Editor’s note: A tiny Palestinian Bedouin town located in the West Bank hills outside of Jerusalem is bracing for an impending eviction to make way for plans to expand an Israeli settlement. The case reached its endpoint on Monday when the deadline ordered by Israel’s high court expired on the community of Khan al-Ahmar to vacate and demolish their own homes and an elementary school.
The ruling comes after a lengthy court battle that began in 2009, where Israel seeks to transfer the Bedouin community to a nearby reservation of apartment units adjacent to an unofficial municipal dump. For the Bedouins, the move would devastate the herding community, making it impossible to bring along their main source of income, their grazing animals.
This case has implications far beyond the 32 families who live there and the nearly 200 students who attend the school in the town. Khan al-Ahmar is situated at a midpoint between the West Bank and Israel. If the eviction moves forward, it will pave the way for a Jewish-only settlement bloc to divide the West Bank into two, rendering impossible the creation of a unified Palestinian state in the occupied territory.
Photographer Thomas Dallal documented the demolition preparations throughout the month of September.
at the end of this presentation in south africa, by award winning journalist Thomas Dallal, he talks about his father-in-law’s village, now the site of a l’oreal factory and “park” (the old olive trees from their village land), “the colonial enterprise in the west bank is a continuation of what was done in ’48”. witnessing and capturing these moments in Khan al-Ahmar, of the children especially, it must be a familiar bitter taste. like documenting his own family. probably why the photographs looks so personal. the same thing, with the whole world watching up close this time. and we let it continue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ibb_Ls8kc
Roha- the holiday named Chanuka is about rededicating the temple after idol worship.
I do not think that the Jewish connection to Jerusalem should supercede all other connections because of its antiquity or because of the special role Judaism played in the development of Christianity and Islam. On the other hand the pretense by Christians and Muslims that their new prophecies or testaments supercede the Jewish connection are a symptom of the unharmonious nature of religion, unable to hear the value of one’s own mother because “we are the superior daughter.”
There was a tension involved in traditional Judaism regarding relegating Jerusalem and the land to some far off utopian future. When modernism came and erasing the Jewish identity did not appear possible the combination of need and history inevitably led to a movement focused on Jerusalem and the land. In the west in 2018 erasing Jewish identity is entirely within the free choice of most Jews, and as such the particular moment when such an erasure was not possible with its historical consequences seems anachronistic, but circumstances have led us to this point in time and the radical change in the west vis a vis the Jews is remarkable and to deny the radical nature of that change is to add further evidence of the western tendency towards amnesia.
The zero sum nature of the game as currently played, says “it’s mine and not yours.” The dynamics of the situation point to a few causes at the root of this attitude and there is little to indicate that this dynamic will turn around anytime soon without some external cause. As such comments about the antiquity of one religion compared to another adorn (or confuse) the politics with religious references.
To nonbelievers or to disbelievers discussions of religion are a sport that has earned its mockery. In general my thought has tended away from the beliefs of my upbringing, but the continued role of belief in the land of conflict, Israel vs. Palestine, reminds me that whatever religious impulses still exist in me, also still exist in a part of the world that is of importance to me and as such the mockery you evince, while understandable to my skeptical side, impresses me as foreign to the zeitgeist of those who live on the land in question.