A Palestinian Tribe Is Uprooted for the Seventh Time
Young members of the Ka’abneh family, outside their makeshift dwellings in Khirbet Abu Falah this week. Above all, the tribe wants to preserve its shepherding heritage and traditional way of life.
Seventeen families, 120 souls, in search of a home. This week they were joined by other families, and the number of homeless among them will rise to 140. Their children’s school, which they built with much toil, is now shuttered and unlikely to reopen. Their 3,000 sheep also remained behind – there is no place to move them to from their present pastures. Their owners may thus have no choice but to sell them and thereby eliminate their one source of income, which is also their way of life.
In the meantime, the families are living in makeshift tents sewn from sacks that once held Brazilian coffee. And since they had to leave behind their solar panels, they also have no electricity. The only water they have is stored in tanks. Roosters roam about freely on the rocky ground, a donkey is tied up, the children are idle. It’s extremely hot here, on the western edge of the Jordan Valley, in their temporary shelter at Khirbet Abu Falah. For the time being, the Palestinian owner of the land has allowed them to live here for a month.
But what will they do after that? Where will they go? No one has a clue. They are now living on a barren, rocky hill not far from the villages of Al-Mughayyir and Kafr Malik, across from the settlement of Kokhav Hashahar on the distant ridge across the way. The road to Abu Falah passes by the settlement of Shiloh and all its offshoots – wild settler outposts whose mere name is enough to terrify any Palestinian in the area and should stir shame in every decent Israeli.
In the verdant valley of vineyards, on stolen land, are the outposts of Adei Ad, Achia, Yeshuv Hada’at, Esh Kodesh, Kidah and Amichai. There’s also the Kokhav Hashahar quarry, itself a gross violation of international law, which stipulates that an occupier is forbidden from mining natural resources in the territory he controls – but who cares? Micha’s Farm, a settler outpost established in 2018, is dreaded by the extended family of Ahmed Ka’abneh, a shepherd of 60 and the father of 14, most of whom live with him in the same site, perched on a bare hill at Khirbet Abu Falah, after fleeing from their previous home at Ras al-Tin.
This is the sixth time these Palestinian Bedouin have fled, or been expelled, in their history. In 1948 they were expelled from the Tel Arad area, and forcibly moved by Israeli troops to Al-Auja, north of Jericho, then in Jordanian territory. In 1969, they were expelled from Al-Auja and moved to Al-Mu’arrajat, between Ramallah and Jericho. They were 30 families then.
In 1970, they were uprooted from there to the eastern side of the village of Kafr Malik. Three years later, a military base was built adjacent to them and they were evacuated again. They moved to the Ein Samiya area, not far away, where they remained until 1988, despite all the evacuation orders they were slapped with in the intervening years.
In 1988, they decided to leave and establish a new community nearby, at Khabun. Since then, the family has divided its time between its winter site, at Ras al-Tin, and the summer site at Khabun. In the winter it’s too cold to remain with the sheep on the hilltops, so they descend to the valleys to find shelter. In each of these places, they leased private land from local Palestinian landowners in the villages, and in every place they received eviction orders from Israel with various justifications. In 2009, for example, the army ordered them to leave because of the existence of a firing zone nearby. When the settler outposts began springing up in every corner, neither “firing zones” nor “nature reserves” were used as pretexts to evacuate their residents, nor the fact that the settlers had plundered private Palestinian land – but the Bedouin of the Ka’abneh tribe were still pushed north and west.
The establishment of the Kokhav Hashahar settlement in 1979 also brought about an expulsion. It, too, spawned wild outposts whose residents seized control of Bedouin grazing lands. In 2017, a settler whom the tribe knows only by his first name, Hanan, established an outpost east of Ras al-Tin, at Jib’it. He physically prevented them from traveling along the road that led to their community – the only access route. On one occasion he wrecked their tractor, and twice he threw stones at them.
The settlers’ new modus operandi for controlling extensive areas – by herding their sheep on stolen land – has already brought about a huge change in the map here.
The first site where Hanan set up an outpost was evacuated under the pressure of the Palestinian landowners, who had demonstrated against the theft of land; he was also removed from a second site, at the behest of its inhabitants. He then established an outpost at Ein al-Rashash, by the Alon Road. From there he frequently attacked the Bedouin.
After a few weeks of confrontations, Hanan informed them that the pasture lands were going to be divided 50-50 between him and them. He forbade them to enter the 50 percent of the land he had confiscated for his own use; clubs and stones awaited anyone who tried to tend their sheep on the land he declared as his own. Even the owners of the land, who weren’t familiar with the “arrangement” declared by Hanan and came to harvest crops in their plots, were attacked by the settlers. Photographs show the fearsome faces of the assailants.
The Israeli occupation authorities naturally came to the settlers’ aid. The army is always on their side. A year ago, on July 14, 2021, the Civil Administration, a branch of the military government, issued eviction orders against the Bedouin community, which consists of most of the families of Ahmed Ka’abneh’s sons and daughters. The 13 families were forced to leave. It was a week before Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, and it was a very sad holiday for them. This year the situation was even gloomier. They moved to their winter site, hoping that this summer they would be able to return to Khabun.
That didn’t happen.
On June 14, five weeks ago, settlers assaulted one of the families in its tent. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Hajar Ka’abneh, 45, mother of nine children and grandmother of two, was clubbed on the head and all over her body, together with her husband, Mustafa, who’s 48. Hajar spent nine days in the Government Hospital in Ramallah; her husband one day. At night, when he returned to be with the children and tend to the sheep, the army showed up to arrest him as well as two of his sons, Mohammed, 22, and Ahmed, 23.
That too is a method calculated to terrify: The settlers attack and then rush to file complaints against the shepherds – who are the ones who are arrested. Elementary. Mustafa, the father, spent three nights in detention; his sons a week. They were released on bail of 3,000 shekels ($870) each.
Now they’re living in Area B (under Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control). Here, at least, they can’t be issued demolition orders or have their equipment and belongings confiscated. A few years ago, the tribe purchased 25 dunams (6.25 acres) of land here, and one of the other Ka’abneh siblings, Umar, 43, has already begun to build a house. It will be the first stone dwelling any of them has ever lived in, something that does not bode well for their shepherding, and sometimes wandering, lifestyle.
The Civil Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
The tribe’s huge flocks had to be left behind; in their new place, some 10 kilometers west of Ras al-Tin, there’s no room for so many sheep. Nor is there a school here, other than those in the nearby Palestinian villages. The Ka’abneh want a Bedouin school for their children. There are 35 school-aged youngsters, 25 of them girls. It’s very possible that the latter will end up not going to school at all, while the boys attend the village schools.
A meeting was held with representatives of the Palestinian Education Ministry this week, but no solution looms. Above all, the tribe wants to preserve its shepherding heritage and traditional way of life. Ahmed, Umar’s father and the patriarch of the group, says that their children aren’t used to working in construction. They were born into a shepherding way of life, their natural habitat is pasture land.
In the meantime, there is some water remaining in the tanks they left behind for their sheep in Ras al-Tin, but it will soon be gone. What will become of the flocks? No one in the coffee-sack tent we sat in on Monday this week has any idea, nor do they know what will happen to their community of 140 homeless people from 19 families. Umar says they will all have to start life from scratch. His father, Ahmed, says they don’t have a plan. The children continue to scamper across the rocks, while the donkey stands in the broiling sun without water, about to keel over.