka’abneh clan, other Bedouin communities in the Mu’arajat area were forced to leave their homes in February of this year, also relocating due to the severity of the attacks by Israeli forces and the lack of protection.
As for the Ka’abneh community, their relocation to the village of al-Mughayyir near Ramallah has put them in hostile terrain. Shortly after the clan arrived in the village, Israeli settlers attacked al-Mughayyir and its farmers. At around that same time, Palestinians faced a wave of lethal violence from Israeli settlers and the army in other West Bank towns and villages.
This has only further cemented the conviction that no place is safe from Israeli colonists.
For Palestinians, this is nothing new and is seen as a continuation of what started in 1948. And while Palestinians have witnessed the resurgence of resistance to Israeli colonialism across the West Bank since early 2022, some communities have been unable to withstand the constant harassment and daily indignities of colonial erasure.
“I cannot resist the Israeli state alone,” Khader Ka’abneh told Mondoweiss, reiterating his earlier statement: “The settler is the state. The settler is the government. I can’t fight that alone.”
Ata, the 51-year-old herder, echoed the disappointment, admitting that he can longer fight the settler attacks. “I have been trying these past five years, and I can’t anymore.”
END
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
ISRAEL/OPT: OVER 300 PALESTINIAN BEDOUIN
FACE FORCED EVICTIONS FOLLOWING MASS
HOME DEMOLITIONS IN NEGEV/NAQAB
9 MAY 2024
The Israeli authorities’ demolition on 8 May 2024 of 47 homes in Wadi al-Khalil, an unrecognized Palestinian/Bedouin village in the Negev/Naqab, without proper consultation or compensation underscores the urgency to dismantle Israel’s apartheid system, said Amnesty International today.
The demolition orders against the Abu Assa neighbourhood in Wadi al-Khalil were issued by Israeli planning authorities in 2019 to make way for the extension of the route of Highway 6 southwards. The demolitions, the highest in a single day since the demolitions of Al-Araqib in 2010, amount to the forced eviction of over 300 residents of Wadi al-Khalil, one of nine unrecognized villages at risk of forced eviction under the guise of urban development.
“The scenes of hyper-militarized police units, including the notorious Yoav and border police units, storming Wadi al-Khalil to bulldoze homes and confiscate residents’ belongings are yet another chilling demonstration of the cruelty and ongoing injustices and human rights violations meted by Israeli authorities upon Palestinian citizens of Israel, especially those living in the Negev/Naqab,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“Instead of meaningfully consulting with the local communities in an inclusive decision-making process on planning, infrastructure development and access to land, Israeli authorities, particularly the Bedouin Authority for Development and Settlement, continue to use urban development as a tool to displace Bedouins, disenfranchise them and force them into smaller and smaller pockets of land, in a clear illustration of Israel’s apartheid system. They must immediately stop all forced evictions and ensure those affected have access to effective remedy and those made homeless are granted adequate housing.”
Among the units that participated in the demolition is the police unit Yoav, a unit established in 2011 with the declared aim of “enforcing the law” and halting unauthorized construction in Bedouin localities in the Negev/Naqab.
Jabr Abu Assa, a resident of Wadi al-Khalil whose home was demolished earlier this morning, told Amnesty International:
“We cannot stop this plan; Highway number 6 would pass over our bodies regardless of how hard we resisted, so we asked the authorities for a fair and just alternative, to relocate us to a place where we can live in peace and dignity, to Mtalla neighbourhood in Tall al-Sabe’. However, the only option we were given is to move to a neighbourhood in the nearby village of Um al-Batin, where local residents already said they have no room for us and that we are not welcome; this means pitting us up against them. This means forcing us and them to have to fight over the scarce resources that are barely enough for them.”
Abu Assa added that neither he nor any of the residents whose homes and other structures were demolished have received any form of compensation.
“We don’t know where to go next”
On 31 December, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Wadi Al-Khalil’s residents against their forced relocation to Umm al-Batin, allowing the Bedouin Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Negev, a government body that has long served to entrench the domination and oppression of the Bedouin community, to decide where it can relocate the residents.
Hussein al-Rabaya’a, a community activist from the Negev/Naqab, told Amnesty International: “Here you have no choice: they deny you recognition then they decide to displace you, they decide where you can go, and if you protest and ask for a fair alternative, they say it’s not up to you to decide your own fate.”
Another resident of the neighbourhood whose home was destroyed, told the organization: “We don’t know where to go next; we cannot move to Umm al-Batin because we are unwanted there; we’ll do what the residents of al-Araqib did: we’ll set up a tent on the ruins of our bulldozed homes, we have no other choice.
The demolitions in Wadi al-Khalil come less than a year after the Israeli District Court had approved the forced eviction of the unrecognized village of Ras Jrabah, to make way for the expansion of nearby Jewish town of Dimona. The residents of Ras Jrabah remain embroiled in a legal battle against their village’s demolition.
“Israeli authorities must put an end to the systematic discrimination and oppression faced by these communities, including by putting an end to forced evictions and the policy of home demolition. Instead, they should grant villages recognition and repeal all laws, policies and practices designed to dispossess the community – including through planning processes,” said Heba Morayef.
Background
Over the years, Israeli authorities have employed numerous pretexts to push for the displacement and segregation of the Bedouin community in the Negev/Naqab; from expanding highways to building industrial zones, establishing forests for the Jewish National Fund and the designation of military zones.
Amnesty International’s 2022 report on Israel’s apartheid system sets out how discriminatory laws on planning and zoning designed to maximize land and resources for Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
END
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
REPORT
OFF THE MAP
LAND AND HOUSING RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN
ISRAEL’S UNRECOGNIZED BEDOUIN VILLAGES
30 MARCH 2008
STOP THE WALL
ETHNIC CLEANSING OF BEDOUINS IN JORDAN
VALLEY
https://stopthewall.org/2014/
Ever since Israel occupied the West Bank, the Bedouins have been forced to relocate several times to make space for new Israeli settlements, new so-called ‘nature reserves’ and military firing zones. The so-called Civil administration, the Israeli military authority that implements the occupation in the West Bank, has filed for objections plans for establishing a new settlement in the Jordan Valley. The public now has 60 days to submit objections. Mohamed Elias, representing the Wall and Settlement Unit in the Palestinian Authorities following the legal cases of the Bedouin communities, says that it is yet another plan to confiscate land in area C. He has sent an objection to the occupation authorities based on the fact that the public has scarce knowledge of what is going on and no consultation process has been implemented. According to Mohamed Elias the construction of the new settlement will force around 15000 Bedouins from their lands.
The Jordan Valley is a sparsely populated area and Israel considers it the West Bank’s most important land reserve with great natural resources as fertile land and water as well as a geostrategically central area. The Jordan Valley is part of what is called “Area C’. According the Oslo agreement Area C parts of the West Bank are under full Israeli military and civil control. This was supposed to be handed over to Palestinian authorities by the year 2000, but this has never been fulfilled. 61% of the West Bank are Area C. The new areas to which the Bedouin are supposed to be confined are located in area A and B, which are under control of Palestinian authorities.
Bedouins not consulted
According to the Israeli Administration the construction of ‘development towns’ will give the Bedouin communities better living standards, providing proper housing conditions, claiming its proposal suitable to the “dynamic changes” the Bedouins are undergoing. In reality, it is nothing more than part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies, which will destroy the Bedouin life and dump them anywhere, where they are not an obstacle to Israeli colonialism.
Fact is that the Bedouins communities have not been consulted in the planning stages. As the Palestinian legal submission to the courts states, the plan is forced upon them in the interest of the colonizer and does not consider the Bedouins traditional way of living. Bedouins live in small communities and their main livelihood is livestock. In total 46 Bedouin communities, around 15000 people, will be deprived of their land and livelihoods. The plan is to build a new town called, Ramat Nu’eimeh in Fasayel, both north of Jericho. Ramat Nu’eimeh is supposed to confine about 12 500 people.
Seperation of Palestinian territory
Since time Israel is working on the ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin in the so-called area E1 to the area of Abu Dis near East Jerusalem. Israel needs to make space for the settlement projects of the so-called E1-area, an area between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement Maale Adummim. Israeli authorities want to expand construction in order to connect the two cities. This will practically cut off the contact between the north and south part of the West Bank, according to Elias.
Evacuating Bedouins from East Jerusalem, Jericho and the Dead Sea will enable Israel to close the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and by that close the area between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea to Palestinians. This will separate the Palestinian territory and create an uninterrupted line between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements in Jordan Valley. This will make it possible for Israel to expand the settlements in area E1 towards the Jordan Valley. The Stop the Wall Campaign says that this strategy is a part of Israel’s disengagement plan for a ‘Palestinian state’ made up of isolated Bantustans: Ramallah and Salfeet in the center will be separated from Nablus in the north by a belt of settlements and from Bethlehem and Hebron in the south by the E1 plan. According to Stop the Wall another part of the plan is the expansion of the road between Taybeh village east of Ramallah until al Oja. This will then be the only Palestinian connection for the West Bank to Jericho and the Jordan Valley.
Stop the Wall insists: “The Palestinian Bedouin communities as well as the Palestinian people as a whole are resisting these plans of ethnic cleansing and Bantustanization. We are working on many levels, including legal procedures, grassroots mobilizations, lobbying and campaigning. If the international community is serious about their statements for peace and human rights, then they need to act now. The United Nations Agencies – and with this the entire international community – have been officially informed about these plans years ago by the Israeli authorities. What are they waiting for to take effective action?”
END