Tema Okun | ICAHD-USA

I’ve had a hard time communicating the swing of emotions I’ve been feeling since Tom Stern and I returned from the West Bank at the end of July. We were there for 3 weeks, staying with friends in Ramallah, on the ‘wrong’ side of the 30-foot high concrete “Separation Barrier,” and visiting some of the houses that ICAHD-USA has rebuilt through the Constructing Peace Campaign.

We have much good news to report. After each day of visiting houses we would return to our friends’ home tired, physically and emotionally. Every family we visited has a compelling and heartbreaking story; together these stories create a refrain of systematic targeting; a chorus of anguish over the demolition of a house, a life savings, a marriage, a healthy psyche, or a future worth hoping for. The irony is that the Israeli government’s mantra of safety and security serves as the public excuse for immoral and decidedly one-sided policies of land confiscation, settlement expansion, and bypass road construction. These policies have kept Palestinians in a constant state of danger and insecurity for over 40 years.

I tried to imagine what it would do to me to live like this, waking every morning wondering if today the soldiers might come to demolish my house, if today I’ll make it through the checkpoints to get to work or visit my family, if today the settlers will attack, if today I’ll be able to feed my family, if today…

As Tom and I traveled across the West Bank, the numerous checkpoints turned 20-minute trips into long and humiliating hours that few impatient Americans would tolerate. We came to realize that every interaction between Palestinians, even those who do not know each other, is accompanied by stories of Israeli mistreatment, discrimination, and arrogance. These are not anti-Semitic expressions of anger and despair. They are simple descriptions of the daily experience of being mistreated in arbitrary and dehumanizing ways.

It is in this context that we experienced some very poignant and even lighthearted moments such as laughing with a Hebron farmer whose house was rebuilt right in the middle of his fields. We sat next to the house, in the shade of low-hanging trees, joking with him about his many children as he pours us cups of steaming tea laced with sugar. He, like all those we meet over the course of three weeks, is deeply grateful for the rebuilding.

For every family, the life savings that go into the construction of their house are lost with its demolition. Without our help, these families could not rebuild their homes. These families and their rebuilt houses embody physical, nonviolent resistance to Occupation. In Hebron the houses sit directly underneath an illegal Israeli settlement. The ideological settlers here, notoriously mean-spirited, often throw rocks and trash at the Palestinians and threaten the farmers whose families have been in these fields for over a thousand years. The demolition of houses makes it easier for these settlements to expand; rebuilding makes it harder.

Seeing this first-hand helped me realize the importance of the Constructing Peace Campaign. We are not only providing a home to a family who desperately needs one, we are joining them in active, steady, dramatic (if not dramatized) resistance to the Occupation. To date, we have rebuilt 41 houses, plus a Bedouin village housing 25 families. Detailed information about many of these families and their houses can be found on the ICAHD-USA website under Campaign Updates.

Your support and assistance makes this campaign and these rebuilding projects possible. One easy way to help is to contribute to the costs of rebuilding. Each house costs between $5000 and $10,000 to rebuild. The rebuilding needs we have encountered far outweigh our current capacity. Again and again we heard heartbreaking appeals from families who are hoping to receive our help in rebuilding their homes. After seeing the enormous impact we can have with such a small amount of money, we aim to raise our goals and expand the scope of this campaign.

Help us build this campaign - and rebuild more houses - with a thoughtful gift. Your donation of $5000, $500, $50 or even $5 makes an enormous difference. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has previously supported this campaign and encourage you to continue that support. Financial contributions to ICAHD-USA are tax deductible and can be made securely online at our website through PayPal.

You can also contribute by helping organize a local campaign in your area; details about how to do this are offered on our website at www.icahdusa.org. Local campaigns serve a dual purpose of raising awareness about the Occupation and house demolitions as well as raising money to support the Constructing Peace Campaign.

I’ll end with a quote from one of the Palestinian contractors, a quiet, handsome man with a gentle smile named Hamis. Never without a cigarette, always calm, Hamis told us as we sat with a family in the shadow of an illegal Israeli settlement, “With these houses, you save the life of a family.” As a Jewish-American woman (especially during this period of the Jewish High Holy days), I feel strongly that with each brick placed into the rebuilt wall of a Palestinian family’s home, I am reclaiming a small piece of the promise of who I - who we - are meant to be.

As always, thank you for being part of the ICAHD-USA community and for all that you are and all that you do.