As its name suggests, Beit Arabiya belongs to Arabiya Shawamreh, her husband Salim, and their seven children — a Palestinian family whose home has been demolished four times by the Israeli authorities and rebuilt each time by ICAHD’s Palestinian, Israeli, and international peace activists before being demolished again last night.

At around 11p.m. Monday, a bulldozer accompanied by a contingent of heavily armed Israeli soldiers appeared on the Anata hills to promptly demolish Beit Arabiya, along with residential and agricultural structures in the nearby Jahalin Bedouin compound. Three family homes were demolished along with numerous animal pens; 20 people including young children were displaced, left exposed to the harsh desert environment. While standing in solidarity with Palestinians, ICAHD staff and activists were repeatedly threatened by Israeli soldiers. ICAHD Co-Director Itay Epshtain was beaten and sustained minor injuries.

Beit Arabiya was issued a demolition order by Israeli authorities back in 1994, following Israel’s refusal to grant a building permit. It has since been demolished four times and rebuilt by ICAHD activists four times. Last night’s fifth demolition came following a reissue of the demolition order last Thursday. ICAHD Director Dr. Jeff Halper, standing astride the ruins, vowed to support Salim and Arabiya in rebuilding their home. “We shall rebuild, we must rebuild as an act of political defiance of the occupation and protracted oppression of Palestinians,” said Halper.

Beit Arabiya has become a symbol of resistance to the Judaization of the Occupied West Bank and Israeli demolition policy. “ICAHD is as determined as always to rebuild [Beit Arabiya] and [persevere] in its struggle to bring about justice and peace,” added Halper.
Salim and Arabiya, along with their neighbors and friends, stood last night and watched as this tragedy unfolded once again. Arabiya and Salim have dedicated their home as a center for peace in memory of Rachel Corrie and Nuha Sweidan, two women (an American and a Palestinian) who died resisting home demolitions in Gaza. In the past decade ICAHD has hosted numerous visitors at Beit Arabiya and based its annual rebuilding camp at the house, rebuilding 185 demolished Palestinian homes.

Earlier this month, ICAHD extended an invitation to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing to visit Beit Arabiya during her country visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territory scheduled for later in the month. “It is our hope that while we cannot extend the same hospitality to the Special Raportueor, Prof. Raquel Rolnik will visit the ruins of Beit Arabiya and report on the utter cruelty and illegality of Israeli policies and practices, and that members of the international community will follow in her footsteps,” said ICAHD Co-Director Itay Epshtain.

For more information and coordination of visits to Beit Arabiya, please contact Itay Epshtain at itay@icahd.org or +972-54-2623306

Slider Photo Credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/MCC

The destructive action left twenty people homeless, including six children. Since 1967 around 2,000 homes have been demolished in East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). The Israeli authorities demolished more than 670 East Jerusalem homes between 2000 and 2008. The number of outstanding demolition orders for East Jerusalem is estimated at up to 20,000.

ICAHD estimates that about 25,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories were demolished between 1967 and 2010.

(reposted from Electronic Intifada)

ICAHD Co-Director Itay Epshtain and ICAHD UK Director Linda Ramsden met with the Special Rapporteur staff in Geneva earlier this month, to ask of the Rapporteur to convey his grave concern of imminent displacement, and deliver the recent publication “Nowhere Left to Go: Arab al-Jahalin Bedouin Ethnic Displacement.”

Please visit the ICAHD website for more information.

Fifteen army jeeps and a bulldozer showed up at the rural community, in the hills east of Jerusalem, and demolished five family homes, displacing 71 people, including some 60 children. ICAHD staff arrived at the community a few short hours after the demolition to find family members mourning the loss of their homes and property. Abu Khamis, a Khan al-Ahmar community activist, told ICAHD staff: “We will not be forced off our land; if Israel demolishes, we will rebuild.”

The Palestinian-Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar (Jerusalem periphery) is fighting for survival. The 180-strong community faces the threat of imminent displacement if the Israeli authorities demolish their homes and school as planned. This may well destroy the community, one of 20 in the area, who have become victims of creeping settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing.

The land the community lives on has been slated for the expansion of settlements in the Ma’ale Adumim municipal area, in the Jerusalem periphery, despite the community’s decades’ long presence. Israeli authorities see Khan al-Ahmar and the other Palestinian-Bedouin communities in the area, more than 2,300 people in all, as a hindrance to the planned expansion of Ma’ale Adumim, Kfar Adumim, and other surrounding illegal settlements, and to the construction of the West Bank wall which would de facto annex this strategically significant area to Israel, rendering a Palestinian state unviable.

The Khan al-Ahmar Jahalin School is the only school to provide primary education to children of the Arab al-Jahalin Bedouin tribe. Built in 2009 by Italian NGO Vento Di Terra (Wind of Earth) and local NGOs, the eco-friendly school, providing schooling for over 70 students, is slated for demolition.

If implemented, the Israeli development plans would be the culmination of years of settlement expansion at the expense of the Palestinian-Bedouin communities. Since 1991, when large parts of the communities’ living areas were integrated into the expanded boundaries of Ma’ale Adumim, Israeli policies have increased the pressure on the communities to leave their homes.

The recent house demolitions are part of an ongoing policy designed to forcefully transfer Bedouin of the Jerusalem periphery, as highlighted in the ICAHD publication Nowhere Left to Go: Arab al-Jahalin Bedouin Ethnic Displacement.

House demolitions, evictions, and property confiscations, exacerbated by settler harassment and the economic effects of movement restrictions, have left these communities struggling to make ends meet and living in fear.

ICAHD calls for an immediate end to the occupation of Palestinian Territory and to demolitions of Palestinian houses, schools, and infrastructure, which cause displacement and dispossession.

ICAHD calls for the transfer of powers and responsibilities related to the sphere of planning and zoning in the West Bank, including area C, to Palestinian jurisdiction in accordance with international law and bi-lateral agreements, so as to allow for a nondiscriminatory planning system to include community participation in all levels of the planning process.

ICAHD calls for a safe return of all families forcibly displaced to their homes and compensation for any harm they have suffered, including the destruction of land, homes, and property.

Yesterday I spoke with a Jerusalem Post reporter, and invited her to come and see the camp in Anata for herself. She couldn’t, she told me, “because we’re not allowed to go to the West Bank.”

And that’s a shame, because that means she won’t be able to see and report on so many things that might help her audience understand what occupation means to the more than 2 million residents of the West Bank.

She won’t see the curious children who come to our construction site near the Israeli “security fence,” the wall that snakes through the West Bank, cutting through villages, separating farmers from their land, and even splitting in two the campus of Al Quds University (Al Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem). Some of the children began throwing stones at the soldiers by the wall the other day, drawing attention from the police and making us nervous that they might shut down our project, a home for the Sbaih family, whose previous house was demolished by the Israeli authorities. (Some 15 percent of the 162 houses that ICAHD has reconstructed over the last seven years have been re-demolished by the Israeli military—the reconstruction work is at least as much a statement of resistance as it is an effort to provide homes for Palestinians, and the families who participate do so with this understanding.)

The Jerusalem Post reporter won’t see the contrast between the illegal Israeli settlements here — lush green landscaped communities with municipal swimming pools and well-maintained roads — and the Palestinian villages, whose narrow streets, if they are paved at all, are so uneven that the vans we cram into to go to our worksites can only travel at five or ten miles an hour most of the time.

Jeff took us on a tour of one of these communities yesterday — Ma’ale Adumim. It encompasses land stretching all the way to the Dead Sea, and, when construction finishes, it will nearly bisect the West Bank. It includes an industrial park and an aeronautics and space college. This school is intended to turn out technicians to work at the airport that is planned to serve “Greater Jerusalem,” itself a sprawling swathe of land with settlements topping the hills and dividing the surrounding Palestinian villages from each other. Most people live in Ma’ale Adumim more for economic than ideological reasons; unlike the religious settlers who believe the land was deeded to them directly from god, they moved to the settlement because government subsidies make it financially attractive and they feel alienated from the Orthodox population that is ever more dominant in Jerusalem.

Residents drive to work in the city every day, as they do in suburban bedroom communities in the United States, but here they use four-lane highways reserved for Jews, while Palestinians must travel on smaller side roads, going through checkpoints that the settlers never see. The ubiquitous checkpoints that can cause a trip of 10 miles to take hours are tucked out of sight in the tunnels where the Palestinian roads pass under the settler highways. Even the wall itself is constructed so that it is not so intrusive from the Israeli side. While Palestinians are greeted by a 25-foot concrete barrier, often on the Israeli side, the area approaching the wall is a gentle slope with landscaping.

The Israeli journalist won’t see the irony of the acres and acres of stumps from Palestinian olive trees that have been cut down by the military, while other ancient trees with thick gnarled trunks have been uprooted whole and transplanted to beautify the grassy traffic circles in the settlements. “Imagine seeing a 400-year-old olive tree that has been in your family for generations planted in a Jewish settlement,” says Jeff. These green oases with their grass- and tree-lined streets are a tremendous drain on the water resources of the region. Israel and its settlements in the West Bank use 85 percent of the water from the West Bank, while in many Palestinian villages and cities, municipal water comes only two days a week.

And it’s too bad the reporter won’t come to our construction site to see what a small group of people, fueled by a passion against injustice, can accomplish. In only a few days, we have gone from a bare foundation to a structure with four walls and a roof, with the beginnings of interior walls tracing out the rooms where a family will raise children, eat, drink, sleep, and, we hope, grow old together.

Yes, with a little effort, it’s possible to go through life in Israel and the settlements without ever seeing a Palestinian. And that’s the real shame.

Today’s writers are working on the Jerusalem construction site, beside the Israeli “separation barrier”. Tuesday was a great day; we worked hard but still had fun by all singing together. Our group works well together, and we understand each other well. We have begun constructing an outside garden, cleaning up surrounding stones and digging to build stairs.

We began our excursion to the Old City of Jerusalem on a bus, with no problems at the checkpoint. We were not even asked for our passports! Then we picked up Meir Margalit, a member of both ICAHD and the Jerusalem City Council, who guided us through the city. We began the tour at “New Gate,” which was built for the Franciscans, to avoid walking around the city wall to access their buildings. We observed Ultra-Orthodox Haredim Jews, and learned the meaning and purpose behind their traditional clothing. We entered the Palestinian zone, and learned about the history of a radical Jewish group from the 1960’s called the “Black Panthers”. We drove across the old 1967 frontier toward the Mount of Olives, and saw the old checkpoint where observers still watch for the former frontier. Then we saw Israel’s Hebrew university, located on occupied territory.

On the Mount of Olives, we observed a settler house, occupied by political settlers just in the middle of a Palestine zone, at a strong strategic place. Then we began with the old city, discussing “the Dome of the Rock” and Al-Aqsa Mosque. We learned about the conflict between Jews and Muslims over the rock’s meaning, revolving around Abraham, Mohamed, and the Old Synagogue underground.

From the Mount of Olives, we could see E1 (the highway separating East and West Jerusalem), Beit Arabiya, and settlements, learning about plans to join them with Jerusalem.

After that we stepped through Damascus Gate and into the heart of the Old City. We walked through a complicated crossing of little streets full of shops holding everything you can imagine; but for Palestinians themselves, not just for typical tourists. It was really squished and crowded. In one of the shops we could see some uniformed men. On top of the shops, you can still see people living in their homes. Just before we arrived to the Holy Sepulcher Church, we could see an Israel flag waving in the wind. Just in front of the main door, a man with his weapon was sitting, watching the house. We discovered that they are paid by the state, and stay the whole day. Then we entered the Sacred Sepulcher, divided between the Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Catholic Churches. Then we took again the bus to the Spanish consulate, to thank them for the economic help to our trip.

We had the opportunity to speak with our ambassador. We put our cards on the table, because the consul spoke about the good relations between Spain and Israel. Some of us asked for Spain to press the Israeli government about the conflict. He answered that Spain alone is not able to decide about such a big issue, especially since it strongly depends on the EU. Apparently, they send regularly messages to Israel, alone or together with other countries, to give their opinion, which differs from EU’s. After that, someone suggested Spain cutting off its supply of weaponry to Israel, and he did not quite answer our question, speaking like a diplomat. After that, putting aside Spain, we asked about his opinion on the way to resolve the conflict, and proposed working with other countries on an agreement. He discussed his view on existing agreements, and how they could be translated into reality. After a positive meeting, we said goodbye and left the consul.

al-Bustan neighborhood in Silwan, East Jerusalem.

Israeli forces issued five new house demolition orders in the al-Bustan section of Silwan in East Jerusalem on Wednesday, 5 August, injuring eight Palestinians in the process and seizing the identification card of Musa Odeh, a member of the al-Bustan Committee working to non-violently oppose the demolitions. Authorities also deployed tear gas to prevent residents from confronting the soldiers ordering the demolitions.

The orders augment the 90 demolition orders already standing in Silwan, a densely populated village located on the southeastern slopes of the Old City of Jerusalem. The area, which is located near the biblical site of Siloam and which houses approximately 55,000 residents, was annexed by the state of Israel in 1967; since then, the Municipality of Jerusalem has nearly uniformly refused Palestinian residents building permits to develop the neighborhood, typifying Israeli urban planning policy in East Jerusalem for the past 42 years. In 2004, a directive was issued from the Municipality’s building supervision department to demolish all the homes in Silwan in order to build the “King’s Valley” archaeological park, which is currently under the administration of the fundamentalist settler group Elad. If completed as planned, the Silwan demolitions would constitute the largest scale demolition program in the city of Jerusalem since the leveling of the Maghrebi quarter the night after Israel’s seizure of East Jerusalem in 1967 in order to build today’s Western Wall plaza.

Every year dozens of volunteers come to Anata, in east Jerusalem, to reconstruct houses destroyed by Israel. Jerusalem municipal councilman also partakes in rebuilding process, hoping it will ‘build foundation to help us live together in peace’.

On the backdrop of the eviction of Arab families from east Jerusalem and tensions with the United States and the West, a group of some 80 Israeli, Palestinian and foreign activists have embarked on a unique mission to rebuild the houses that were destroyed.

The activists, who come each year to a “summer camp” in the Anata neighborhood in the northeast section of Jerusalem, are rebuilding two family homes that were destroyed in an eviction by Israeli authorities during the families’ eviction. [Read Summer Camp blogs here.]

“Sometimes there are situations in which civilians must rise up against injustice and do the things the government refuses to do,” Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said to Ynet.

The activity is not legal, but Halper said that it is vital and important nonetheless: “This isn’t just the humanitarian work of helping unfortunate Palestinians. This is an act of political resistance to the occupation. We do it out in the open. If you do it like a thief in the night, it is not a protest,” said Halper.

‘Like brothers and sisters’

Sixty of the 80 activists who came to the summer camp this year are volunteers from abroad, 40 of them from Spain. The Spanish government gives full sponsorship for their participation in the project.

“Democracy is not just the right to vote. It is social consciousness and opposition to injustice,” explained one of the volunteers. “The Israeli public doesn’t really know what is going on here. Everything is done away from the public eye. The Palestinians can’t be chased off the land. Even if the government continues to destroy, we will come and rebuild.”

On a hill facing the construction site, sat Younis Sabiyah, watching his demolished house be rebuilt. Sabiyah has lived in Anta for 16 years together with eight of his family members. Last year, his house was demolished. Since he has been renting.

“God willing, I believe the house will be erected and they won’t destroy it. The people here are not just friends, they are like brothers and sisters to me,” said Sabiyah.

‘Building bridges for coexistence’

The young volunteers received surprising support in a Jerusalem municipal councilman. Meir Margalit (Meretz) came to help the group rebuild. “I am not trying to hide. I am acting openly against the city’s policy and building houses it has demolished. It is my deep commitment to humanitarian values,” Margalit said to Ynet.

“With every house destroyed by the state, it damages the central pillars on which it is based. What I am doing is a desperate attempt to save the country from itself, to dismantle the mechanism of self-destruction that has been in motion in this country since ’67. My basic motivation is to try and put the State of Israel back on the path of sanity,” explained Margalit.

Margalit takes an active part in the rebuilding project and takes part in the building. “The main objective is not just philanthropy. In addition to a house, we are also building a bridge for coexistence. We ultimately will live side by side in independent states, and now we are building the foundation that will help us live in peace,” said the councilman.

Summer Camp 2009: Welcome to Israel

The day I arrived here a right-wing extremist walked into Open House, a lesbian and gay center in Tel Aviv, and pulled out a gun, killing three and injuring 15.

The next morning, at 5:00 a.m., Palestinian occupants of two houses in Jerusalem were evicted and Jewish settlers installed in their place.

Welcome to Israel.

I am here as part of a 60-member delegation to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions seventh annual summer camp. We will rebuild two houses here in Anata, a village of 30,000 on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, and construct 11 public toilets in the south of Hebron. If there is time remaining, we will work on a project in the Jordan Valley.

We are staying at Arabeia House, which has been demolished and reconstructed four times. It features a spacious downstairs room where the women sleep on mattresses lined up on the floor. The men sleep in two covered areas on the large terrace cut into the hillside. The house has been under a demolition order since June.

On the hill across the way, on the other side of the infamous “Separation Barrier,” as Israeli officials call it (it is known to the rest of the world as the Apartheid Wall), is a military base and prison. Looking east, you can see the Dead Sea and the mountains of Jordan.

On our first full day here, we were taken on a tour of Anata. It was a striking contrast with the well-kept Jewish neighborhood in the south of Jerusalem where we met for our orientation. The first stop is the top of the hill, where a Bedouin encampment is also under a demolition order. The soldiers across the way find the corrugated metal buildings unsightly and want to move the Bedouins, who drive their sheep by our compound in the mornings, into the village. “Whoever heard of animals living in the middle of the village?” asks Salim Shawamreh, who lives in Arabeia House with his wife, for whom the center is named.

Anata is split in three parts; one section is considered part of Jerusalem, all of which has been annexed by Israel; the rest is split between Areas B and C, administrative designations that were applied to the Occupied Territories by the 1995 Oslo Agreement that was supposed to lead to an independent Palestinian state. Areas with the B designation are under Palestinian civil administration and Israeli military control, while C areas are under full Israeli control. All the houses in the Area C section of Anata are under demolition orders, having been built without going through the expensive and tortuous Israeli permit process, which almost always results in denial for Palestinian applicants.

Summer Camp 2009: Welcome to Israel

After our introduction to the village, we began our real work here—building houses for two families whose homes were demolished by Israeli bulldozers. I was working on a house for the Sbaih family, located on a hill overlooking a section of the wall under construction. Looking down, we saw U.S.-made Caterpillar backhoes and bulldozers moving materials around. Up at our site, we were working on pure people power. The internationals, most of them from Spain, cheerfully passed cinder blocks and other materials along human chains. As I passed buckets back and forth, I learned three new words in Arabic: “raba,” sand; “hasma,” gravel; and “mai,” water. These three materials were combined with cement in a small mixer; the resulting concrete was poured into wooden forms to make the columns that will support the walls.

At 5:30, some of us knocked off for the day to attend a demonstration in Jerusalem outside Sheikh Jarrah, where the Hannoun and Ghawi families had been evicted that morning. Their houses were part of a group of 28 that had been bought by Jews in the late 19th century. The previous occupants had abandoned them in 1929 after violence erupted against the growing influx of Zionist immigrants into what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Israeli courts have ruled that the property should be returned to Jewish ownership. “If they really wanted to be just, they should also return the homes in the rest of Jerusalem that were owned by Palestinians in 1948, and there are a lot more of them,” says Meir Margalit, a staff member at the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

In November 2008, another family was evicted. Um Kamel, whose husband died of a heart attack two weeks after the event, erected a tent outside her home, which was occupied by settlers. This summer, activists from the International Solidarity Movement were staying in the threatened houses 24 hours a day, but they failed to prevent the evictions. Two hundred police and soldiers participated in the raid, in which eleven internationals and two Israelis were arrested. Charlie Wood, an ISM activist who was arrested and released, described how he watched from the back of the police wagon as settlers streamed into the empty houses, shaking hands and joking with police.

Yesterday’s demonstration began as a somber gathering of 100 or so outside the barriers police had erected in front of the entrance to Sheik Jarrah. Things heated up when chanting began and some people knocked over two of the metal racks, although no one entered the cordoned-off area. The knot of five or six police who had been huddled near the entrance was reinforced by another dozen, all carrying machine guns. They got into a formation and rushed toward the end with the downed barriers, pushing the demonstrators back a few yards, and a small group of police remained outside the barriers on the sidewalk.

A dance ensued for the next hour, in which police periodically pushed the protesters to the traffic island and then across the street and then retreated. At least three people were arrested.

Eventually we were joined by two more ICAHD staffers who had been to the vigil in Tel Aviv outside the lesbian and gay center. Our first full day, and our stay here is already marked with actions commemorating lives lost and broken.

Welcome to Israel indeed.