Things disappear in Israel.
According to Palestinian geographer Shukri Arraf, some 3,000 locations in historical Palestine had been renamed, Hebraized, by the mid 1990s. They include over 1,000 culturally significant ruins, 550 wadis and rivers, 400 springs, 300 villages, 200 mountains, 50 caves, 30 castles and palaces, and 14 lakes and natural pools.
No-one has attempted to update Arraf’s list with his renowned rigour and forensic attention to detail, but if they did, they would now need to include the village of Umm Al Hiran.
Umm Al Hiran
Umm Al Hiran is a Bedouin village situated in the Naqab (Negev in Hebrew) desert, an area in southern Israel that makes up approximately half of the country’s land mass. The region is steeped in history, with parts of its surface dating back some 1.8 million years. The Naqab, originally known as Arabia Petraea, was incorporated into Palestine in 1922 during Britain’s occupation of the region. The local population identifies as Palestinian-Arabs but refer to themselves as Bedouin in recognition of their nomadic way of life. Today there are some 300,000 Bedouin living in Israel.
Over the last seven decades the government of Israel has systematically classified Bedouin villages and towns in the Naqab as ‘unrecognised’ and forcibly migrated their populations onto ever-narrowing strips of government designated land. These overcrowded and underdeveloped habitats resemble the townships of apartheid South Africa.
In 1956, the Abu al-Qian tribe was resettled in Umm Al Hiran, by order of the Israeli military authorities, after being displaced from their ancestoral homeland of Wadi Atir. Assuming the relocation was permanent, the Abu al-Qian set about building houses and infrastructure, paving roads and farming adjacent lands.
In 2001, the Israel Land Authority described Umm Al Hiran’s residents as a ‘special obstacle’ in its recommendations for further development of the Naqab. A series of farcical legal hearings were held during which the Israeli government claimed the three hundred residents of Umm Al Hiran were illegal squatters, despite the 1956 military directive. For the next two decades uncertainty hung over the future of the village, then in May 2024 they were told they would be evicted in November. They were also instructed to demolish their homes to avoid paying the cost of the state doing so.
This Time It’s Different
Demolition of Bedouin towns and villages, although cruel, discriminatory and illegal under international law, is not uncommon. In May of this year, I wrote about the destruction of Wadi al-Khalil. Since then, the villages of Al-Araqib and Dahmash have also been partially demolished. But the destruction of Umm Al Hiran is different. It sets a dangerous precedent because although other Bedouin villages have been cleared, none have been replaced by a Jewish settlement with an imported, non-indigenous population. The Israeli government’s policy on Umm Al Hiran is explicit – ethnicity determines where you can live. Welcome to apartheid Israel.
Thursday 14th November – First the Arrests
“We woke up at 3:30am to the news of three of the council members of the village being arrested. Nobody knew where they were taken. A lawyer scrambled for hours between police stations that kept sending him back and forth on his search to find his clients” shared a spokesperson from The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages (RCUV), a civil society organization.
While the whereabouts of the three council members remained a mystery, members of RCUV made their way to Umm Al Hiran.
“We arrived at Umm Al Hiran. Many police vehicles were on their way. Drones and helicopters above. All the houses in the village had been demolished by the villagers earlier in the week in order to avoid hefty fines.”
One lone building remained standing.
“The mosque was the only building the villagers couldn’t bring themselves to demolish. Now, standing in front of the large force of policemen the villagers decided they would prefer to demolish the mosque themselves rather than have the police do it. They arranged for a tractor to come from the nearby village of Hura, but the tractor was stuck at a roadblock that the police set up earlier. Though there were attempts to settle this with the police, in the end we noticed the forces coming down from the road to the mosque. About seven large demolition bulldozers came. All for one mosque. Why? The only reason I can think of is to make the fines larger.”
It only took two bulldozers thirty minutes to flatten the mosque. Villagers looked on.
Observers from RCUV asked the villagers if there was anything they wanted to say, anything specific they wanted documented. One villager responded: “What’s the point? Nobody is listening anyway.”
Late on Thursday, RCUV confirmed the three council members had been released, without being charged, after nine hours in detention.
“It is still unclear still exactly why they were detained, other than to restrict them from protesting and warning the rest of the villagers.”
The Judaisation of the Naqab
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir isn’t shy. He frequently takes to X (formerly Twitter) to trumpet his far-right racist opinions and spew his anti-Arab, anti-Muslim views. By Thursday morning Ben-Gvir was gloating: “I commend the Southern District of the Israel Police, led by Commissioner Amir Cohen, for the operation to demolish illegal homes in the Bedouin settlement of Umm al-Hiran.”
One of the problems with Ben-Gvir, there are many, is he talks too much, and in doing so reveals his warped ambitions. Stick a microphone in front of him and the odds are he will incriminate himself: “This [demolition and forced displacement] is the only way to restore governance and sovereignty over the Negev.”
And so, we had it – the destruction of Umm Al Hiran was only necessary to enable Zionist ‘sovereignty’ over the Naqab.
The small village, home to three hundred Bedouins, will make way for a Jewish settlement that will be called Dror. It will become home to 2,400 families, including a significant number of nationalist religious Jews, many with ties to illegal settlements in the West Bank. Dror is part of a broader programme of ethnic cleansing which will see a further fourteen communities grafted onto the remains of Bedouin villages.
Things disappear in Israel.
©2024 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
