{"id":4371,"date":"2018-06-24T15:48:46","date_gmt":"2018-06-24T15:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/?p=4371"},"modified":"2018-06-25T15:53:37","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T15:53:37","slug":"as-israel-pushes-to-build-bedouin-homes-and-school-face-demolition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/?p=4371","title":{"rendered":"As Israel Pushes to Build, Bedouin Homes and School Face Demolition"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By\u00a0David M. Halbfinger<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Rami Nazzal<\/span><\/p>\n

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KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank \u2014 The herders are being herded.<\/p>\n

Any day now, the Israeli Army says, bulldozers will arrive to wipe the West Bank Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar off the map.<\/p>\n

For decades, Israel has wanted to clear a large section of the West Bank of several thousand Bedouins \u2014 who raise sheep and goats in the creases of the hills east of Jerusalem \u2014 to make room for the expansion of Jewish settlements.<\/p>\n

After an ugly televised eviction in the late 1990s, when soldiers hauled off families and bulldozers leveled a whole neighborhood, displaying the occupation\u2019s brute force, liberal Israeli judges and foreign diplomats helped slow the expulsions. Nothing was stopped, but much was stalled \u2014 again and again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The army issued scores of demolition orders for the Bedouins\u2019 rickety hovels of corrugated tin, scrap wood and nylon fabric. Periodically, soldiers tore down a few shacks, toppled water tanks, carted off solar panels or staged military training exercises on the site, in what critics called a drip-drip campaign to make life so miserable that residents would simply leave. But the army did not dare demolish an entire village again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n