Israel's defense ministry is expected to destroy up to 12 traditional "fellaheen" communities situated in the West Bank in an area the Israeli Defense Force have illegally designated as a training zone for the occupying Israeli army. For the Palestinians it must seem incredibly the Israeli government, which governs a society which claims to be based on the rule of law, can get its judicial system to rubber stamp an occupation which is regarded as illegal by the UN and international law without facing sanctions of any kind from the international community.
The communities under threat have been marked on British maps since the 1830s when it was the occupying power, no one really knows how long they have really existed. Adrian Bloomfield who visited the area for the Daily Telegraph wrote:
In the village of Jenba, one of the largest of the 12 communities under threat, the people who live there all remember they were born in the same caves as their fathers and grandfathers. Ad
Sitting on the floor of his cave, its ceiling covered with cobwebs and blackened with stove smoke, Hamid Jabareen, 72 and almost blind, recalled that the only time his father left home was when he was drafted into the Turkish defence of Jerusalem before its capture by Gen. Allenby's troops in 1917.
With its motley collection of tents and discreetly hidden caves, Jenba is an unprepossessing place far removed from the cacophonous bustle of the West Bank's sprawling towns and cities.
But behind its narrow doorway, Mr Jabareen's home – shared with his two wives and myriad children and grandchildren – is surprisingly homely, its natural walls reinforced with stonework and its kitchen and sleeping areas set at split levels.
Mr Jabareen has spent his whole life tending to his flocks and cultivating wheat and barley. The prospect of being deprived of his both his livelihood and the only way of life he has ever known is inconceivable to him.
"It is my land," he said. "It is the land of my father and of my grandfather before him.
"We can only hope that decent and dignified people will raise their voices and say something about it."
The cave dwellers say they have been the victims of a sustained campaign of Israeli harassment for decades.
Settlers living illegally nearby have poisoned their cisterns, burnt their crops, beaten them up and rustled their livestock.
But the greatest threat to their futures began 12 years ago, when Israeli forces forcibly evicted 700 of them after ruling that they were illegally living in a military training zone.
Although they won a reprieve through a court injunction the following year, Israel's defence ministry is now determined to resolve the matter.
It will disclose the contents of a new court petition this week. Activists say they expect the ministry will seek to evict and demolish most, perhaps all, the communities.
The ministry, which sees the cave dwellers as illegal squatters and accuses them of rejecting compromises to relocate them, refused to be drawn on what course it would take.
Rights groups claimed that Israel's real intention is to allow settlers to move onto the land once the Palestinians have been ejected.
Ezra Nawi, an Israeli activist, said: "To build new settlements, you need to get the Palestinians out somehow, which is why there has been a campaign of intimidation and harassment to make more and more people leave."
The Israel-Palestinian conflict has always been one in which whenever Israel breaks international law or UN resolutions, it uses the international media to turn their Palestinian victims into the aggressors and thus they become in the eyes of the political and media elites responsible for their own oppression. It is almost fascistic and reminds one of the way the Nazis blamed the French resistance for the reprisals the SS inflicted on villages like Oradour-sur-Glane. Myself I cannot see much difference between the latter and the way in 2008 Israel treated the Palestinians in Gaza after Hamas had fired home made rockets into Israel proper.
Take the cae of the twelve Palestinian communities who are under threat. When Israel first occupied this land and the West Bank as a whole they created a military training zone near the Palestinian city of Hebron. Years later after the Israeli government earmarks this land for yet more illegal settlements, It's Ministry of Defense has the audacity to accuse the people who have lived on this land for decades as their families have before them, of being illegal squatters who refuse to accept the rule of law.
The village of Jenba and the other eleven communities are not in Israel proper but on the West Bank, where under international law the writ of Israeli law does not run. Yet still Israel attempts to turn black into white and white into black, shame on them for acting just like the Nazis did during the Holocaust. The sad fact is, if and when these communities are evicted, Western governments will huff and puff and then when Israel builds even more settlements on occupied land, they will accept the new status quo and demand the Palestinians do likewise.
Shame on us all for accepting such fascist behaviour.
Photo above of Hamid Jabareen sitting in the home he and his people have lived in for generations.
Mick Hall.
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