Abdallah Arara has raised 11 children and worked 400 head of sheep on the same plot of land five miles east of Jerusalem for most of the past 45 years. His parents arrived in the early 1950s after Israeli troops forced them out of the Negev, a desert further south.

Now, his family may be forced to move again.

“At any minute, the Israelis will come and evict us,” said Arara, 60, one of several thousand members of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe, who live among the rocky hills and dunes on the road to Jericho from Jerusalem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

His fears stem from the Israeli government’s decision last week to approve the building of 3,400 housing units in the empty area known as E-1 between Jerusalem and the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim. That’s where Arara and the rest of th

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