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International Dialogue

International Dialogue

John Reynolds

Abstract

Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood. (Cole 2015: 19) In September 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court confirmed that the planned eviction and demolition of the small West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar, originally authorized by the Court earlier in the year, should go ahead. The residents of that village are Palestinian Bedouin who had been expelled by the Israeli state in 1952 from their original lands in the

Naqab desert. Six decades on and that state, as a colonizing regime in occupied territory, asserts that the community can no longer stay in the home they had made in Khan al- Ahmar. The community maintains that this home is on land owned by Palestinians long pre-dating Israel’s entry to the West Bank in 1967. The Supreme Court refused to accept these ownership credentials, and instead upheld the government’s position that the land had become “state-owned.” As such it can be designated for civilian colony usage should the state so wish. The Israeli state had announced a plan in 2012 to relocate the community elsewhere, and demolished a number of structures in the village between 2015 and 2017. Khan al-Ahmar is of particular significance because of its location in the “E1” corridor which, if settled, would allow a contiguous Jewish-Israeli presence to stretch from Jerusalem all the way across the center of the West Bank. After the Supreme Court ruling, Israeli settlers descended on the area singing in triumph at having redeemed the land. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman similarly approved: “Khan al-Ahmar will be evicted! I commend the judges of the court for a brave and necessary decision in the face of hypocritical attacks orchestrated by Abu Mazen, the left and European countries. No one is above the law. No one will prevent us from exercising our sovereignty.”1

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