Palestinians face removal as far-right Israel vows expansion
KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank (AP) — Protesters streaming up the windswept hills east of Jerusalem interrupted Maha Ali’s breakfast.
Palestinian chants of support for her West Bank Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar, at risk of demolition by the Israeli army since it lost its legal protection over four years ago, drowned out the singing birds and bleating sheep.
While intended to encourage the village, last week’s solidarity rally unsettled Ali. Israeli politicians assembled on the opposite hill for a counter protest, calling for Khan al-Ahmar’s immediate evacuation.
“Why are they all back here now? Did something happen?” Ali asked her sister, gazing toward a swarm of TV journalists. “Four years of quiet and now this chaos again.”
The long-running dispute over Khan al-Ahmar has resurfaced as a focus of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a legal deadline looming and Israel’s new far-right ministers pushing the government to fulfill a Supreme Court-sanctioned commitment from 2018 to wipe the village off the map. Israel contends that the hamlet, home to nearly 200 Palestinians and an EU-funded school, was built illegally on state land.
For Palestinians, Khan al-Ahmar is emblematic of the latest stage of the decades-long conflict, as thousands of Palestinians struggle for Israeli permission to build in the 60 percent of the occupied West Bank over which the Israeli military has full control.
After a spasm of violence last week — including the deadliest Israeli raid in the West Bank for two decades and the deadliest Palestinian attack on civilians in Jerusalem since 2008 — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded Saturday with a vow to strengthen Jewish settlements in the Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank, where little land is allocated to Palestinians.
The competition for land is playing out in the southern Hebron hills — where the Supreme Court has ordered the expulsion of a thousand Palestinians in an area known as Masafer Yatta — and across the territory. In unauthorized Palestinian villages — without direct access to Israeli power, water or sewage infrastructure — residents watch helplessly as Israeli authorities demolish homes, issue evacuation orders and expand settlements, changing the landscape of territory they dream of calling their state.
Last year, Israeli authorities razed 784 Palestinian buildings in the West Bank because they lacked permits, Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported, the most since it started tracking those demolitions a decade ago. The army tears down homes gradually, the group says, loathe to risk the global censure that would come from leveling a whole village.
News of Khan al-Ahmar’s impending mass eviction four years ago sparked widespread backlash. Since then, the government has stalled, asking the court for more time due to international pressure and Israel’s repeatedly deadlocked elections.
“They say the bulldozers will come tomorrow, next month, next year,” said Ali, 40, from her metal-topped shed, where she can see the red-roofed homes of the fast-growing Kfar Adumim settlement. “Our life is frozen.”
On Wednesday, the Israeli government requested another four months to respond to a Supreme Court petition by a pro-settler group, Regavim, asking why Khan al-Ahmar has not yet been razed. Far right lawmakers condemned the delay on Wednesday, with Danny Danon, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, demanding that the new Cabinet change the “floundering policies of the previous government.”
The Bedouins fear the brakes may be off now that Israel has its most right-wing government in history.
Regavim’s co-founder, Bezalel Smotrich, is now Israel’s ultra-nationalist finance minister. In a contentious coalition deal, he was given control over an Israeli military body that oversees construction and demolition in Israeli-administered parts of the West Bank.
At a Cabinet meeting last week, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar BenGvir, demanded that Khan al-Ahmar be demolished “just as the defense minister chose to destroy a Jewish outpost” built illegally in the West Bank.