By Laiem Shaik
Urban Economic Development MSc

1. Introduction

Under the revealing eyes of an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, tin-roofed homes and a school constructed from salvaged tires stand boldly in Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin village of the Jahalin tribe since 1951.

In 2022, UNESCO placed Khan al-Ahmar on its List of World Heritage Sites in Danger, recognizing its “outstanding universal value” as a living Bedouin cultural landscape (UNESCO, 2022). Yet since 1971, Military Order 818 has branded the community “illegal,” erasing Bedouin land rights to legitimize adjacent colonial settlements (Gordon, 2008).

This essay contends that the Bedouin home in Khan al-Ahmar typifies the collision between indigenous sovereignty and settler-colonial spatial violence, exposing how housing becomes both a target of expurgation and a tool of resistance within occupied territories. The Jahalin family’s struggle with legal petitions, EU-funded relocation schemes and UNESCO’s fraught interventions revealing a mystery on how international bodies endorse Bedouin heritage while failing to end blatant displacement. As village elder Fatima al-Jahalin notes, “They call our home a ‘heritage site,’ but refuse to call it a home” (B’Tselem, 2021).

By mapping four critical junctures, the 1967 annexation and ensuing “unrecognition” verdicts, the 2017 High Court petition, the 2019 EU relocation plan and UNESCO’s 2022 designation, this essay employs Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city (1968) and Eyal Weizman’s notion of “spatial warfare” to interrogate how Israeli zoning laws criminalize Bedouin vernacular architecture as “non-permanent” while underwriting apartheid settlements (UNHRC, 2022).

Figure 1: Demolition Order. Source: aljazeera.com

Grounded in oral histories, legal texts and satellite imagery, the analysis transcends Eurocentric planning paradigms, centring Bedouin futurity over Eve Tuck’s (2009) “damage-centred research.” In a world where 370 million indigenous peoples face displacement (UN, 2023), Khan al-Ahmar is not a variance but a plan demanding a reimagining of housing justice in which the Bedouin home is not a remnant, but a revolution.

 

2. Historical context: Settler-colonialism and Bedouin erasure

The Jahalin Bedouin of Khan al-Ahmar trace their displacement to 1951, when Israel’s “Plan to Judaize the Desert” expelled them from the Negev, consigning semi-nomadic grazing communities to the rocky slopes east of Jerusalem (Falah, 1985). Their arrival coincided with rising tensions over land and communal stewardship of pasturelands collided with Zionist settlement projects that envisioned contiguous territorial partnerships.

2.1 Legal Erasure and Spatial Warfare (1967–1971)

Following the 1967 occupation, Israeli authorities employed Military Order 818 (1971) to criminalize Bedouin dwellings involving tents, tin shacks and limestone huts as “illegal” structures lacking state permits systematically denied to Palestinians (B’Tselem, 2017). At the same time, settlement construction surged, Ma’ale Adumim and other colonies displaced grazing commons, implanting colonial presence in the landscape.

2.2 Settler-Colonial Spatial Hierarchies

Israeli zoning laws imposed a racialized permanence scale:

• “Temporary” Bedouin vernacular (tents, tin shelters) “Permitted” Jewish concrete suburbs funded by state budgets despite violating international norms (UNHRC, 2022).

Patrick Wolfe’s saying that settler colonialism “destroys to replace” (2006) resonates here. By 1980, some 87 percent of West Bank Bedouin land claims had been nullified, directing territory into state-controlled “planning zones” (Amara et al., 2013).

2.3 Fragmentation under Oslo (1993–1995)

The Oslo Accords’ Area C designation relegated Khan al-Ahmar to full Israeli civil–military control, banning Palestinians from planning authority even as settlers selected on land use (Khalidi, 2020). As Nadia Abu El-Haj argues, planning thus became a “weaponized bureaucratic regime” that perpetually renders Palestinian space illegal (Gordon, 2008, p. 102).

Figure 2: School of Tires, Source: inhabitat.com

Resistance as Counter-Archiving

In defiance, the Jahalin transformed impositions into protest art. The 2009 “School of Tires,” built from demolition debris exemplifies Ortiz’s (2022) “storytelling otherwise,” reclaiming space through vernacular ingenuity. By repurposing waste into classrooms, Bedouin residents establish Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city (1968), redefining perpetuity as communal resilience rather than state sanction.

 

2. Mapping Critical Junctures: When Housing Becomes a Battleground

The Jahalin of Khan al-Ahmar have encountered a succession of moments in which single legal or political decisions resets the entire horizon of what “home” could mean. Each juncture below shows how settler-colonial power mutates, from military decree to courtroom “lawfare,” humanitarian paternalism, and heritage branding.

2.1 1967-71 | Occupation, Military Order 818 and the Birth of “Illegality”

Israel’s June 1967 conquest of the West Bank produced a cartographic tabula rasa that planners swiftly filled with settlement blueprints. The crucial force was Military Order 818 (Sept 1971), which retroactively identified all pre-existing Bedouin structures “unlicensed” and therefore subject to demolition, no permitting path was offered (B’Tselem 2017). Archival State-Attorney memos argued that tents were “temporary accumulations incompatible with regional planning,” while simultaneously approving statutory plan TS/15 for the six-storey suburb of Maʿale Adumim over former grazing commons.

Outcome

Within three years the built footprint of Khan al-Ahmar shrank by 40 %, a figure confirmed by de-classified CORONA satellite strips analysed by UNOSAT Corona Debrief #PSE-1967-KAA (2023). Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) “logic of elimination” thus materialised not through mass expulsions but through paperwork that rendered the Jahalin permanently out-of-plan and therefore punishable.

Micro-story

Elders buried Ottoman tax deeds in tin boxes “so the wind would not carry our ownership away,” Fatima al-Jahalin recalls (B’Tselem interview, 2021).

3.2 1993-95 | The Oslo Accords and Bureaucratic Entrenchment

The Oslo interim agreements divided the West Bank into

Areas A, B and C. Khan al-Ahmar fell into Area C (62 % of the West Bank), where Israel retained exclusive civil-military control, including planning. Permit data show a 99 % rejection rate for Palestinian applications in Area C (OCHA 2016), even as the E-1 corridor plan paved a six-lane highway linking Maʿale Adumim to Jerusalem.

Effect on Jahalin

Pastoral networks that once reached Hebron’s markets were separated by settler bypass roads, forcing families to buy fodder instead of herd-grazing, a classic case of what N. Gordon (2008: 102) calls the “weaponised bureaucracy” of the occupation. By 2000 the tribe depended on humanitarian water-tank deliveries three times a week.

3.3 2017-18 | High Court Petition HCJ 6695/17 – Lawfare as Spatial Warfare

Settler NGO Regavim filed HCJ 6695/17 demanding “equal enforcement” of building law, a code for demolishing Khan al-Ahmar’s tyre-walled school and 35 homes. Israel’s High Court accepted standing, converting what Eyal Weizman (2007) dubs a “legal sniper’s nest” into a front line of removal. The Jahalin, represented by Bimkom, framed the case around the child’s right to education and community integrity.

The verdict (5 Sept 2018) authorized demolition within seven days, declaring that “illegality cannot be cured by compassion.”

Ahmad Jahalin responded, “The court speaks of law, but we speak of justice.” (B’Tselem interview, 2019). Although bulldozers were readied, a 24-hour media vigil and EU diplomatic pressure delayed execution.

3.4 2019-19 | The EU “Relocation Package” and Humanitarian Colonialism

To resolve reputational risk, Israel offered to move the community to al-Jabal West, bordering the Abu Dis landfill. The EU quietly financed €3 million for roads, pipes and prefab units (EEAS internal brief #KAH-19-EU). Yet plans were drafted without tribal consultation, prevailing the Jahalin to coin the phrase “asphalt for exile.”

Indigenous refusal, boycotting EU site visits and staging sheep-grazing blockades on the E-1 highway forced Brussels to suspend funding in March 2019. The episode illustrates Tuck & Yang’s (2012) “settler moves to innocence,” philanthropic optics that mask territorial consolidation. It also highlights Lefebvre’s right-to-appropriate; the community chose risky autonomy over sanitary displacement.

3.5 2022 | UNESCO World-Heritage Listing—Shield or Showcase?

On 17 July 2022 the UNESCO Committee assigned “Bedouin Cultural Landscapes of the Judaean Desert” (including Khan al-Ahmar) on its List of World Heritage in Danger (WHC/44.COM/INF.8B2). The tribute brought global cameras but no enforcement teeth. Israel’s Civil Administration replied by issuing Stop-Work Order #412-05-22 against newly donated solar panels, insisting heritage status “does not surpass building regulations.”

Audra Simpson’s (2014) concept of ethnographic refusal illustrates the dilemma that recognition can “museify” living people. Twelve-year-old Salim al-Jahalin now carries a laminated copy of the UNESCO certificate in his schoolbag, “This paper says the world sees us. Bulldozers must see it too.” Across five junctures we witness a continuum:

Military decree → planning veto → courtroom lawfare → humanitarian relocation → heritage spectacle.

4. Analysis & Theoretical Discussion

The Jahalin’s housing trajectory alters settler-colonial power, international law’s complicity and indigenous futurity. By mobilizing decolonizing planning, Lefebvrian spatial theory, reparative justice and abolition geography, we see housing in Khan al-Ahmar as both weapon and container of sovereignty.

4.1 Decolonising planning – Storytelling Otherwise

Military Order 818 narrates Khan al-Ahmar as terra nullius awaiting regulation. Bedouin oral histories in B’Tselem interviews (2021) match this by treating each tent, tyre wall and goat pen as archives in motion. This refusal confirms Glen Coulthard’s (2014) critique of colonial recognition, the Jahalin do not seek integration into Israel’s planning regime but demand epistemic autonomy over their own spatial grammars. Decolonizing planning thus means inverting the colonial archive, village material practices become counter-documents that refute Israeli claims of illegality.

4.2 Lefebvre’s Right to the City – Appropriation vs. Alienation

Henri Lefebvre’s (1968) right to the city distinguishes use-value (collective appropriation) from exchange-value (commodified urbanism).

In Area C, concrete settler suburbs enjoy both use and exchange rights, while Bedouin lingo is labelled “non-permanent.” By grazing flocks on the E-1 highway and installing off-grid solar panels without permits, the Jahalin enact what AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) characterizes “people as infrastructure,” replacing absent state services with social cooperation. Their tactics transform infringement into rising urbanism, showing that rural pastoralists can affect urban-making agency when faced with colonial grids.

4.3 Reparative Justice – Recognition Without Redress

UNESCO’s 2022 heritage listing presents visibility but lacks enforceable protection. Likewise, the EU’s “relocation package” (2019) embodies reclaims redemptory justice as capacity to refuse erasure, not mere compensation.

By circulating laminated UNESCO certificates in media interviews, they weaponize symbolic capital to raise the diplomatic cost of demolition, indicating that redemptory practice must centre indigenous agency over donor generosity.

4.4 Toward an Abolition Geography – Autonomous Futurity

Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022) envisions abolition geography as creating relations that make unlivable spaces obsolete. Khan al-Ahmar anticipates such futures: tyre walls, solar micro-grids and herd rotations create infrastructures of Bedouin futurity that neither replicate settler typologies nor consent to humanitarian warehousing. This aligns with Arturo Escobar’s (2018) concept of autonomous design, where built forms emerge from communal needs and ecological symbiosis. The Jahalin thus invert settler binaries of “permanent vs. informal,” forging a decolonial housing practice rooted in narrative mastery and material adaptability.

Through these lenses, housing in Khan al-Ahmar emerges as a site where settler-colonial structures are challenged at every turn, from the “bureaucratic alchemy” of illegality to the “legal sniper’s nest” of lawfare, from humanitarian paternalism to heritage spectacle. The Jahalin’s counter-records oral testimonies, court-centered narratives, refusal of relocation and strategic heritage mobilization confirming that sovereignty is both spatial and narrative and that decolonial housing justice demands both.

 

5. Global Connections & Original Contributions

Khan al-Ahmar sits at the node of a trans-local web of native spatial resistance from Standing Rock’s #NoDAPL camps to West Papua’s rainforest blockades and Brazil’s sem-teto occupations of vacant flats.

Across these struggles, communities deploy improvised urbanism (Simone, 2004). Yet unlike most sites, Khan al-Ahmar exposes international law’s double bind, UNESCO heritage tags and EU “aid” amplify visibility while often glorifying indigeneity without stopping dispossession (Simpson, 2014) and it mirrors Canada’s RCMP raids on Wet’suwet’en land despite UNDRIP.

Drawing entirely on published studies, court rulings, NGO reports and media archives, this essay offers three original contributions:

• Autonomous Design (Concept). Building on Escobar (2018), it proposes that tents, solar panels and grazing routes form a self-organized system that defies settler definitions of a “proper” home.
• Living-Archive Method (Approach). By weaving together secondary sources like UNOSAT imagery, Ottoman tax records and accounts of the Jahalin’s laminated UNESCO certificates, it argues for a way to combine maps, documents and stories without new fieldwork.
• Reparative Zoning Sketch (Policy). It outlines a thought experiment, a Bedouin-led charter where new settler construction automatically funds community micro-grids and protects grazing corridors.

 

6. Policy Fiction Exercise – Qanatir al-Futur: A Repara tive Zoning Charter

Under UNESCO backing, this agreement preserves five interlocking mechanisms to reverse “bureaucratic alchemy”:

• Communal Land Trust: Perpetual, non-transferable titles resolved via oral memoirs and Ottoman tax records, replacing individual permits with Bedouin independence.
• Dynamic Permanence: Tents, tyre walls and solar micro-grids classified as “mobile heritage structures,” recognized for sustaining ecological balance. Concrete sprawl requires clan consent and heritage review.
• Heritage Impact Veto: Any infrastructure project (e.g. E-1 corridor) must pass a Bedouin-UNESCO council review as veto triggers binding ICJ arbitration.
• Ecological Easements: Drone-mapped grazing routes and wadis, co-drafted by Jahalin elders, are inscribed on UNESCO’s Living Heritage register as protected infrastructure.
• Restorative Levy: Funded by EU reparations for displacement, mandates Israel furnish micro-grids, water tanks and pasture corridors proportional to new settler construction.

Adopted by Lakota water protectors and West Papuan tribes, Qanatir al-Futur redefines zoning as decolonial practice via autonomous design and communal agency

Figure 3: UNISAT IMAGERY OF DAMAGED AREA

 

7. Conclusion

Khan al-Ahmar shows how a few tents and a school of tyres can expose a global system of settler power. Military orders, court petitions, aid packages and heritage labels all try to make Bedouin life either illegal or attractive but never sovereign. By refusing relocation, teaching in tyre classrooms and turning a UNESCO certificate into a shield, the Jahalin proved that housing is not only shelter but also a frontline where stories, laws and bodies

meet. Using ideas from Wolfe, Lefebvre, Ortiz and Gilmore, this essay has argued that “illegality” is a bureaucratic trick and that true permanence lies in ecological care and that zoning can be rewritten from below.

 

References:

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