“Now, however, the brakes may be off. With the Trump administration providing diplomatic cover, right-wing ministers in Israel pressing to exploit that while it lasts and international support for the Palestinians focused for the moment on Gaza, a new ruling by a settler-majority panel of Israel’s Supreme Court appears to have freed the government to proceed with the removal of entire Bedouin communities on the West Bank. Advocates of the Bedouins say this would be a war crime: the forced transfer of a population under the protection of the military occupation.
“Everyone’s asking me, ‘What are you going to do, Bedouin?’” said Eid Abu Khamis, 51, Khan al-Ahmar’s leader. “I don’t have an F-16 or an F-15. I’m asking the international community: Where are the laws?”
Khan al-Ahmar is a dusty dot on the map, tucked behind a highway dividing two bustling Israeli settlements: Maale Adumim, so well-established as a suburb of Jerusalem that even leftists concede it would need to be carved out of a future Palestinian state; and a fast-growing offshoot, Kfar Adumim.
Bedouins have made the place their year-round home since at least the 1970s, though some, like Mr. Abu Khamis, say they were born there even earlier. Their tribe, the Jahalin, had wandered the Negev desert until being expelled by Israel after its establishment in 1948. When they arrived here in what was the uninhabited West Bank, the area was under Jordan’s control.
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they were born there even earlier.CreditCorinna Kern for The New York Times
With Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the army took over, restricted the herders’ movements and expropriated the area as state land — without yet evicting the Bedouins. In the 1970s, the developers of Maale Adumim called for evacuating the Bedouins to build Jewish housing to the east and “cut off the Arab settlement continuity between Judea and Samaria,” the terms Israelis use to refer to the northern and southern halves of the West Bank.”
How my heart sings 