The Demolition of Khan al-Ahmar Will Proceed
The Israeli government has won court approval to go ahead with the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin village, whose residents (who were moved there by the Israeli military decades ago after being displaced from their traditional territories) will be relocated near a garbage dump where other Bedouins have themselves been “dumped” in recent years. The removal of Khan al-Ahmar- it’s school, homes, sacred spaces, will allow Israel to connect Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim (a Jewish settlement) as well as slice the West Bank in two, furthering the decades-old dream of the Israeli right of making a two-state solution impossible. You can read Amnesty International’s report on it here, and my report on the Canadian activist detained protesting the demolition here (which also gives more context and background).
This story should be recognizable to Canadians, with our own history of taking land by the sword or the pen, then moving the inhabitants to worse and worse locales. In a few more decades Palestinians may find themselves in a similar place to where our Indigenous peoples were a few decades ago (and still are to too great an extent)- politically disempowered, traumatized, poor, ghosts who haunt the civilization that conquered and brutalized them until they posed no threat.
Our Indigenous people have risen up again in power to shape what happens on the land we share, and it seems unlikely the Palestinians, still resisting after 70 years, will go silent any time soon. What a shame, though, to see Israel go the way so many others have gone before, choosing the path of state-building on a foundation of violence and injustice so similar to that which our Jewish ancestors have experienced at the hands of others for centuries.
