| |
An occasional column by Nigel Parry for Middle East International magazine.
In mid-May I received a phonecall from a Birzeit graduate who wanted me to come down to her family home in Jerusalem, which was under threat of demolition at the hands of a Hebrew University expansion plan. The irony was that 50 years ago, her family had settled there in flight from the horrors of the Nakba, and here we were in the 50th anniversary year of the Nakba, watching history repeat itself.
I never made it down to cover her family's story. I had problems of my own, when on 25 May 1998, Palestinians including members of the security forces, used a bulldozer to demolish my own home in Ramallah without warning or any legal proceedings (http://www.nigelparry.com/diary/home/).
It has been said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ultimately one over real estate. This was no different. I lived in a house on sought-after land in the center of Ramallah, the landlady wanted to sell it, and she knew enough about the way post-Oslo Palestinian political realities are to know there would be no uncomfortable legal problems.
The whole experience gave me a new insight into the pain suffered by Palestinians seeing their homes demolished, one of the most uncomfortable and symbolic aspects of the conflict, and focused me on that which is both important and - sadly - is usually lost as one more wave in a sea of statistics as yet another Palestinian family is rendered homeless by an Israeli bulldozer.
The Israeli 'peace bloc' Gush Shalom, has a house demolition section at http://www.gush-shalom.org/demolition/demolition.html that includes an extensive photo gallery, with images mainly provided by the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in Hebron. Don't be mislead into avoiding CPT's own website archives, available at http://www.prairienet.org/cpt/archives/1998/aug98/, because of their religious slant. In the e-mail reports you will find there and in the archives of previous months, CPT members have revealed an otherwise absent human face to the suffering of some of the 10,000 Palestinians made homeless by Israeli house demolitions over the last ten years.
"Rodeina's husband, Atta Jaber, had been at work. He arrived too late to see the demolition of his house, built in 1992. Tears rolling down his cheeks, Atta said, 'I put six years of my blood into this house...
The faces were full of emotion but the emotions were too raw to take photos. In the course of our time there calls came to the cell phone including one from Sara, a CPTer in Iowa, one from Pierre a CPTer now on leave in Ontario, and still another from Arik, a rabbi living in Jerusalem. Finally there was one from Hisham, a Palestinian journalist, who did a live interview with Ata where Ata talked of peace for all people. Some of the rage from yesterday has been replaced by the energy he is putting into rebuilding. The phone calls mean a lot.'"
[excerpted from August 1998 postings.]
Even the hard statistics themselves are quite chilling. The 'Save the Homes of Palestine' website has a factsheet compiled from the work of several organisations at http://www.net-a.org/hdemol/facts.html
Consider that from the Oslo signing in September 1993 until March 1998, 629 Palestinian homes were demolished in the West Bank including East Jerusalem. Of these, 43 percent were demolished under Rabin/Peres' Labour government and 57 percent under Netanyahu's Likud government. Considering that Netanyahu only came to power in May 1996, Likud clearly comes out as the bad guy, but one is left wondering what the Labour architects of Oslo were thinking as they signed, smiled, shook, and proceeded to demolish another 268 Palestinian homes over the next two-and-a-half years.
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem published a report entitled "Demolishing Peace" in late 1997, that approached the subject with its characteristic dispassion and well-sourced research. Although its website's 'Housing and Land Issues' section (http://www.btselem.org/Subjects/HouseLand/HouseLand.htm) has an excellent archive of previous reports and press releases on the same issue, you'll have to travel to http://www.net-a.org/hdemol/btselem.html to find a copy of this particular report.
For other human rights-related information on West Bank demolitions, LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, has an excellent section including an introduction to the issue at http://www.lawsociety.org/isrocc/hdem.html, and the Applied Research Center-Jerusalem attempts to answer the question "Behind the Policy of House Demolition: Why Here and Now?" at http://www.arij.org/paleye/demolish/index.htm, an illustrated introduction to the micro-geographical reasoning behind the wider Israeli policy.
If you're wondering what Israeli peace activists are doing about all this, reports from "The Other Israel" at http://members.tripod.com/~other_Israel/bldzr.html should answer a few questions. For readers from the United States, an online protest letter to US officials can be found at http://salam.org/activism/protest.html
by Nigel Parry
September 1998
MEI