Umm al-Khair: Between Demolition Orders and a Library That Serves as an Anchor for Life
As Carmel settlement expands, the road to school is blocked, homes are raided, and activists are arrested, women and mothers in Umm al-Khair are building a community library-an anchor for life
In recent weeks, Umm al-Khair has once again become a symbol of life under occupation: on one side, settlement expansion, military raids, demolition threats, and the restriction of living space; on the other, a community that insists on education, culture, and a future for its children.
Umm al-Khair is a Bedouin community in the South Hebron Hills. Its residents have lived there since the 1950s, after their families were displaced from their lands in the Arad area and relocated by the state. For decades, they built their lives there, raised children, herded livestock, and cultivated the surrounding land.
In the 1980s, the settlement of Carmel was established nearby. Since then, a continuous struggle has unfolded over land, residency rights, and the community’s ability to remain where it lives. Over the years, numerous demolition orders have been issued against homes and community structures. Some have been carried out, while others remain pending. Many families live with the constant uncertainty of not knowing whether their homes will still be standing tomorrow.
In recent weeks, however, the situation has escalated further.
Last week, ten new caravans were placed on land adjacent to the community as part of the expansion of the Carmel settlement. Within days, they were connected to water and electricity infrastructure, access roads were paved, and families moved in.
The significance goes far beyond physical expansion. The caravans were positioned along the paved road that residents of Umm al-Khair use to reach the local school, neighboring villages, and essential services.
In practice, this move has severely restricted the community’s freedom of movement. Children on their way to school, teachers, women, families, and people in need of medical care are now forced to navigate a reality in which the safest and most direct route passes through an expanding settlement area. For residents, this is yet another step in a long process aimed at shrinking their living space and making life increasingly difficult.
Alongside the settlement expansion, harassment and military incursions have intensified. On the eve of Eid al-Adha, the army entered the community after a complaint from settlers about olive trees planted six months earlier. Soldiers entered family homes, conducted searches, and spread fear among children and adults on an important religious holiday.
The following day, at midday, the army returned to Umm al-Khair. Soldiers once again entered the community, carried out searches, and the raid ended with the arrest of two activists.
For residents, this was not an unusual event but part of a familiar pattern: a complaint by settlers, the arrival of military forces, house searches, detentions, arrests, and displays of force. Alongside the expanding settlement, military presence has become an inseparable part of daily life.
Yet amid all of this, another story is unfolding in Umm al-Khair.
In recent weeks, women and mothers from the community, together with activists from Mothers Against Violence and other partners, have been working to establish the Odeh Library, a community library and educational space designed to serve as an anchor for life for the community’s children, youth, and women.
The library was born from a simple understanding: when daily life is filled with fear, uncertainty, and violence, it is necessary to create a different kind of space, a space for knowledge, learning, play, creativity, conversation, and hope.
Bookshelves, reading corners, and activity spaces for children are currently being built. At the same time, a summer program is being developed for approximately 65 children and teenagers from the community. The program will include educational activities, arts and crafts, emotional support, games, and social activities, led by teachers, mentors, and women from the community itself.
The library is not merely a building. It is a statement.
It says that children deserve books even when new caravans are being placed around them. It says that education matters even when the road to school is being blocked. It says that a community deserves a future even when demolition orders hang over its homes.
Perhaps this is the most accurate picture of Umm al-Khair today: on one side, caravans, demolition orders, raids, and arrests; on the other, books, children, teachers, and mothers.
This is a struggle over land, but it is not only about land. It is a struggle for the right to live a normal life. For the right to reach school safely. For the right to raise children without fear of nighttime raids. For the right to establish a library where others seek to erase and diminish.
Between the caravans placed along the road to the school and the new bookshelves of the Odeh Library, a deeper struggle is taking place over the character of this place and the future available to the next generation.
The mothers building the library are not simply fighting for a structure. They are fighting for the possibility that the children of Umm al-Khair can believe that even in difficult circumstances, a future can still be built.
In a reality of occupation, oppression, and constant threats to one’s home, it is easy to fall into despair and believe there is no way forward. Yet it is precisely in places where life itself is under threat that we must hold onto a horizon. The Odeh Library, educational activities, and encounters between women and mothers are an attempt to light the way at the end of the tunnel, not only for the children of Umm al-Khair, but also for us, the Israeli mothers who stand alongside them.
It is from this understanding that the Recognition and Reconciliation Project of the Global Mothers Alliance emerged. Its purpose is not only to oppose the existing reality, but to create a space where we can look at it honestly, learn from it, acknowledge the pain it produces, and imagine a different future.
The central blind spot in much of the public conversation is that people still speak about “peace” primarily in terms of security, agreements, and conflict management, while avoiding genuine engagement with injustice, responsibility, trauma, and the conditions necessary for reconciliation. Shared life cannot be built without acknowledging pain, ongoing harm, and the profound inequality that exists between the two peoples.
For this reason, we believe that anyone seeking a shared future must engage with questions of recognition, justice, freedom, and human rights, as well as the role of women, mothers, and civil society in building trust, healing, and the ability to live side by side in dignity and security.
We invite women, mothers, and all who are willing to see reality as it is, not through slogans or denial, to join us. To become part of a movement that chooses to confront blind spots, listen to testimonies, meet the people beyond the fences and fears, and transform recognition into an act of responsibility.
Because recognition is not surrender, recognition is the beginning of repair. And reconciliation is not forgetting. Reconciliation is the ability to build a shared future grounded in truth, justice, and human dignity.
From Umm al-Khair today, we can see two possible futures. One is marked by settlement expansion, blocked roads, military raids, and arrests. Libraries, education, human connection, and partnerships among mothers mark the other.
The question is not only what will happen to one community in the South Hebron Hills. The question is what kind of society we choose to build for the children of Umm al-Khair and for our own children as well.
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