On the backdrop of the protest by five European states, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered a stay in the razing of the Bedouin West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar and the eviction of the 32 families living there. Justice Anat Baron’s temporary injunction on July 5 gave the state until July 11 to respond to the residents’ petition against the destruction of their homes and their relocation to an area near the village of Abu Dis east of Jerusalem.
The international interest in their small village and media coverage of the campaign by Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK more than likely provided residents of Khan al-Ahmar with the stamina to persevere in their decadelong struggle and to petition the high court once again after being turned away repeatedly.
Since 2009, the residents of Khan al-Ahmar have appealed to the court numerous times in a bid to force the state into an accommodation and prevent the destruction of their village. As recently as May 24, Israel’s top court — the same court that stayed the demolition order this week — rejected yet another petition and gave military authorities the go-ahead to raze the village within a month. Justices Noam Sohlberg, Yael Willner and Anat Baron (the same judge who now suspended the demolition) ruled that there was no legal basis for intervening in the 2017 decision by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to demolish the villages of Khan al-Ahmar and Susya in the Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank designated Area C.
The 170 residents of Khan al-Ahmar are members of the Jahalin tribe. In 1952, they were evicted from their lands in sovereign Israel near the southern archaeological site of Tel Arad, which the state turned into an area for live-fire military drills. They roamed about until reaching the Jerusalem hills, then under Jordanian control, where they settled. After Israel captured the area in the 1967 Yom Kippur War and established the settlement of Kfar Adumim and the industrial zone of Mishor Adumim on the land where they were living, they found themselves boxed in between the settlement and the industrial zone. They are currently living near the Dead Sea, their village divided in two by the busy Jerusalem-Jericho road.
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