The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 estimates there are between
500 and 1000 children held in Israeli military detention each year.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the Palestinian
village of Khan al-Ahmar, where it is and why its location puts it in
the crosshairs of the settler movement.
Khan al-Ahmar is a very small village of around 250 people. And it
sits just north of Jerusalem inside the West Bank. I'll give you just a
little bit of background and then I'll tell you why it’s so important.
The people who live there are members of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe. This
is a tribe that originally lived much further south in what's called
the Tel Arad area, an arid part of Israel below the West Bank and above
the desert. They were shepherds. They lived a Bedouin lifestyle where
they raised sheep and goats. And they travelled in the summer months, as
part of their lifestyle and in 1948 when Israel was established, they
fled or were expelled from where they were living in Tel Arad. Different
families dispersed across the West Bank. Some of the Jahalin, for
example, settled in the southern area of the West Bank called Masafer
Yatta closer to Tel Arad, but this family moved all the way up above
Jerusalem. And 1967 came around and then again the West Bank was
occupied. And the other turning point was the 1990s when the Oslo
Accords were signed and the West Bank was divided into different areas.
And the Jahalin Bedouin are living in an area that's called Area C, an
area that Israel completely controls both militarily and
administratively which means that Israel has complete control over the
lives of these Palestinians. So for example, they're not really able to
build legally. Israel denies 98% of Palestinian requests for building
permits in Area C. So that immediately results in residents building
illegally. And this tiny hamlet is technically built illegally. In 2009
Israeli military authorities issued demolition orders for basically the
entire village. And there's this back and forth with the state and
residents who petitioned the Supreme Court, the High Court of Justice,
to keep their village where it was. And they had been in court for a
decade, until 2018, when the High Court of Justice upheld the state's
decision to demolish the village. But the village has not yet been
demolished. And that's largely because this place that they're located
in - and why it's in the crosshairs of the settler movement - is it’s
too sensitive. It's located in a place called E1 and what that means is
it's in this corridor that connects the southern West Bank to the
northern West Bank. And it's this 12 square kilometre area between
Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to its north where this
village sits that the settlement movement has been pushing to build in
for a very long time. If they were to be able to remove this village
that they consider an impediment to their project and be able to build
so as to have a contiguous settlement from Jerusalem all the way to
Ma’ale Adumim, it would cut off the Palestinian south from the
Palestinian north. And that would make it impossible for what the
international community has called for years and years for which is a
two-state solution. It would prevent what's called (Palestine)
territorial contiguity between Jerusalem and those two sections of the
West Bank to its north and south. So the village is really a symbol for
the international community. And even though it's really small and even
though it has these demolition orders, it's remained where it is.
And you mentioned that Area C is completely under the control of
the Israelis. Bezalel Smotrich, is both the finance minister and the
deputy minister in the Ministry of Defence, and as such, he's in charge
of civil administration in Area C. Give us a sketch of Mr. Smotrich.
Smotrich is the wunderkind of the settler extreme right. He's always
mentioned in the same sentence with Itamar Ben-Gvir, this other far
right extremist settler. But they're very different. Itamar Ben-Gvir is
a kind of clownish, thuggish Kahanist guy who lives in Hebron. Smotrich
is slightly more refined but still extremely racist and homophobic and
is this supremacist version of the extreme right. He actually lives in
an outpost near the settlement of Kedumim. His home is technically
illegal, not unlike Khan al-Ahmar. And he has dedicated his life to
undermining the possibility of a Palestinian state and to expanding the
settlement project. So to give you an example of what I mean when I say
he's a Jewish supremacist and really what Palestinians hear when they
hear him speak, back in 2021 he addressed the Knesset and he said
directly to Arab lawmakers in the Knesset that it was a mistake that
Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, didn't finish the job. In
other words, didn't make a bigger Nakba, a bigger expulsion of Arabs and
throw you all out in 1948. He really thinks that Israel is for Jews and
there is no space for anybody who is not Jewish in the country. In 2005
he was arrested on the basis of his possession of 700 litres of
gasoline. He was suspected of participating in an attempt to blow up the
Ayalon Highway, which is a central highway in Israel, to prevent or
disrupt the disengagement of Israeli settlers and forces from Gaza at
the time. He was held in jail for three weeks but he didn't speak to
authorities. And he was actually released without an indictment. But he
was certainly suspected in essentially what was a terrorist plot in
2005. A few years later he founded an NGO, Regavim, that really gave him
the boost that got him into the Knesset. It monitors and pursues legal
action in the Israeli court system against Palestinians who build
illegally. That can be in Israel proper, where there are lots of
Palestinians who aren't able, similar to their brethren in the West
Bank, to get permits to build and so they also build illegally and
Israel does demolish their homes inside of Israel, we're talking about
the homes of Israeli citizens. Regavim constantly uses drones over
Palestinian villages and they take pictures and they note any new
construction. That could be a sheep pen, a bench, a water cistern, it
could be anything that is new, that is technically illegal, that they
then call the government to come and demolish. So that's the kind of
organisation that this guy Bezalel Smotrich founded and the kind of
actions that he encourages.
This man is not only the finance minister but also, as you say, a
minister in the Ministry of Defence. He has new authority over the
lives of Palestinians in area C that has not been granted before to a
civilian government minister . There's a significance to this position
specifically for a couple of reasons. He's very strategic in the way
that he's thinking. He knows that Area C is where he wants to focus.
Area C is only home to a couple of 100,000 Palestinians. It's not where
most Palestinians live, it's where most settlers live. And so his goal
is to really drive all the Palestinians out of that area first. There
are more demolitions, more illegal outposts popping up, more settler
attacks, in fact, massive pogroms than there were in the past. And the
truth is that settlers - especially the radical violent ones, which are
not all of the settlers, of course - are quite emboldened. They know
that Smotrich has their back. So when they commit acts of violence
against Palestinians, they can almost guarantee that there won't be any
repercussions. And that also means that Palestinians themselves feel
more helpless and more terrorised by settlers than ever before. And then
on top of that Smotrich supports annexation of the West Bank. And what
this position is - it's a small technical administrative change - but it
is actually significant because the West Bank was previously or is
still mostly occupied by the Israeli military, it's a military
occupation. And internationally it is (seen) as a military occupation.
But when you have a civilian minister ruling over a people, the
Palestinians of Area C, who did not elect him we have a different animal
on our hands. We no longer just have a military occupation where the
IDF is ruling Palestinians, we have an elected minister ruling
Palestinians, a man they did not elect. And that is something different,
that is what legal scholars are calling de facto and not only de facto but de jure,
that is legal annexation. And it's a thing that I think has been less
noted by the media, because it's kind of a hard thing to grasp. It's a
technicality. But it's very significant.
I want to ask you about Mr. Netanyahu. He's been coy about the
future of Khan al-Ahmar. He said it will be demolished and then he
pushed the decision into the long grass. So what's going on there?
Because of course, he owes his premiership now to the likes of Smotrich
and Ben-Gvir.
There’s one thing you can say that's positive about Benjamin
Netanyahu; this man is a superb politician, he can get out of anything,
he can get into anything. The international community has rallied
around Khan al-Ahmar again and again. And he knows that he doesn't want
more pressure on his back. Right now he has enough with this government
that is causing him endless amounts of international challenges because
of the things that they say and because of the things that they want to
do. And because he has the furthest right coalition he has ever formed.
In fact, it's the furthest right coalition that Israel has ever seen.
And so it's quite a challenge for him to manage. And I think that one of
the reasons he's pushing Khan al-Ahmar more specifically into the long
grass, as you say, is that this little village has name recognition
worldwide. And there are other villages, and this is important, that
don't have this kind of name recognition that are partially or even
totally demolished all the time. And no one hears about them outside of
the Palestinian press or the Twitter feeds of human rights organisations
like Yesh Din and B'Tselem because they don't have the name
recognition. Just this week B'Tselem documented the fact that 20
residents of a very small town and a community in South Hebron Hills
called al-Widadi abandoned their homes. And they abandoned their homes
after repeated attacks by settlers and the erection of a new outpost
nearby. And this is the third community probably in the last two months
in the West Bank to literally leave everything, leave their homes and go
somewhere else, probably not in Area C. So pushing Khan al-Ahmar
demolition off, while demolishing and enabling the destruction of tens
of other villages is actually very tactically smart. It makes the
coalition happy because demolitions are still happening. And it prevents
the international community from saying anything.
You mentioned that Benjamin Netanyahu is under a lot of
international scrutiny, but also a lot of pressure at home. These
protests that are ongoing over his so-called judicial reforms, these
massive protests, will they in any way help the cause of the villagers
of Khan al-Ahmar and indeed these other villages that are being
demolished? Will it help the wider Palestinian cause? Because aren't we
talking about human rights here on both sides? Is there any kind of
recognition that ‘Oh, my goodness, this is what the Palestinians are
talking about when they talk about human rights?’ And that maybe we've
got some common ground here.
I think it's the million dollar question. It's a really excellent
question. Will these protests which are sweeping Israel - they're in
what, their 29th week? I don't want to count wrong but it's been months
and months of these protests against a package of legislation that
Netanyahu’s ministers, Netanyahu’s people in the Likud - not in the far
right, not the Bezalel Smotrichs - are trying to pass that would weaken
the Israeli judiciary in favour of the Israeli government. In other
words, it would basically give what is already a very weak democratic
system, a push in the direction of majoritarianism, total domination by
the legislature and the legislature being in this case the government
only because the way that the opposition and the coalition work in
Israel is that the coalition, the formed government, really has all of
the power. And it's important for me to note that as a staff member of
the New Israel Fund, which has been helping to seed money into some of
these protests, specifically parts of the protests that have to do with
anti-occupation, that say the words there really can't be democracy, the
chant of these protests is democratia, democracy. And so I
would say that the protests are giving the Israeli public an opportunity
to have a collective civics lesson. This anti-occupation block is
saying there can be no democracy with occupation. You have to look this
in the eye in order to understand what we mean when we say equality. We
can't have equality for some, there is no such thing as a partial
democracy. So I do think that there is a message from these people who
are the human rights organisations and the voices for equality for all
and the voices for an end to what is essentially an apartheid regime in
the West Bank, those voices are there. And so I do hope that these
protests against the judicial reform can also spark this conversation
about an end to the occupation.
You mentioned international pressure has been important in
maintaining the survival of Khan al-Ahmar. But as you said, there are
other communities that are disappearing almost on a daily basis. And
this settlement expansion, this plan of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir goes
forward, I would say almost unimpeded. What more should the
international community be doing?
I remember Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, said
something about one of the villages in the south Hebron hills. Alll it
took was a statement and that was off the table. And I do think that
that's still true. I do think that when big names and big people in the
international community say the name of a village that village is safe,
at least for a while. And so there is a world in which you could start
naming names. I've been thinking about this when it comes to the south
Hebron Hills, you know, there are 12 villages in Masafer Yatta in the
southern part of the West Bank that are under the threat of eviction,
because like Khan al-Ahmar, the Supreme Court rejected their petition
not to be demolished. So if somebody like Anthony Blinken were to just
list the names: at-Tuwani, Tuba, Umm Faggarah, Umm al-Khair.
Name the names.
I would say too that the international community at large needs to
be looking at the bigger picture. They need to be talking about what's
actually happening on the ground. So the pogroms that have been taking
place. One of the things that in the United States, I think, is really
shocking is that there were hundreds of settlers descending on villages,
moments where they burned cars, they tried to torch buildings, they
attacked homes and businesses. And in one case, at least, one
Palestinian was shot and killed. These are armed settlers coming with
fire. And a week or two ago a couple of places were attacked, one of
them was Turmus Ayya. Turmus Ayya is a village that is very wealthy.
It's home to a lot of American citizens, Palestinian-American citizens.
And I actually just heard on a webinar that we did from one of the women
who was there, a Palestinian-American woman and she said “my kids tried
to call the embassy, they tried to call the American Embassy and say,
‘We are unsafe, they are attacking us’ and they literally thought they
were going to die but the last embassy to pay a visit to this village
after that night of settler terror was the American Embassy.” And (the
settlers) have not been indicted and the American Embassy hasn't pushed
for indictments of the attackers on Turmus Ayya. There have been zero
indictments of people who stampeded through that village that night. And
so that's something that I do think the international community can do
is to just name names of actual places and see the people who were there
because they are real people. And they are really there. And also push
for an actual end to the impunity, to the total getting away with it
that those settlers and their folks have. And just the last thing that I
need to say, and I think this is the messaging that the international
community is missing, which is that the security of the Palestinians and
the security of the Israelis depend on each other. There is no world in
which Palestinians have security and Israelis don't and Israelis have
security and Palestinians don't. Neither will be safe until both are
safe. And so that needs to be constantly in the sights of policymakers.
We need to know that both people need to be safe, there cannot just be
security for Israelis, and there certainly cannot just be security for
Palestinians. So I'll end with that.
The Arab Digest newsletter takes a two week break returning 14 August. We launch our New Top Ten Podcast
list on 31 July and it will run through the month of August. A new
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