Israeli police forced out the Siyam family from their home in the heart of occupied East Jerusalem last week, the final chapter in their 25-year legal battle against a powerful settler organisation. The family’s defeat represented much more than just another eviction. It was intended to land a crushing blow against the hopes of some 20,000 Palestinians living in the shadow of the Old City walls and Al Aqsa mosque.
The US ambassador to Israel recently argued that Israel has the right to annex much of the West Bank. Jonathan Cook writes that Israeli officials have been preparing for this moment for more than half a century, since the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza were seized back in 1967.
“Tourism is one of a range of tools that has been used by the Israeli government as a basis to grab land, and to expand their control in ways that abuse the rights of Palestinians,” Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir told The New Arab.
UN Special Rapporteur S. Michael Lynk tells an audience in New York, “annexation trends in the occupied territories, particularly with respect to the West Bank, are quickening, and annexation is in the air, and formal annexation may be occurring sooner than we are thinking.” The Israeli right has been creative, but the human rights activists give him hope.
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. This case has implications far beyond the 32 families who live there and the nearly 200 students who attend the school in the town. 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.
In an effort to legalize thousands of settler homes in West Bank, the Israeli government audaciously claims that it can “legislate anywhere in the world”, that it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries”, and that “is allowed to ignore the directives of international law in any field it desires”.
Israeli authorities have approved over 1,000 new illegal settlement units in the occupied West Bank, sparking condemnation from both Palestinian and international officials. According to Peace Now, since the election of US President Donald Trump, the Israeli government has promoted plans for 10,536 units and tenders for 5,679 units in settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Israel finally built an access road to the West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar last week, after half a century of delays. But the only vehicles allowed along it are the bulldozers scheduled to sweep away its 200 inhabitants’ homes. As Bedouin resident Ibrahim Abu Dawoud observed: “For us, leaving the desert is death.”
Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian for throwing stones last week, but when settler youths threw stones at soldiers to prevent the evacuation of a settlement, they were treated with kid gloves. That Israeli-Jewish settlement outpost was evacuated without a shot; while scores of Palestinians are massacred on the border.
Lydia Noon revisits the largest unrecognized Bedouin village in the West Bank, Abu Nuwar. There she finds a community reeling from home demolitions and revoked work permits to enter Israel. Students are now learning in a barber shop as their classroom was destroyed.