Village elder Hajj Suleiman violently arrested during demolition of public park
July 4 | International Solidarity Movement | South Hebron Hills, occupied Palestine
The South Hebron Hills have faced two consecutive days of demolitions starting early yesterday morning, with bulldozers destroying water wells and uprooting over 500 trees in two villages.
An elderly Palestinian activist from Um al-Khair was also hospitalised yesterday after being violently detained by occupation forces.
Five JCB bulldozers accompanied by Israeli Civil Administration vans began uprooting trees – some of which were over 14 years old – and demolishing water wells in a public park between the villages of Hashem Daraj and Um al-Khair at around 9am yesterday morning.
70-year-old man Hajj Suleiman, was aggressively dragged out of the road, where he had tried to stand in the way of the bulldozers, by soldiers and pushed to the ground. He was later seen unconscious before being taken to hospital for medical attention.
Some hours later, the village elder was discharged. Despite his ordeal, Suleiman was back the next day to try to disrupt the violence of the bulldozers. He was briefly detained again before being driven in a military jeep to Um al-Khair in a attempt by soldiers to prevent him carrying out further direct actions.
Unconscious village elder carried to safety after being aggressively detained and pushed to the ground by Israeli soldiersHajj Suleiman receives medical attention
His nephew Tariq described yesterday’s demolition spree by the Israeli Civil Administration – the body that governs Area C in the West Bank – as “brutal.”
“They don’t leave anything alone,” he told ISM. “They demolish the peoples houses, they demolish the animal barns and now they’re starting from this year to demolish trees and water cisterns.”
The park, which is now a heap of uprooted trees, was one of the few public spaces belonging to Palestinians in the region.
This morning, the bulldozers came again, destroying two water cisterns and uprooting more trees in Dkeika, a village close to the West Bank border.
The cisterns are vital during the summer months for shepherds to graze their sheep and goats.
While the villagers’ resources were being demolished, a drone belonging to far-right Israeli NGO Regavim was documenting the scene. The group, which receives Israeli taxpayers money, is dedicated to evicting Palestinians from Area C and within Israel through court petitions. It’s likely they played a direct role in the two day demolition spree.
A drone operated by Israeli far-right NGO Regavim hovers over bulldozers wrecking water cisterns
Many Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills, which is located within Area C, live with the constant threat of having their homes, water systems, roads and farms bulldozed by the Civil Administration.
Structures built by Palestinians in Area C without building permits (less than 1% are approved by the Civil Administration) are served demolition orders while illegal Israeli settlement outposts have free reign to build with impunity.
Olive trees, some 14 years old, unearthed by bulldozers
The illegal settlement Carmel looks over the Bedouin village of Um al-Kheir
June 26 | International Solidarity Movement | Umm al-Kheir, south Hebron Hills, occupied Palestine
The Bedouin village of Um al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills have launched a new bid to save their homes from demolition.
On Monday, activists from the village submitted a new master plan to the Israeli Civil Administration which, if accepted, would protect their community from the bulldozers.
Since 2011, 32 structures including houses, animal barns and a bread oven have been demolished in Um al-Khair with almost every family losing at least one home.
The village has been in crisis mode over the past week, going to bed each night with the fear that bulldozers could be rolling towards them in the morning.
An international presence (including people from the Good Shepherd Collective, Christian Peacemakers Team, All That’s Left and ISM) has been set up in solidarity with the people of Um al-Kheir and to provide a possible deterrence.
The community hopes to have a response from the Civil Administration in the coming days, which if given, will freeze the demolition orders for a few years.
A Bedouin flock of sheep in Um al-Khair
But until a response is given, the village remains at risk of demolition.
The Civil Administration, the governing Israeli body in Area B and C in the West Bank, recently rejected the villagers’ previous master plan submitted three years ago. During this time period, demolition orders were frozen, giving the Bedouin community a brief respite. But now the freeze period is over and Um al-Kheir is once again at risk of demolition with orders against 45 homes.
The villagers are expecting a response from the Civil Administration tomorrow, which would begin the process again of freezing the orders while the master plan is deliberated.
Um al-Khair is one of the villages in the South Hebron Hills that is particularly at risk of expulsion.
It is gradually being surrounded by the illegal settlement of Carmel which is just feet away with a fence separating the two.
11th November 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Um al-Khair, Occupied Palestine
Last month in northern Palestine brought stories of Israeli settlers from the illegal Yitzhar settlement that, however horrifying, all suffered an important shortcoming: the scope of the stories lent to individual scapegoats, and in doing so provided a vivid, but ultimately penny-deep look at the Palestinian condition. Today’s news is flooded with such dramatic examples.
This past month, I lived in and began to learn the story of Um al-Khair, a Palestinian Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills. Again the case presented a challenge of conveyance – perhaps even more so. While it’s certainly every bit as troubled as the villages in the shadow of the Yitzhar settlement, Um al-Khair’s story is much less made for TV than the photogenic, headline-grabbing brutality of physical violence.
There’s no getting around it: it’s a small village, and reversing the injustices there wouldn’t move the needle on injustice in Palestine a whole lot.
However, it does offer itself as a worthy placeholder – an exemplary microcosm for the nation of Palestine, and what happened, is happening, and will happen to it if nothing is done.
Tariq (left) and Eid Hathaleen, with Tariq’s nephew Muhammad in his arms. Tariq’s house, which he shares with his mother, has been demolished 3 times already (’08, ’12, and ’14). Eid recently had both of his cars, one less than a week old, confiscated by the Israeli army. A tattered – but still standing – Palestinian flag waves behind them.
This isn’t to say that tragic physical violence doesn’t occur there. One of the first stories new visitors hear is that of a resident who, as his brother Tariq says, “lost his life without losing his life.” About 17 years ago the young man, Muhammad, was herding his goats and – so claimed a settler – ventured onto a far corner of settlement property. An Israeli soldier chased him down (after the fact and within his own village), and beat him most of the way to death for it. Today, the man who would’ve been one of the leading breadwinners for the village walks the roads mentally handicapped, unable to contribute to the survival of the community. As the soldier was leaving the village that day, he turned and pointed at Muhammad in the dirt – the young man already having left his body for the last time – and shouted “Look at your brother, let him be an example! I’ll make every single person in this village handicapped!”
As it turns out, the soldier didn’t have to. Seventeen years later, the pen would prove mightier than the sword, and the true kneecapping of Um al-Khair would come not in the form of an excessively forceful soldier, the optics of which might provoke international outrage, but rather bureaucratic, pseudo-legal land-grab policies.
To that end, in the 17 years since the martyrdom of Muhammad, by far the most high ranking targets of the Israeli army in Um al-Khair have been peaceful, inanimate objects – their traditional Bedouin oven, among the kind of objects Pierre Nora coined “les lieux de mémoire” in 1989, as well as a proposed community garden – the first of which has been built or rebuilt and subsequently destroyed 3 times over, and the other disallowed before construction could even begin (though there’s an international campaign to support it anyway).
As Tariq, a budding community leader, said, “The soldiers that try to break us aren’t enemies of terrorism. They don’t like us, but even they know we are not terrorists. They are enemies of life. They are enemies of our presence here. Look at the oven, the garden.”
The future of Um al-Khair. Their demands are simple: to live in peace, which means an end to the ongoing demolition of their homes, as well as an end to settler violence against them during the night.
Clearly the real threat isn’t any one person, but anything palpable for Palestinians to hold on to,and with it the motivation to continue resisting.Homes, homelands, even ovens and community gardens are brought to ashes – as Israel admits with shameless candor – to make room for people of a different ethnicity.
Taken together, what happened to Muhammad the individual and what’s happening to Um al-Khair’s lifeblood structures span the spectrum of violence, from physical to structural. Though they’re specific to Um al-Khair, they speak volumes about the post-1948 Palestinian story.
The notion that a bread oven or community garden could be threatening should be preposterously silly and, at the same time, make all the sense in the world when the very acknowledgement of a Palestinian people is threatening to an ideology whose implementation required their ethnic cleansing. After all, one of the most repeated go-to’s for stewards of Zionism – that Palestine was “a land without a people” – reveals itself as the only option short of confronting the question of what happened to those people, and who was responsible.
The result was that incorrect and racist revision: pre-1948 Palestine – a rich bastion of culture, cuisine, art, music, academia – was really a land of zero cities. After all, it didn’t even have a people.
Suleiman Hathaleen, the elder in Um al-Khair, himself 6 years older than Israel. Born in Arad, Palestine (now Arad, Israel), he was made a refugee in 1948, and has lived in Um al-Khair since.
Of course, any rational person knows that Palestinians do exist, and that they didn’t come to Palestine simply to meet the arriving Jewish immigrants with weapons. Sentient, living evidence for this – for the bustling Palestinian society and what happened to it – exists in refugee camps in- and outside of Palestine to this day.
Since 2007, roughly 20 families from Um al-Khair have joined them, after the State of Israel – not a rogue extremist, not an individual settler, but the real-life manifestation of Zionism – has come to their village to make them homeless. This, unfortunately, is what defines the struggle at large for many indigenous Palestinians –to stay and survive at all under the threat of expulsion and extermination. There’s been virtually no evidence even of an attempt to maintain a second-class, exploitable Palestinian population, making this – what’s occurring in the West Bank and Gaza as opposed to the State of Israel – not apartheid, but unvarnished ethnic cleansing.
The ruins of a family’s demolished home in Um al-Khair.
And so, ceding for a moment the possibility that Um al-Khair’s situation is controversial, the fact remains that the international community has yet to be told what justifies it. What justifies the fact that the people with the deed to the land, who’ve lived completely without sin and within the law, are forced to stand there crying out for help, physically weak from humankind’s deepest sadness – the gutting, emptying kind that you feel in your body – as a Caterpillar D9 military bulldozer thunders to life and starts towards their home.
28th October | Operation Dove | Um Al Kheir, Occupied Palestine
Yesterday, Israeli forces demolished a total of seven structures in the Bedouin village of Um al Kheir. The structures demolished are, three houses made of concrete, a caravan donated by the United Nations (United Nations Human Rights Response Fund with the support of Ireland, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom) to be used as a home, a tinplated house, a tinplated kitchen, and a traditional oven.
Photo by Operation Dove.
The structures belonged to five families, with a total of thirty people affected. An Israeli activist and an international volunteer were brought and detained in Kiryat Arba Israeli police station.
At 9:20 am a convoy of eleven Israeli army vehicles and two bulldozers reached the Bedouin village of Um Al Kheir. At 9:34 the bulldozers started the demolitions while Israeli soldiers, border police officers and DCO [District Coordination] officers kept Internationals and Israeli activists away from the village, declaring it a, “closed military area”.
Photo by Operation Dove.
Around 10 am the Israeli police arrested an international volunteer and an Israeli activist with the accusation of remaining inside the area. Both were released during the same day.
Um Al Kheir is a Bedouin village in Area C, under Israeli civil and military administration. It’s located very close to the illegal settlement of Karmel, established during the beginning of the ’80s and expanded in the recent years, especially in 2013. The village routinely experiences harassment from Zionist settlers and the Israeli army.
Palestinians from the South Hebron Hills keep struggling in a non-violent way to claim justice and to defend their human rights. The South Hebron Hills Popular Committee, together with international volunteers and Israeli activists, will soon gather to re-build the demolished structures in Um Al Kheir.
Photo by Operation Dove.
Operation Dove has maintained an international presence in At-Tuwani and the South Hebron Hills since 2004.
Within minutes of our arrival in Tuwani, in the south Hebron hills of the West Bank, an army Jeep rolled into the village and shattered the mid-morning tranquillity. “We’re turning this place into a closed military zone,” announced the stern-faced commander to anyone within earshot. Brandishing his rifle in one hand and a military document in the other, he proceeded to explain that “I decide who can be here and who can’t, and anyone who isn’t a resident has to leave immediately”.
That meant us – me, my friend and our three guides from the Villages Group – as well as the other activists who maintain a permanent presence in Tuwani assisting the locals in their struggle to survive. The timing of the closure was no accident: earlier in the morning NGO workers and locals had taken part in a solidarity march to highlight the hardships suffered by the village children who run the gauntlet of the neighbouring settlement every time they walk to and from their school.
Anything the activists could do the soldiers could do better, it seemed. “The IDF [Israel Defence Forces] don’t like us coming to support the residents of Tuwani,” said one volunteer, “so they make it their mission to make everyone’s lives uncomfortable as a result.”
The shutdown of the village and the surrounding farmland was only the latest in a long line of attempts by the Israeli authorities to break the will of the Palestinians living in the area. As we drove out of Tuwani, we were shown the stump of an electricity pylon sawn down by the army after attempts by villagers to connect themselves to the national grid. Elsewhere, dirt mounds and locked gates stopped locals driving to the nearby city of Ya’ta, thus preventing them taking their produce to sell at market, and severely impairing their economic prospects.
Thanks to the army’s exclusion orders, we were forced to walk a treacherous and convoluted route through the rocky scrubland to visit communities living in even deeper seclusion beyond Tuwani. In Tu’ba, the cave-dwelling residents of the village are under no illusion about what the future holds for them, despite all the hype surrounding the much-vaunted settlement freeze.
“The freeze will have no effect round here,” the father of the household told us bitterly. Our guide expanded on the theme, telling us that the “real freeze is on Palestinian construction: 95% of Palestinian applications for building permits in Area C are denied by the civil administration, and for communities in this area they are not allowed to build above ground whatsoever”.
Those people living in caves are, it seems, tolerated by the authorities while they remain underground, but as soon as they put their heads above the surface and attempt to build rudimentary shacks and outhouses, demolition orders are served and the army are quick to enforce the letter of the law with gusto.
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring settlements of Carmel and Ma’on, building work was going on in earnest, and defiant banners on bus stops and fence posts declared the settlers’ intention to “smash the freeze”, and denounced the incumbent government as traitors to the Zionist cause. While government inspectors have been attacked during their attempts to bring settlement construction to a halt, the full force of the settlers’ wrath has – as ever – been meted out against the Palestinians.
The sickening desecration of a mosque on Friday in the village of Yasuf, near Nablus, appears to be the opening salvo in the settlers’ latest battle to force the government to back down over the building freeze, and those we met in the south Hebron hills were wary of similar reprisal attacks being carried out against their communities. “Our children are still attacked on a regular basis,” one local told us, “as well as our shepherds and farmers. Even if we call the police, we know justice will never be done, and the situation is only getting worse now that the settlers are furious about Netanyahu’s decision.”
Ehud Krinis, one of the Villages Group activists, believes that the freeze is “just an act” on the part of the government; having worked in the area for almost eight years and seen the settlers’ above-the-law behaviour first hand, he maintains “there is no effective force that can stop the settlers building more. In fact, as we can see in Susiya and elsewhere, the settlers simply see the freeze as a challenge to construct [at an even faster rate], which is what will happen over the next 10 months.”
As we sat with the head of the Bedouin clan living in Um al-Kheir – a collection of tumble-down tents and shacks literally touching the perimeter fence of the Carmel settlement – the mood of resignation engulfing the encampment’s residents was suffocating. We were shown aerial photos of Um al-Kheir’s gradual demise over the past 30 years, a situation attributable to the encroachment of the settlers and the military on to their ancestral land. It was clear that for those forced to endure the humiliation and hardship on a daily basis, the politicians’ upbeat talk was at best cheap, and at worst a flagrant denial of the facts.
For those Palestinians living under military rule, coupled with indiscriminate and incessant settler attacks against them, their children and their flocks, there is no end in sight to the suffering. While the world might have been convinced that the worm is about to turn in the Israeli political arena, a quick glance at the fevered construction still taking place in the settlements, the oppressive military activity against the Palestinian villagers and the overarching penury in which the Palestinians are forced to subsist should give onlookers food for thought about the true situation on the ground.
Freeze or no freeze, the future looks no brighter for the Palestinian locals today than it has during any of the bitter years and decades gone by.
