Police use smash and grab tactics to drive Bedouin out
Jonathan Cook’s article is followed by Nahum Barnea, Ynet.
Crowds arrive in Umm al-Hiran for Friday prayers. Copyright: Jonathan Cook
In Umm al-Hiran, it is a ‘continuing Nakba’
Israel has advanced plans to raze the village of 150 homes and replace it with a town for Israeli Jews
By Jonathan Cook, blog and Al Jazeera
January 22, 2017
They came in their thousands, from across Israel and from occupied East Jerusalem, to bury Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan [Yacoub Abu al-Kiyan] after Friday midday prayers [see also Bedouin treated as terrorists]. The small dusty valley at the heart of Umm al-Hiran village in the Negev desert turned dark with rows of worshippers. But Abu al-Qiyan’s body never materialised. terrorists]
By early afternoon, it was confirmed that the Israeli police had refused to release the corpse, two days after Abu al-Qiyan was shot dead during a pre-dawn raid to bulldoze his home and those of another dozen families.
A sword has hung over the heads of Umm al-Hiran’s 1,000 inhabitants for many months, as the Israeli government has advanced plans to raze the Palestinian Bedouin village of 150 homes and replace it with a town for Israeli Jews.
Raed Abu al-Qiyan, Yacoub’s 40-year-old nephew, told Al Jazeera: “Not only did the police kill him in cold blood, but now they are holding his body hostage to try to make more convincing their ridiculous story that he is a terrorist.”
A police claim that they shot dead Abu al-Qiyan after he committed a “car-ramming attack” – driving into a group of Border Police, killing one of them – has “rubbed salt deeper into the wound”, Najeh Abu al-Qiyan, a friend of Yacoub’s, told Al Jazeera.
The car (L) that Israeli police say was used by Abu al-Qiyan to ram a group of policemen in Umm al-Hiran, a Bedouin village in Israel’s southern Negev Desert, Jan. 18, 2017. Witnesses say al-Qiyan lost control of the car after he was shot by police. He died in the crash. Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters
Witnesses, including Israeli Jewish activists who were in the village to protest the demolitions, say Abu al-Qiyan lost control of his car on the dusty hillside below his home after Israeli police shot at him in the early morning darkness.
An aerial video taken by police appears to confirm the witnesses’ accounts, showing Abu al-Qiyan driving slowly and cautiously until there were bursts of gunfire from the police. The car can then be seen accelerating and veering wildly down the steep slope.
Lawyers for the family will get a hearing before Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday to demand his body’s return.
Policing the crowd. “They brought live rounds to Umm al-Hiran. That indicates that they came with an intent to kill.” Photo by Al Jazeera
Leaders of Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens say the minority has long and bitter experience of police brutality. But they have been enraged by what they call “lies and cover-ups” from the police and rapidly escalating rhetoric from the government.
Ministers have echoed seemingly unsubstantiated police claims that Abu al-Qiyan was an ISIL supporter.
Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan’s 24-year-old son, Hussam, who recently returned from his last year of medical studies in Ukraine, said that description of his father bore “no relationship to reality”.
“He worked hard to send me abroad and made sure I had the best opportunities in life,” he told Al Jazeera. “He wanted all his children to be educated like him and to be positive role models in our community.”
Nonetheless, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, lost no time in accusing Abu al-Qiyan of a car-ramming attack. His police minister, Gilad Erdan, meanwhile, said Palestinian lawmakers who supported the villagers had “blood on your hands” over the death of police officer Erez Levi. He called Umm al-Hiran’s residents “violent thieves”.
Demand for inquiry
On Saturday night, thousands turned out at Arara in central Israel to protest Abu al-Qiyan’s killing and a wave of further demolitions they fear the government is preparing for Palestinian communities in Israel.
Addressing the crowd, Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List faction in the Israeli parliament, called for an independent inquiry “to uncover the lies of Netanyahu, Erdan and the police”.
He bled to death over half an hour while police refused to let an ambulance attend to him
In response to the video footage showing police shooting before Abu al-Qiyan lost control of his car, spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Al Jazeera that officers had initially “fired warning shots into the air”, not at the vehicle.
But a report on Friday night on Israel’s Channel 10 TV challenged that version. Abu al-Qiyan’s autopsy, it said, showed he was hit in the torso and knee in the first rounds of shooting. He then bled to death over half an hour while police refused to let an ambulance attend to him.
Raed Abu al-Qiyan rejected claims that his 50-year-old uncle had ever intended to confront the police.
“He knew there was no way we could stop 500 armed police from bulldozing his home,” he said. “So he put everything valuable into the car and was leaving the area. He did not want to stay and see the destruction. It would have broken his heart.”
A maths teacher, Abu al-Qiyan reportedly had his computer, clothes and his pupils’ books in the back of the car when he died.
Signs of police brutality
In the wake of the leaked autopsy report, liberal Jewish legislators have started to raise questions too about the police conduct.
Ksenia Svetlova, of Zionist Union, said that, if it was shown that Abu al-Qiyan was denied life-saving treatment, “then it’s Azaria case number two” – a reference to an army medic, Elor Azaria, who was filmed last year executing a wounded Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron.
The death of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan, following an Israeli police raid in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran to demolish several homes on January 18, sparked a wave of protest across the country by Arab Israelis. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/ AFP/Daily Mail
Odeh, who was present in Umm al-Hiran on the morning of Abu al-Qiyan’s death, was himself injured. Photographs show him lying on the ground dazed, his head bleeding, with Israeli police standing impassively over him. Odeh accused police of shooting him twice with sponge-tipped bullets.
He added that police had used extreme levels of violence, firing sponge-tipped bullets, tear gas canisters and stun grenades directly at the villagers and their supporters.
Residents from Umm Al-Hiran weep at the destruction of their homes, January 18, 2017. Photo by AFP
Basel Ghattas, a Joint List legislator who attended the Friday prayers, recalled the conclusions of a judicial-led inquiry into the police killing of 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens during protests in Israel at the start of the second Intifada in 2000.
He told Al Jazeera: “The inquiry warned the police not to come to civil demonstrations with live ammunition, and that they must not treat Palestinian citizens as an enemy. And yet they brought live rounds to Umm al-Hiran. That indicates that they came with an intent to kill.”
A week before the houses in Umm al-Hiran were destroyed, 11 homes in the Palestinian town of Qalansawe in central Israel were razed. With tens of thousands of Palestinian homes in Israel under threat of demolition, fears are high that Netanyahu’s far-right government intends to open a new front against the minority.
There are widespread suspicions that Netanyahu hopes to distract attention from his own troubles, as he becomes more deeply enmeshed in a corruption scandal.
Dov Khenin, the Joint List’s only Jewish legislator, told a protest in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night: “The deeper the police investigation of Netanyahu, the wider the flames of his incitement.”
Painful reminder of Nakba
The fate of Umm al-Hiran, and Abu Al Qiyan’s killing, said Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian minority, were painful reminders to Palestinians in Israel of “the continuing Nakba” – the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians with the loss of their homeland in 1948 to create a Jewish state.
Although Israel’s Palestinian citizens avoided expulsion outside Israel’s new borders, as many as a quarter were driven from their homes by the Israeli army, becoming internal refugees. They included the families now in Umm al-Hiran.
Adalah, which has been representing the families’ efforts to stop their expulsion, said military officials forced the al-Qiyan tribe to relocate to Umm al-Hiran in the 1950s.
Successive governments, Bishara told Al Jazeera, had refused to recognise Umm al-Hiran, as well as dozens of other Bedouin communities in the Negev. Decades later, and without a master plan to authorise building, Israeli officials have classified all Umm al-Hiran’s homes as illegal.
“For these families, it is like seeing the Nakba being replayed,” Bishara said. “They were made homeless so Jews could live in their place in the 1950s, and now the same thing is happening all over again.”
She added: “For decades, the government has said to villages like Umm al-Hiran, ‘we cannot provide infrastructure in the remote corners of the desert where you live’. And yet, time and again, we see that Israel can build a community in exactly the same place, if it is intended for Jewish citizens”.
Prelude to more demolitions
Palestinian leaders believe the government is making an example of Umm al-Hiran, as a prelude to expelling tens of thousands of other Bedouin who have been trying to hold on to a traditional rural way of life in their villages.
The government has been formulating a proposal to forcibly relocate many of them to a handful of overcrowded government “townships” that are the most deprived communities in Israel. A previous version, known as the Prawer Plan, was abandoned in late 2013 following waves of protest.
Majd Salah, from Qalandiya, close to East Jerusalem, said he had come to the Friday prayers to show solidarity with Umm al-Hiran, pointing out that many homes in his community were threatened with demolition too.
He added that the government was fearful of returning Abu al-Qiyan’s body in case the burial became a rallying point for protests. “As with our own martyrs in Jerusalem, the police will try to force his family to bury him in secret, in the middle of the night,” he told Al Jazeera.
Escalating incitement
Ghattas, the Joint List legislator, said the “escalating incitement” against Abu al-Qiyan – including the accusation he belonged to ISIL – was part of a trend intended to justify further repressive policies against the Palestinian minority.
Few Palestinian citizens have forgotten that, only weeks ago, the police and government accused the minority of being behind an “arson intifada”, when hundreds of fires broke out across Israel following a prolonged drought and fuelled by high winds.
All of the dozens of Palestinian citizens arrested over the fires were later released without indictments.
Raed Abu al-Qiyan said: “This kind of continual incitement just fuels the fires of hatred. And it will be used to encourage and justify more violence against us in the future.”
Bulldozers demolishing homes in Umm al-Hiran, January 18, 2017 Photo by Menahem Kahana/ AFP
Umm al-Hiran: The tragedy is just beginning
The haste in which all officials, from Prime Minister Netanyahu downwards, adopted the ISIS-inspired terror attack version in the Bedouin community’s violent evacuation is reminiscent of the haste in which they adopted the arson story in the recent fires. While these accusations sound good, they’re not necessarily true.
By Nahum Barnea, Ynet Op-ed
January 19, 2017
“You see the two Baggers up there?” Yasser Abu al-Qiyan asked. There were two yellow excavators parked peacefully at the top of the hill. They had been rented to prepare the area for a new Jewish community called Hiran, which would be built alongside the ruins of Bedouin community Umm al-Hiran.
“Tell me, my brother,” Yasser continued. “Who do you think guards them?”
Who? I asked. “My uncle,” Yasser replied. “We guard them, and they kick us out.”
We stood outside the community’s mosque, in the heart of a group of more than 20 men who had accumulated tons of rage. They had a hard time explaining what they were enraged by more: The death of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan, a relative who was shot to death as he drove his car towards the police; the claim raised by the police and widely reported by the media that he had been an Islamic State supporter; the demolition of their homes; or the inability to prevent any of this.
“I want one thing,” a young man screamed in my ear, “Jewish blood. Bring me a Jew, I’ll kill a Jew.” The older men tried to calm him down. From time to time, he burst out again.
Yasser Abu al-Qiyan served in the IDF, in the Bedouin regiment. “Had their commander told them not to use live ammunition, what happened wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “There was an order from above. They wanted to see a lot of blood.”
“There is no justice in our country,” he said, with fire raging in his eyes. “The guy you murdered didn’t do anything. And three hours later, you bring bulldozers to demolish the homes here? Look,” he turned his hand towards the hill where the home of Yacoub al-Qiyan had stood just an hour earlier. At the bottom of the hill, there was a barrel of water for the sheep. The bulldozers that destroyed the house poured out the water and filled the barrel with earth. “Why do the sheep have to suffer?” he asked.
The fatal morning followed a night of negotiations that had reached a dead end. Yair Maayan, director of the Bedouin Development and Settlement Authority in the Negev, blames the Bedouin and external elements that helped them; the Bedouin blame the government.
What happened in Umm al-Hiran on Wednesday morning is a tragedy. An outstanding policeman, Erez (Amedi) Levi, a father to two small children, was killed on the job. He was killed in a terror attack inspired by ISIS, the police say. Their claim is based on an assessment made by someone in the Shin Bet. The circumstances, as well as the videos from the incident, leave room for two contradicting versions. The haste in which all officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu downwards, adopted the ISIS version reminds me of the haste in which they adopted the arson story in the recent fires. These accusations sound good; they’re not necessarily true.
LINKS
to some of the many postings about the threat to Umm Al-Hiran over the last few years:
Order to confiscate land of Israeli citizens (they are Bedouin)
October 2, 2012An Arab-free Negev is ‘Jewish destiny’
October 15, 2013Send an urgent message to Netanyahu: stop the demolition of Um al-Hiran and Atir!<
February 15, 2015Court backs state decision for forced removal of Bedouin
May 14, 2015Marking Land Day when nothing is forgotten yet unity prevails
March 31, 2016US view of when Israel gets it wrong<
April 16, 2016Solidarity gets stay of execution on Bedouin village
September 15, 2016Working with the Jewish Left for justice for all
December 21, 2016Bedouin strike over home demolitions;
January 20, 2017Bedouin treated as terrorists
January 20, 2017