Rebuilding a House and Building a Common Future

[Violet_Crumble]

Young and old came from different parts of the world to the small village of Anata to rebuild a demolished Palestinian house together with Israelis and Palestinians. They wanted to provide a home for 23 people, but there was also a larger motivating factor. Building the house was also an act of resistance to the Occupation.

After being displaced from their land in the Negev desert, the Kabuah family came to the Anata village on the outskirts of Jerusalem in 1980. They bought a piece of land and started to build a house, which was completed in 1998. For years they unsuccessfully tried to get a permit to build their house. In June 2004, their house was demolished by the Israeli authorities, leaving the Kabuah family of 23 people homeless. Sadly, the Kabuah family is not alone in facing this situation. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), since 1967 Israel has demolished almost 9,000 Palestinian homes, leaving approximately 50,000 people without shelter and traumatized.



The homes that are destroyed do not belong only to suicide bombers or their families. According to ICAHD, the large majority of the houses are demolished simply because they lack a building permit. Palestinians build without permits because it is virtually impossible for them to get this permission, either within Israel or in the Occupied Territories. "The motivation for demolishing Palestinian homes is purely political, although elaborate systems of planning regulations, laws, and procedures are employed to give it legal justification," says Lucia Pizarro, international coordinator of ICAHD.



A demolition order is typically stuck on a house, which could result in its destruction the very next day. Since so many Palestinian houses have no permits, these families know that their homes could be demolished at any time, although they could stand for many years, adding to the anxiety and uncertainty. In addition to risking the loss of their homes, Palestinians also can be heavily fined to the tune of up to $25,000 for not having a permit. Sometimes they even have to pay for the demolition costs of their own home.



"The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes is an attack on an entire people, an attempt to make the Palestinians submit to a mini-state...under Israeli control," ICAHD coordinator Jeff Halper says. ICAHD is a nonviolent, direct-action group originally established to oppose and resist Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories. They have since expanded their resistance activities to other areas: land expropriation, settlement expansion, by-pass road construction, the policies of "closure" and "separation," the uprooting of fruit and olive trees, and rebuilding houses. The Kabuahs' was one of the houses chosen for rebuilding by ICAHD.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=7045

[The Magistrate]

1. Both Sad And Encouraging, Ma'am

Encouraging because this Committee is doing a very good thing, and its efforts may make some contribution to good feelings between the peoples so long locked in conflict. Such feelings are the only real possibilty of security in the future for either people.

Sad because the sort of demolitions refered to are simply wrong. There is no doubt that the issuance or with-holding of permits is guided by a discriminatory policy.