Expert Q&A: On Israel’s Displacement of the Palestinian Bedouin

September 18, 2014 IMEU
Expert Q&A: On Israel’s Displacement of the Palestinian Bedouin

PHOTO: Israeli forces destroy structures belonging to a Bedouin family in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem, November 2011. (Issam Rimawi / APA images)

 

Expert

Suhad BisharaSuhad Bishara, Attorney and Director of Land and Planning Rights Unit for Adalah: The Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel.

 

 

 


Q&A

 

Q - On September 16, Haaretz newspaper reported that the Israeli government is advancing plans to forcibly relocate 12,500 Bedouin Palestinians from lands just east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank to planned communities in the Jordan Valley. Why do Israeli authorities want to move these people off the land they're currently inhabiting?

SB - “Israel is trying to advance its interests in the area as an Occupying Power that perceives itself, in contradiction to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), as a permanent (rather than temporary) regime. These particular attempted evictions in the eastern area surrounding Jerusalem have long been part of a strategic plan to secure vacant lands in order to expand and strengthen the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to ensure a ‘safe’ passage and geographic continuity between the settlements and the city of Jerusalem, and to decrease the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem and its surrounding area so as to maintain a permanent Jewish majority. This plan follows the same policy approved in previous Israeli plans in the area such as the Jerusalem Regional Master Planand the proposed plan for the Eastern Ring Road.”

 

 

Q - Does Israel have any legal authority to forcibly relocate Palestinians living in the occupied territories?

SB - "No. According to International Humanitarian Law (IHL) individual or mass forced transfers of protected persons are prohibited, regardless of motive. (Fourth Geneva Convention (GCIV), Art. 49). Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including the Bedouin communities living in east Jerusalem, are considered protected persons, meaning they are civilians who do not have the nationality of the occupier (Israel). IHL does provide an exception for the occupying power if evacuation of an area is needed for imperative military reasons or if the security of the civilian population is in question. In these cases, the occupying power continues to have responsibility for the well-being of the protected persons and must return the evacuated persons to their homes as soon as the military operations in the area are over. The threshold for evacuation is high, and the eviction of the Bedouin communities from the area surrounding east Jerusalem does not meet these strict exceptions."

 

 

Q - What avenues of redress do the people who will be subjected to this forced removal have?

SB - “In the past, Palestinians facing forced transfer in the OPT have approached the Israeli Supreme Court, though experience has shown that the Supreme Court is unwilling to protect Palestinians from unlawful evacuation. However, the unlawful transfer of protected persons is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions (GC IV, Art. 4), which triggers penal sanctions and legal actions under international law (GC, IV, Arts 146-147).  IHL calls on all parties to the Geneva Conventions to take legal action against forced evacuation, so there may be opportunities for Palestinians subject to unlawful transfer to seek international protection.”

 

 

Q - Inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, the government has been carrying out a similar campaign against Bedouin citizens of the state living in the Negev (Naqab) Desert, ethnically cleansing non-Jewish Bedouin citizens from their traditional lands in order to make way for the settlement of Israeli Jews. Are these two campaigns against the Bedouin connected?


SB - “Since the Nakba in 1948, Israel has created a complex matrix of racist land, planning and military laws and regulations to seize control of Palestinian land and displace hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants through ‘legal’ means. In doing so, it has effectively suspended domestic and international protections for Palestinians.  Today, Israel continues to displace Palestinian communities located within its sphere of control in Israel and in the OPT and suspend their rights against such forced evictions and transfers.

“Just this week, the Israeli Supreme Court decided in case of the Palestinian Bedouin village ofUmm el-Hieran in the Naqab, to step aside and allow the demolition of Umm el-Hieran and the forced displacement of its 500 Bedouin citizens of Israel in order to establish a new Jewish town(Hiran) in its place. In Umm el-Hieran, the court failed to grant Bedouin citizens of Israel constitutional protections against forced evacuation; their status as citizens of Israel was irrelevant, and their rights were suspended because of their nationality, because they are Palestinian. The same is true in the OPT in relation to the suspension of legal protections under IHL. Israel is enacting a single policy of displacement against Palestinians in whatever geo-political or legal reality in which they live, in order to fulfill Israel’s settler colonial vision of maximum control of land and resources for exclusive Jewish use, with the minimum number of Palestinians.”