The Arab al-Jahalin is the biggest bedouin community that lives in the West Bank Area called E-1, part of the Area C, where Israel retains control over security as well as planning and zoning, and holds strategic significance for further expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.
The bedouins live in miserable shacks, without electricity or running water, grazing their sheeps between debris and dreaming of the flourishing desert of Beersheva, where they have been forcefully evicted, across the 1949 armistice lines by Israeli authorities. In the last 15 years the Bedouin communities have been subject to demolition, requisition of cattle, attacks by settlers, aimed to get away from the area. But despite this, the communities have shown determination and unbelievable resilience, who led the Israeli military authorities to draw up a “plan of relocation” so-called Nuweimeh Plan, which seeks to solve the ‘Bedouin problem’ by relocating the approximately 2300 Bedouins of the E1-zone to a town named Nuweimeh near Jericho. The lands of Nuweimeh, however is unsuitable for the animals to graze, and in addition there is no job opportunities, which is why the Bedouins who already are settled there live almost solely on UN food parcels.
