A Village With Close Ties to the Bay Area, Facing Demolition in the West Bank

For nearly 10 years, progressive Bay Area Jewish groups have maintained close ties with a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank — providing support, facilitating faith-based cultural exchanges and spreading awareness about encroaching settler violence.

Following reports of Israel’s plans to demolish the village, Umm al-Khair, advocates are now calling for its protection.

“This is an unjust takeover,” said Seth Morrison, a member of the Face-to-Face Jewish-Palestinian Reparations Alliance, based out of Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, and a leader in the Bay Area’s Jewish Voice for Peace.

“It is essential that the Israeli Embassy know that many Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are aware of this criminal action and are demanding that it change,” Morrison said.

On Tuesday, Israeli government and military personnel delivered 13 demolition orders and one stop-work order to Umm al-Khair, according to Chase Carter, communications director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. The orders included plans to dismantle a community center — “a central hub for everyone in the community, men, women and children” — as well as the center’s playground, 11 homes and a greenhouse. The stop-work order paused construction on a new house.

“If these demolition orders go through, the entire community is at risk of being forcibly displaced, permanently,” said Carter, whose organization has brought people from the Bay Area, including members of Kehilla Community Synagogue, to visit Umm al-Khair and other villages in the region.

“A core community of [the region] and of the nonviolent civil resistance movement, that is connected to so many of us here in the Bay Area, will be gone,” Carter said. “And that is a huge blow to our movement and solidarity activists that are trying to stay steadfast in the struggle to bring peace and justice to the region.”

Neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli Consul General of San Francisco responded to requests for comment.

In a video posted Tuesday on YouTube, Eid Al-Hathaleen, an activist who lives in Umm al-Khair, said residents were given four days to appeal the orders in Israeli court. Lawyers for residents, Morrison told KQED on Thursday, said the “cases will be extremely hard,” and the likelihood of “stopping the demolitions legally is less than 20%.”

“I am extremely troubled by reports that the Israeli Government has resumed the demolition of Palestinian homes in Umm al-Khair,” Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, said in a statement. “No one should live under the threat of demolition, displacement, or death. I call on the State Department to use all available levers to stop the killing and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The residents of Umm al-Khair first took refuge among the rural, olive tree-dotted landscape of the South Hebron Hills in 1948, after losing their homes during the creation of the state of Israel. They purchased the land from Palestinians in the nearby city of Yatta and built a small agrarian community. Israel conquered the land during the Six-Day War in 1967 and has occupied it since.

In 1980, Israel set up a settlement, Carmel, abutting the village. The U.N. Security Council has condemned these settlements as a violation of international law, which Israel has disputed. Carmel, which has grown to engulf Umm al-Khair, has drawn international criticism for its expansion into neighboring communities and for the stark disparities in living conditions between the village and the settlement.

Kehilla Rabbi Emeritus David Cooper, who has visited the village multiple times since 2016, said tensions between the growing settlement and the Palestinian residents of Umm al-Khair ratcheted up after Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Learning that Umm al-Khair was set to be demolished felt like discovering that a “next-door neighbor’s house” was being torn down, he said.

“No authority, no reason, nothing. … The neighborhood next to me is being erased,” Cooper said. “It feels as immediate as that to me, and there is no justification for it whatsoever.”

Kehilla’s connection with the village began with a series of trips organized by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence to conduct what Cooper called “nonviolent co-resistance work.” The congregation and the Jewish-Palestinian reparations group organized multiple delegations to visit Umm al-Khair, and they meet monthly with residents of the village on Zoom.

Eid Al-Hathaleen and his cousin Awdah were Umm al-Khair’s primary points of contact with the Bay Area. Earlier this year, the congregation invited them to the U.S. as part of an inter-faith humanitarian mission that made headlines when the activists, both of whom held visitor visas, were detained at San Francisco International Airport by U.S. immigration agents. Despite outcry from their local sponsors and from officials, the men were refused entry and sent home the next day.

One month later, Awdah Al-Hathaleen, a prominent activist featured in the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was killed by an Israeli settler. In the Bay Area, his friends and allies mourned the loss and worried about what it signaled for the village’s future.

“The situation was already bad before October 2023, but it escalated dramatically after,” Philip Weintraub, another Kehilla member, told KQED in July. “We’re most fearful for the survival of the village — that was most important to Awdah — the protection and safety of the residents of Umm Al-Khair.”

This week’s demolition orders follow a temporary injunction issued earlier this month by the Jerusalem District Court forbidding settlers from inhabiting seven prefabricated homes just steps from Umm al-Khair, on the grounds that the houses were built without authorization and in violation of zoning designations, according to reporting from the Times of Israel. This notice has been violated, and the homes are occupied, the report said.

Last week, President Donald Trump said in an interview with Time Magazine that any Israeli attempt to annex parts of the occupied West Bank will not be tolerated.

“It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” he said, in a conversation about the administration’s role in the fragile Gaza ceasefire deal. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

The day before the interview was published, however, the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, voted in favor of annexing land in the West Bank.

And from June 18 to Sept. 25, Israeli authorities have approved the construction of 20,000 new housing units in the West Bank, according to a U.N. report.

Despite the Trump administration’s assurances, Morrison said the situation in Umm al-Khair tells another story.

“Unfortunately, what is happening is de facto an annexation. Since the Gaza genocide started, settler violence against Palestinians has increased a hundredfold,” he said. “Numerous people have been killed, they’ve taken over more land, they’ve built more illegal settlements. And this is part of that initiative.”