UN: Israel may ’forcibly transfer’ 46 West Bank Beduin communities

[Little Tich]

Source: Jerusalem Post

The Civil Administration is working on a plan to relocate the communities and offer them alternative housing sites, but is far from completing the process.

Forty-six Palestinian herding and Beduin West Bank communities outside of Jerusalem are at risk of population transfer, the United Nations warned on Wednesday as a top official attended a protest ceremony against the pending IDF demolition of a small, unauthorized school in one of those encampments.

Under a hot morning sun, David Carden, who heads the UN’s West Bank Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, sat with Palestinian officials at a long folding table, set up on an artificial green lawn outside the eight-room compound, nicknamed “the tire school.” It services some 170 boys and girls from grades one to nine.

Communities such as this one, Khan al-Ahmar, “in the central West Bank [are] identified as being at risk of forcible transfer due to Israeli ‘relocation’ plans,” Carden said.

These people are “among the scores of vulnerable Palestinian communities across the occupied Palestinian territory who struggle daily to meet their basic needs and realize their rights in a coercive environment that creates pressure on them to leave their homes,” he said.

Read more: http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/UN-Israel-may-forcibly-transfer-46-West-Bank-Beduin-communities-464384

[Little Tich]

1. UN OFFICIALS: ISRAEL MUST HALT PLANS TO TRANSFER PALESTINIAN BEDOUINS

Source: UNRWA, 20 May 2015

The Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, James W. Rawley, and the Director of UNRWA Operations West Bank, Felipe Sanchez, expressed their grave concern today that Israel is rapidly advancing plans to transfer Palestinian Bedouins in the central West Bank from their current communities.

The UN Secretary-General has recently expressed concern in a report of March 2015 that “(p)lans to transfer thousands of Bedouin and herders […] may also be connected with settlement expansion. The Bedouins and herders are at risk of forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as multiple human rights violations.”

On 28 April, residents of Abu Nwar were informed that some families would have to move to the Al Jabal area outside of East Jerusalem, where the Israeli authorities have been preparing the ground for the past months. “Israeli practices in Area C, including a marked increase of demolitions and confiscations of donor-funded structures in the first quarter of 2015, have compounded an already untenable situation for Bedouin communities,” said Mr. Rawley.

Abu Nwar is one of 46 Palestinian Bedouin communities (~7,000 people, 70 per cent of whom are Palestine refugees) in Area C slated for transfer to three proposed “relocation” sites. “For Abu Nwar, or any other communities in the immediate E-1 vicinity, this would represent a continuation of developments that commenced in 1997 when Palestine refugees were loaded on trucks and taken to the same urban site in Eizariya, after which an illegal settlement was constructed on their former land,” said Mr. Sanchez. “History has shown us that these transfers have not proven to be in the interests of the Bedouin communities.”

The plan occurs against the backdrop of a discriminatory zoning and planning regime that facilitates the development of illegal Israeli settlements at the expense of Palestinians, for whom it is almost impossible to obtain permits for construction. Instead, they live in constant fear of eviction and home demolitions. The forced urbanization of Bedouin communities in the three relocation sites would destroy their culture and livelihoods.

Read more: http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/un-officials-israel-must-halt-plans-transfer-palestinian-bedouins

[oberliner]

3. Straight to the Nazi Germany comparison

Never fails.

[Little Tich]

4. No Nazi references, please.

Surely there must be other possible (and more apt) comparisons than comparing Israel with the Nazis?

[Nitram]

9. OK, point well taken.

[geek tragedy]

6. Nah, more like Slobo Milosevic. nt

[Nitram]

7. I'm sure there are Israelis who are dismayed by the irony (and horror) of Israel...

following in the footsteps of south African Apartheid and the Nazi strategy to gain territory.