‘We are very simple people. We don’t like a fancy life’: Settler expansion and the price Palestinians pay

“Our lives have been turned upside down. But we have no other place to live, we have been displaced too many times,” Khader Salamah says, standing next to the ruins of the structure where he housed his livestock, just a couple of hours after it was demolished by Israeli authorities.

Salamah and his family live in Ein Samiya Bedouin, a small agricultural community of about 180 people in Area C of the West Bank, which is under full Israeli control.

The area is abundant in water resources and is targeted by illegal settlement expansions and Jewish-only bypass roads.

The livestock are the farmer’s only source of livelihood, and he’s worried he’ll now spend “sleepless nights trying to keep watch over them”.

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“We are very simple people. We don’t like a fancy life. Our people moved from the Negev desert after the 1948 war, and were displaced again in 1967. We have lived here in peace with our goats and sheep for decades, depending on our livestock without any problems,” he says.

The community depended on grazing for their animals, but have been “attacked when we try to access the grazing land” in recent years, since Israeli settlers began to occupy the surrounding hills.

“Now we totally depend on buying food for the animals. It costs us a lot, so we have to sell them. We live in inadequate shelters because we cannot get permits from the Israelis to build. One of the good things we still have is the school, but it is threatened now,” he says.

The local school was built in January this year with funding from the EU and serves some 30 pupils aged between 6 and 12, addressing the long-standing lack of education in the area and for neighbouring herder communities. However, it is now under “serious risk” of demolition, says Salamah.

“The school was our only hope for our children to have a better life. If it’s demolished, they will have to walk 15km to the next one. It would not be a safe distance, there is no public transportation, and we are afraid they could be attacked or arrested.”

Conditions are becoming “worse every year” in the community and across the West Bank, says Christopher Holt, a representative of the West Bank Protection Consortium, a partnership of international NGOs and EU donors, including Ireland, that works to stop the forcible transfers of Palestinians.

[ Israel treats Palestinians ‘in a way that is unacceptable and illegal’, says Coveney ]

“In this community, two structures were destroyed this morning – a storage unit and an animal shelter for their livelihood business. Now the school is at imminent risk, and their homes,” he says.

“Last year saw the largest number of settler attacks on record since the UN began keeping records. This year is set to overtake last year’s level of violence. The situation today is as bad as it’s been since 1967.”

According to United Nations data, Israeli authorities had demolished more than 400 Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank this year by the start of September, displacing hundreds. These include both punitive demolitions and demolitions ordered due to a lack of construction permits, which are almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain in Area C.

The EU has urged Israel to halt demolitions on occupied Palestinian land, citing a violation of international law and an undermining of the viability of the two-state solution.

However, settlement capacity continued to increase “exponentially” in 2021 and 2022, according to an EU report in July, with settlements in occupied East Jerusalem more than doubling from 6,228 housing units to 14,894.

The rise in settlement expansion plans by the Israeli authorities was also accompanied by a “worrisome trend in rising settler violence”, the report said.

For Salamah and his community, things have been “really bad” for the past year, with “frequent attacks” by the Hilltop Youth – a group of hardline, extremist religious-nationalist youth who “come at night with weapons”.

Less than an hour away in Ramallah, Ahmed (26) and his friends come to the Youth Village educational facility to “camp, study, and do things to improve our lives”, but they have also recently begun to experience threats of violence from settlers.

“We built this place ourselves. We made a treehouse, and we planted olive trees. We just sing, watch films, and have fun. But now there is an outpost of settlers next to us, all armed,” he says.

His friend, a 21-year-old woman who does not want to be named, says “every Palestinian feels unsafe or threatened at some point”.

“We all know someone who has been arrested, beaten or killed. You see checkpoints all over the place, you are interrogated for no reason. We are just normal young people, but we can’t feel free.”

There are some 700,000 settlers now living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip) and they’re becoming “a very powerful force”, says Dr Mustafa Barghouti, secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative in Ramallah.

“There is an anger and resentment towards Europe now when you compare what happened in Ukraine. There are so many sanctions on Russia but not a single sanction here.”

Amal Jadou, Palestinian deputy minister for foreign affairs, expresses a similar sentiment.

“Settlers control the lives of 3.5 million Palestinians here now. The two-state solution is a European invention, and since the late ‘80s we have become fervent advocates, but it is being completely undermined by the Israelis and the world is silent. The EU and member states issue statements of condemnation but what have they done to stop it? It is time for action,” she says.

[ Six Palestinians killed in West Bank clashes with Israeli forces ]

“We always say the situation can’t get any worse, but then it does. Now it’s the worst it’s ever been. What is happening here today is only a glimpse of what will happen in the future. The Israelis are blurring the 1967 border and expanding. If something doesn’t change, Palestinians will revolt and it will be bloody.”

Refugee camps are often the most vulnerable to targeting by both settlers and Israeli forces, Jadou says. At Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem, Israeli forces enter at least once a week to make arrests, and there are “almost daily incursions”.

“These include shots fired, and a massive use of tear gas. It’s highly traumatic for the kids. We had to close two schools in the north because there was an escalation of violence,” says Adam Bouloukos, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides support for Palestinian refugees.

Aida is one of 19 refugee camps located in the West Bank and is home to almost 6,000 people, most of whom are under the age of 18. So far this year, there have been 33 Israeli operations and 26 detentions at the camp.

“The checkpoints and permit systems mean our own staff sometimes take three hours to get here in the morning on a trip that should take 30 minutes. It’s an occupation force that is largely acting with impunity,” says Bouloukos.

Abdelfattah Abusrour, who runs an arts centre nearby, was born in the camp in the 1970s.

“It has been decades and we are still being born in refugee camps in our own country. We were not the cause of the suffering of the Jews. To blame us for the crimes of the Nazis is a burden we cannot carry. It is difficult to continue on when everything is only becoming worse and worse,” he says.

“I’ve heard from children I work with who are just 11 or 12 that they have no hope, that they want to die. It’s devastating. We want our children to want to be doctors, journalists and artists, not to aspire to die. What will the world do about it? Miracles will not happen alone, we have to provoke them.”

In response to a request for comment from The Irish Times, Adi Ophir Maoz, deputy ambassador and spokeswoman for the Embassy of Israel in Ireland, said Israeli police “sometimes” remove “illegal construction” because “Israel is a law-based state; everything is supervised by the authorities and is decided either by the legislature or under the instruction and supervision of the judiciary”.

“The Israeli police is handling and acting on every case of violence it encounters (investigating, arrests etc) by extremists on both sides who act illegally.”

It was “not in Israel’s interest to help foment a state of lawlessness, since history shows this always has a spill-over effect. There are constant attacks against Israelis — rocks, fire arms and murders”, she said.