A family of 7 lived in this house near Anata, which was destroyed by Israelis tonight. photo by Keren Manor of Active Stills.org
A tragic night in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers accompanied a bullodozer as it destroyed all the buildings in a Bedouin community near Anata, northeast of Jerusalem in the West Bank.
“People are somber, traumatized, and griefstricken,” says Itay Epshtain of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. (ICAHD) who operate a center on the site called Beit Arabiya, which was also destroyed. “Nearly 100 people are out in the elements now on a cold night. Children, babies, mothers, fathers. Some of us from ICAHD did try to block the bulldozer, but we were beaten back by soldiers.”
The community was first hit with a demolition order in 1994, but it has been regularly targeted by the occupation forces in recent years since ICAHD set up a facility there in an effort to protect the people.
The Bedouin community is in Area C, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank.
Epshtain says the demolition was launched at 11:30 p.m. tonight and is part of a government policy of ethnic expulsion in Area C, aimed at forcing Bedouins into the largely-urban areas of Area A, where they will be under Palestinian Authority control.
We will keep you posted on the fate of the people of Beit Arabiya, who are in our thoughts and prayers tonight.
god help these people
One day, perhaps, right will make might.
more to come … in an increasing wave – the neocons and zio-fascists are all about “creating facts on the ground” and don’t care if those include ruined lives, terrible crimes and dead bodies of the innocent if they’ve made strategic gains by doing so
It’s part of the on-going process of ghettoization. Israel did it inside the Green Line where it has corralled Palestinian villages and cities into isolated blocks, islands, economically dependent on nearby Jewish towns for sustenance as Israel continues to confiscate more and more agricultural land, thus forcing Palestinians in Israel to become laborers instead of being land-owners with a product to sell.
Once the Palestinians in the occupied territories are corralled into the major cities, Israel can then lock the gates along the apartheid wall and throw away the key if it so wishes.
Then the two state solution will have come true; there will be Eretz Yisrael which will extend from the river to the sea, and in the middle there will be blobs of Palestinianism that will be starved and drained until they become so desperate they either leave for Jordan or become slaves to their Israeli masters as many Palestinian construction workers are already forced to work on building Jewish-only colonies on occupied land.
50 dollars says that so-called world leaders would still be talking about the two-state solution and Thomas Friedman along with Uri Avnery would write optimistic columns reveling in the economic boom in Ramallah and in the potential for a better society.
You wanted context, well there’s your context.
P.S. – Phil, it would be nice if next time I asked for a comment deletion that the request was actually fulfilled instead of that comment being treating as the sole intellectual property of Mondoweiss.net
I understand why the Israelis drove the farmer and village Palestinians out of their lands in 1948 and 1967. That is perfectly understandable since a Zionist state required a majority of Jews. In fact, during those periods of ethnic cleansings they hired the Bedouins as mercenaries to carry out those policies. It was a natural thing to do: the Bedouins were the natural enemies of their more sedentary neighbors. The ancient conflict between a herder society and a farmer society.
What I do not understand that given the many years of service that the Bedouins provided to the Zionist enterprise, why are the Zionist turning against them now? To this day, Bedouins serve in the IDF. The Israelis have been so clever in dividing Palestinians against themselves but with these actions they are willing to push the Bedouins into alliance with their fellow native citizens.
To answer my question: of course they can abandon the Bedouins — they no longer need them since they now have on their side the world’s only super power.