The High Court of Justice has approved the planned demolition of the village of Jahalin at Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank, along with the village’s school made out of tires. The High Court has allowed the demolition at any time the government sees fit as of next month.

On Thursday, the court rejected two petitions against the demolition from residents of the village and from parents of children at the school who come from surrounding Bedouin communities. Justice Noam Sohlberg wrote in the ruling that the structures were built illegally and that no reason existed for the court to intervene in the defense minister’s decision to demolish them. Justices Anat Baron and Yael Willner concurred.

In August, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced that his ministry was preparing to remove the residents from Khan al-Ahmar and Sussia after all requests by the villages for a master plan and building permits where they had lived for decades were turned down. The petitions by the Jahalin residents were filed by attorney Shlomo Lecker. Over the past decade, both communities have become the flagship of the fight against the removal of Palestinians from Area C, which is under complete Israeli civil and military control.

The state is demanding that the approximately 200 residents of Khan al-Ahmar and Abu Hilweh move to an area that has been allocated to them by the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration on land in the area of the town of Abu Dis (which was declared state land) and built houses on the lots where the Civil Administration is preparing infrastructure. A new school is also to be built in that area.

The area is on the edge of a half-urban Bedouin community where the state settled dozens of Bedouin families at the end of the 1990s, after it evacuated them from an area where they had lived for decades that was earmarked for the expansion of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim. Some of the families were forcibly evacuated at the end of the 1990s, while others agreed to move to the town following negotiations and in exchange for financial remuneration and grazing land.

The High Court ruling may become a precedent for dozens of other Bedouin communities that oppose the Civil Administration’s intention to concentrate them in permanent towns in the West Bank, including a town near Abu Dis (known as Jabel Jahalin or Kafr Jahalin). Thus they will have to urbanize their lifestyle.

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