Last week, the State of Israel hung the scalp of another Palestinian community on its belt after completing the demolition of Umm Al-Hiran. On the morning of Nov. 14, hundreds of police stormed the Bedouin village — which is located in the Negev/Naqab desert, in southern Israel — accompanied by special forces officers and helicopters. The residents, Israeli citizens who had long feared that this day would come, had already self-demolished most of the structures in the village to avoid having to pay large fines. All that was left for police to destroy was the mosque.
Just like that, two and a half decades of legal struggle to save the village came to an end, and the residents were rendered homeless. If you want to understand the entire history of Zionism’s injustices against Palestinians — with all the discrimination, racism, dispossession, and violence, grounded in a vision of Jewish supremacy and a concomitant obsession with demographic engineering — you need look no further than Umm Al-Hiran. ….more
