Bedouins in the West Bank hold fast to their land as pressure builds to leave
KHAN AL AHMAR, West Bank — The predawn sky exposes the outlines of the slopes of the Judaean desert. A strip of lamps on a new highway bathes the rocky earth in a ruddy glow, as motorists zip through the lonely expanse toward Jerusalem.
Here amid a chorus of crowing roosters, a cluster of dilapidated shacks on the desert hillside marks a tiny Bedouin encampment known as Khan al Ahmar.
The 160-person outpost, like dozens of other Bedouin hamlets clustered around the roadway, populates a region that descends from the Jerusalem mountains toward the West Bank city of Jericho and the border with Jordan.
It is a rugged, sparse landscape — but one that is at the center of a political tug of war. The region is coveted by Israelis who want to expand Jewish settlements and to solidify control over Jerusalem, as well as Palestinians who see it as part of their own state someday.
The Bedouins, caught in the middle, may soon be forced from this land.
In one home open to the chilly morning air, members of the Abu Dahouk family were wrapped in blankets as they began to stir shortly after 6, rising from mattresses set on large rugs covering the desert floor of rock and dirt.
In a shack that serves as the family kitchen and dining room, 12-year-old Nasrin and 14-year-old Iman, the two youngest in the family of nine, knelt over a fire tended by their mother, Sara. Their father, Eid Abu Dahouk, offered the young girls some spare change before they left for school.
The family’s flock of sheep and goats needed grazing, but for the father, known to most by his nickname, Abu Khamis, the next order of business was meeting with European diplomats.
An affable envoy representing an insular community, Abu Khamis served the diplomats sweet tea and pita bread prepared by his wife. He briefed them on a surge in home demolitions by Israeli military authorities.
Foreigners, diplomats and human rights workers are frequent guests here because the encampment — illegal under Israel’s military occupation — sits on such a strategic fault line of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“All Bedouin communities from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea are under a demolition order,” Abu Khamis told the visitors.
In February, the prospect of displacement seemed to become more imminent at Khan al Ahmar after Israeli authorities marked several dozen homes and structures for demolition. The move is being challenged by human rights lawyers and is expected to be heard by Israel’s High Court of Justice in September.
Many Palestinians and rights activists worry that evicting the Bedouins to make way for settlement growth would create an Israeli wedge between the northern and southern West Bank, making the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state physically impossible.
Meanwhile, there has been growing pressure within Israel’s coalition government to annex Maale Adumim, a settlement east of Jerusalem with a population of about 38,000, whose enormous boundaries nearly encompass all of the Jahalin Bedouin.
“There is no way to have a Palestinian state with Israel controlling this area,” Abu Khamis said. “If Israel evacuates the Bedouin community from this area, the boundary of Jerusalem will be extended to the Dead Sea. It will be the end of the last hope for peace.”
Abu Khamis’ family is among about 7,000 Bedouins from the Jahalin tribe who claim the Judean desert slopes east of Jerusalem as their home and cling to the remnants of their lives as semi-nomadic herders.
About 30 Bedouin encampments, each one measuring just a few acres, sit on rocky slopes nearly empty of trees or vegetation.
Displaced to the West Bank from ancestral lands after Israel gained independence in 1948, the Jahalin tribes settled in the open area outside Jerusalem with their flocks of sheep and goats. Some families live less than a mile from one another while others live two or three miles from the nearest neighbor.
The Bedouin here are registered with the United Nations as Palestinian refugees. But they live apart from Palestinian society, and Abu Khamis complains that the Palestinian government in nearby Ramallah hasn’t made good on promises to provide school transportation for the children.