Skip to main content

What Israel is doing to the Bedouins

It is bad enough that the Israelis treat the Palestinians the way they do, but it extends to Bedouin communities too.     These nomadic people are effectively put upon, as this piece (with photos) from AlJazeera so clearly shows.

"Khan al-Ahmar, occupied Palestinian territories - Israeli authorities recently approved plans to build more settlement units in an area known as E1, which links Jerusalem with Ma’aleh Adumim.

Khan al-Ahmar is part of a cluster of Bedouin communities living in or near the E1 corridor, and is deemed one of the few remaining obstacles to long-held Israeli plans to link the holy city directly with the third-largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

Eid Khamis is the head of Khan al-Ahmar, a community that was forced to leave the Negev Desert during the 1948 war.

These Bedouin of the Jahalin clan set up their homes in a dusty valley - now nestled between the Israeli settlements of Kfar Adumim and Ma’aleh Adumim - about 10km from Jerusalem.

Khamis, 47, said the community's traditional way of life has been under threat by Israeli authorities for as long as he remembers. The encampment has no running water and is not connected to the electricity grid. Israel refuses to provide Khan al-Ahmar with basic infrastructure, and prevents it from building even to sustain the natural growth of its population.

And now, communities such as Khan al-Ahmar face a new threat, as Israeli authorities recently approved plans to build more settlement units.

The E1 expansion announcement came after Palestinians won an upgrade in their status at the UN General Assembly to non-member observer state.

According to the Palestinian negotiating team, if the proposed settlement building goes ahead, it would effectively bisect the West Bank and sever the physical link between Palestinian territories and Jerusalem."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more