A few days before the prime minister promised to suspend construction in the territories, the orders had already been issued: Buildings, tin shacks and tents in the tiny Bedouin hamlet of Hirbet Um al-Hir, adjacent to the settlement of Carmel in the south Hebron hills, were to be demolished.
This week, representatives from the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem visited the site. A kitten lay on the rocky, arid ground, slowly dying. No one in the place gave a thought to rescuing it. Helpless, the kitten cast a desperate gaze at its surroundings. ..... The residents of the tiny village are helpless, too. With their last remaining strength they are clinging to the fence of the settlement of Carmel, part of which lies on their private land; clinging to the soil their father and grandfather bought after the family was forced to flee from the Negev in 1948; clinging in their tents and their tin huts and with their animals to the remainder of their land, from which Israel has for some time been threatening to evict them.
....On Monday of this week the diplomats from the U.S. consulate were struck by the injustice. They promised to help. Who knows? Maybe salvation for the residents of the hirbeh - the word means ruin - will come from them.
Alongside the yellow homes of the "southern neighborhood" the settlers have laid the foundations for another group of homes. These of course will not be included in the "freeze," because they are "building starts." .... the residents of the new neighborhood are worse than their predecessors.
......"Because they are young. Because they sabotage our property and steal our animals." Id tells of shepherds being attacked and sheep stolen, of people being struck and harassed. Complaints submitted to the Hebron police usually result in a visit by a team of police, but no one is brought to trial. And now have come the freeze orders, which Id calls "a big, big problem."
...Id was born here.... tribe, the Jahalin, which lived in the Negev and was scattered to the four winds in 1948. Id's grandfather arrived here at the beginning of the 1950s with his family and bought this land, on the remnants of which we now sit, from people in the town of Yatta.
Id's father, Suleiman.... "Three times you did us bad," he says. "The first time, in 1948. Everything went. No refugee camps were established for the Bedouin, and every tribe went its own way. We started to wander in the hills, until we got here.... My father bought the whole hill from them, and now Carmel is perched on it. The second time: the Six-Day War. We all became refugees....
"Then, in November 1980, the first Jewish National Fund tractor entered along with a high army officer, who said: We have to cut a road to Be'er Sheva here. Everyone will benefit from the road, he said. Then they put an army base on the hill...
"We are stupid Bedouin. We thought the settlers would not harm us. They did groundwork here, groundwork there, Carmel grew and expanded onto our land and we said nothing. In 1992 it snowed and we saw our situation, we were totally finished, and then we started to build with cinderblocks. The settlers called in the Civil Administration and they wanted to demolish our cinderblock structures. We were served demolition orders. I went to the Civil Administration in Beit El and there they told me: Aren't you ashamed? They are sitting on my land and building two-story homes and I will not build...
"Three weeks ago, on November 11, a Civil Administration officer came with an inspector. He came to this tent where we are now sitting - this tent also exists in the pictures taken by your plane - and told us that the tent has to be demolished. This tent has been here since the 1960s. I have a transistor radio and I hear that there is a tsunami in Asia or an earthquake in Russia. From Allah. And what happens? All the countries help. And how do they help? They bring tents to rescue the people. You are a wise nation. I ask you: What kind of law tears down a tent? What kind of law issues a demolition order for a tent? What happened to this world?......
....To Benjamin Netanyahu I say: I am not afraid. I told the officer: If you take down the tent we will sleep on the earth and the sky will be our blanket. We will not leave. How many times does a person have to flee in his life? Carmel is on my land....
"They started with these orders in 1995. This is our third blow. I have more than 60 orders and it's not finished yet...... Only if there will be a massacre here like in Kafr Qasem or in Kibiya. If they take down our tent, we will put up a new one. We are Bedouin.
"We have no objection to Carmel. In the 1980s we were friends. They knew all our children. At that time they were good people. Now they want to move us....You know that everything is in the hands of the settlers. And who guards them? The army and the Civil Administration... The whole nation of Israel works for the settlers.
.... Several months ago the villagers tried to build 11 gray-brick toilets; only two remain that were not demolished, one in this compound and one in the compound opposite. They are left with one toilet for 86 people...
Now they know what will happen: after the stop-work orders will come the second order and then the third and then the demolition. "We are already used to it," they say, laconically yet sadly.
A response by the Civil Administration was not available at the time of going to press. Full story
13 October 2009, Israeli soldiers and police prevented the residents of Umm al-Kheir, located in the South Hebron Hills, from finishing the construction of a new chicken house. The families are not allowed by the army to build houses and are therefore living in tents that are located just outside the gate to the illegal settlement of Carmel.Treatment of Bedouins inside Israel
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