Sir, – After some delay, most recently during the visit of German chancellor Angela Merkel, the Jahalin Bedouin community of Khan al-Akhmar near the illegal Israeli settlement Ma’ale Adumim is finally about to be evicted and its houses and school demolished.
In the early 1950s the Jahalin tribe was evicted by Israel from the Negev and forced to resettle in the Judean desert, now in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967.
Khan Al Akhmar is the first community to be evicted in order to facilitate contiguity between Jerusalem and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement.
In the past nine years, since the construction of an ecological school from tyres and mud (having been refused building permit for a solid school structure), the Israeli courts have consistently rejected the Jahalins’ repeated appeals against demolition and eviction. Evicting them will forcibly transfer them from their traditional open air shepherding settlement to life as a rejected community in the neighbouring Palestinian town Al Azariyya, whose inhabitants oppose the Bedouins living in their midst due to historical enmities between settled Palestinians and Bedouins. Demolishing the school will end not only the education of Khan al Akhmar’s children, but of 170 other local children attending the school.
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The UN and the EU have criticized Israel’s plans to transfer the tribe, agreeing that transferring occupied populations is a war crime.
The impending transfer has received little Irish political attention or media coverage. It is time the Irish Government voices its objection to this gross injustice. – Yours, etc,
RONIT LENTIN,
Retired Associate
Professor of Sociology,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.