A bout 1,200 Palestinian men,
women, and children living in a remote corner of the West Bank face expulsion
by the Israeli army at any moment.
If it goes ahead, the emptying out of eight Palestinian herding villages
in the Masafer Yatta region will be the largest eviction of Palestinians since
Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.
اضافة اعلان
Israeli human rights lawyers say it would be a grave breach of the Fourth
Geneva Convention.
“We feel robbed, terrorized, and that we are living in trauma,” Ali Awad,
a local youth activist told me as I visited Al-Fakhit, one of the villages
targeted for eradication. Palestinians and left-wing Israeli activists who
support them envision two possibilities: Wholesale expulsion by the Israeli
military or, more likely, troops making villagers’ lives so impossible through
demolitions, destroying roads, and other measures, that they leave.
Exactly where they would go is not something that seems to trouble
Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz.
At an emergency meeting of about 100 people in the courtyard of Al-Fakhit
school, I spoke to villagers who eke out their livelihoods by grazing sheep and
hardscrabble farming.
The school has an Israeli demolition order against it and the next time I
visit Al-Fakhit, the school, the village, and the Palestinians might all be
gone.
Al-Fakhit’s predicament highlights that since Israel signed agreements in
2020 with several Arab countries to normalize relations, Israeli policy towards
the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank seems to have become
crueler in many respects.
Normalization was viewed by many as a historic step toward a more peaceful
Middle East and may have given Israel reason to feel more secure in the region.
But it has not led to a moderation of the ultra-nationalist policies of Prime
Minister Naftali Bennett’s government or mitigated harsh practices towards
Palestinians.
Israel appears to feel more at liberty to engage in the land theft and
other abuses that are an integral part of its de facto annexation of the West
Bank.
In Masafer Yatta, the displacing of destitute Palestinians to enable the
upgrading of an army training zone will pave the way for what leading Israeli
West Bank expert Dror Etkes predicts will be the transfer of that same land to
Jewish settlers.
An expulsion or intensification of coercion here could set a precedent for
further evictions across the West Bank territory the international community
says it sees as the heartland of a future Palestinian state.
Israeli bulldozers recently demolished the homes of five families in this
village and another four in nearby Markaz village, forcing families to sleep in
tents and caves.
The Israeli government and settlers “want the land without the people,”
said Mohammed Hamamreh, a sheep herder from the Mufagara hamlet.
Hamamreh, his father and grandfather were born in Mufagara and before that
his family came from nearby Tuwani, he said. The Israeli occupation came to the
area only in 1967. Later, the settlers arrived in violation of international
law and in recent years they have engaged repeatedly in violence against the
Palestinians and even the Left-wing Israeli activists who try to protect them.
Hamamreh’s four-year-old grandson Mohammed was struck in the head by a
rock thrown by a settler during a September rampage. He himself was wounded in
the arm and property in the village was shattered by the settlers.
An expulsion or intensification of coercion here could set a precedent for further evictions across the West Bank territory the international community says it sees as the heartland of a future Palestinian state.
The Israeli Supreme Court on May 4 finished the settlers’ work. Ignoring
compelling evidence to the contrary, it ruled that Hamamreh and the villagers
are only seasonal itinerants not residents, have no ties to their land and can
be expelled. Settler leaders rejoiced, knowing they will be the beneficiaries.
It would be a mistake to consider this abuse of non-violent, defenseless,
indigenous people by Israel as merely a local problem. It is not.
Across the West Bank, we are witnessing a deepening of Israel’s occupation
with an accompanying increase in home demolitions, settler violence, land
takeovers, illegal settlement construction, pressure on Palestinians to
relocate, and the use of excessive force by the army. To be sure, not all of
the problem is on one side, as Palestinian assailants have recently mounted a
string of attacks on civilian targets inside Israel proper that shook the
tightly knit country.
But what is going on is not a response to Palestinian violence. Rather it
is “institutionalized theft” of Palestinian land, as Etkes calls it. It
endangers the commitment of Arab countries to the emergence of an independent
Palestinian state.
The US, EU, and UN have all raised concerns over the evictions but there
needs to be a stronger coordinated response to put pressure on Israel to halt
the evictions.
A further movement to the right by Israeli society, the morphing of the
Israeli army into the enforcement arm of Jewish settlers, the acquiescence of
the Biden administration, and perhaps preoccupation with the war in Ukraine are
some of the reasons Israel is stepping up the magnitude of its violations.
The West Bank may seem far away and without immediate relevance to the
overall strategic equation in the region. But it is an occupied territory, not
an internal Israeli affair. The cruel expulsion of Palestinians from their land
will only exacerbate tensions in the regions and should be meaningfully opposed
by Israel’s allies, both old and new.
Ben
Lynfield is the former Middle East affairs correspondent at the Jerusalem Post.
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