Arab anger flares as homes bulldozed
ISRAEL: A police operation to demolish about a dozen buildings in an Israeli Bedouin village yesterday turned violent, leaving a policeman and a village resident dead and inflaming tensions between Israel’s government and the country’s Arab minority.
Nearly 500 officers arrived at Um al Hiran before dawn to secure the demolition, firing stun grenades, flares and tear gas as they ordered residents to leave dwellings slated for destruction. What ensued was disputed by police and residents.
In what Israeli authorities described as a terrorist attack, Yakub Qian, whose house had been slated for demolition, ploughed his white Land Cruiser through a crowd of police officers that had gathered on the village’s outskirts, killing one and injuring another. Qian, who police said was a member of Israel’s Islamic Movement, was shot and killed by police.
Villagers and human rights activists disputed the police account, saying that a policeman fired on Qian, a maths teacher, without provocation, causing him to lose control of the vehicle.
Arab members of Israel’s parliament accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Right-wing government of engaging in a deliberate crackdown against Arab towns with unauthorised buildings. Last week about a dozen buildings were demolished in the Arab village of Kalanswe in central Israel.
Facing legal pressure to evacuate a group of several hundred settlers in December, the prime minister ordered a crackdown on illegal Arab buildings.
Um al Hiran is one of about three dozen Bedouin villages not recognised by the Israeli government sprawled throughout southern Israel’s Negev Desert. They are home to about 70,000 residents.
Israeli officials have held several rounds of unsuccessful negotiations with community leaders to relocate them to several townships and pay compensation to Bedouin with landownership claims.
Um al Hiran residents waged a legal challenge against a government plan to evacuate them to make way for a Jewish town in the same place. After losing a Supreme Court appeal in 2015, the villagers have been negotiating with the government to relocate residents to a nearby Bedouin township.
- LA Times