RAMALLAH, West Bank — The residents of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev are on standby, awaiting Israeli bulldozers to arrive someday and destroy their homes as a prelude to establishing a Jewish community on the ruins. Around 70 Bedouin families, some 1,000 people, face forced evictions after a May 5 ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court upholding a 2002 government decision to destroy their village and build a Jewish town called Hiran.

Lawyers from Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel had argued before the court that the residents of Umm al-Hiran and their ancestors have been living in the village since 1956 on the orders of the Israeli military governor after they were displaced from their original home, Khirbet Zbala. They did not seize the land on which they live. Moreover, their displacement and the demolition of their homes would be unfair and unjust treatment, because they had been established decades prior at the will of the state but would now be demolished based on claims that they had not been permitted.

The Supreme Court ruled, however, that the state rightfully owns the land of Umm al-Hiran, noting that the village residents had not purchased it but rather resided there after the state allowed them to. The state, the court said, is now legally canceling its decision to permit them to reside at Umm al-Hiran. In short, the residents have no legal rights to the land, and it is the state's right to establish Hiran on that land.

The targeting of Umm al-Hiran is part of a series of projects in the Negev in line with the 2011 Prawer Plan, conceived by former Minister of Planning Ehud Prawer and legislated in 2103 as the Law for Regularizing Bedouin Habitation in the Negev. It proposes that the populations of 22 unrecognized Bedouin villages be relocated to residential complexes to be built for them. Unrecognized villages are those not acknowledged as official settlements by the Israeli government. They are therefore denied municipal services and infrastructure, including electricity, phone lines, a sewer system, roads and health clinics. Schools are also scarce.