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"Building
Homes and Hopes for Peace." Although known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the struggle in the Middle East is not between Israelis and Palestinians, argued Jeff Halper, coordinator of the Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions (ICAHD). At a 3 October 2002 Palestine Center (Palestine Center) briefing Halper maintained that the conflict is instead between those people--Israeli and Palestinian--who want a just, peaceful settlement to the ongoing violence, and those who want to destroy the other side and force it to bend to their will. For those in the Israeli government who belong to the latter camp, the practice of home demolition has become a favored method of operation. Since 1967, when the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began, over 9,400 Palestinian homes have been destroyed. In the past four months alone Israel destroyed more than 1,200 homes. Salim Shawamreh, a Palestinian resident of Occupied East Jerusalem, has had his home destroyed three times and is currently rebuilding it again. He discussed his experience and his work with the new Global Campaign to Rebuild Palestinian Homes. Shawamreh described how he had spent nine years in Saudi Arabia working to make enough money to buy a piece of land. He built a house and was living there with his family when one afternoon he heard a "big voice" calling to him. He recalled going to the door to find an Israeli soldier asking him "is this your home?" He replied that it was and the soldier said, "It's not your home. It's our home now." Shawamreh was given fifteen minutes to get his family and belongings out. When his wife slammed the door and tried to keep the soldiers out they broke the windows and threw tear gas grenades in the house. His story is illustrative of the Israeli policy of prohibiting Palestinian landowners from building on their own land. If they do build, their house may be destroyed at any time, with only minutes of warning, as an "illegal structure." Halper believes that it might be time to stop referring to the idea of occupation. He pointed out that "occupation implies a temporary situation." In international law an occupation is supposed to give way to a more permanent status, a negotiated settlement or a withdrawal or some other solution. But Halper argued that "it's very hard to see today how this occupation could be rolled back." What is unfolding in the West Bank has all the hallmarks of an irreversible transformation. Halper pointed to several large settlement blocs that he believes the Israeli government considers non-negotiable. He argued that Israel will attempt to keep them no matter what happens. This leads to the question of whether a two-state solution is practicable anymore, specifically whether a viable Palestinian state could be constructed among the intrusive outcroppings of Israel's nearly permanent presence in the Occupied Territories. Settler-only highways choke the West Bank and cut up the land into separate pieces. The settlement blocs Halper referred to cut the West Bank into three or four cantons. A northern canton will surround Nablus and will be boxed in by Israel's Jordan Valley settlements, the Ariel bloc of settlements and Israel's rapidly growing defensive wall. This wall is being built 5-10 kilometers inside Palestinian territory. It is three times longer than the Berlin Wall and two meters higher. Halper said that it costs Israel a million dollars a kilometer, and the total length will be more than 300 kilometers. Around 100,000 Palestinians will be caught in between the wall, which will cut them off from the rest of Palestine, and the Green Line marking the pre-June 1967 armistice, which is Israel's de facto border. The Oslo peace process was designed to free up enough territory in the West Bank to let a viable Palestinian state emerge. The new wall and the continued settlement construction have further encroached on the dwindling areas available to negotiate over. Halper added that "the map has changed dramatically" since Israel's spring offensives. The West Bank now "looks like Dresden." The Gaza Strip is the "waste bin, the trash can," in Israel's view. Halper believes that Israel will eventually designate Gaza as the Palestinian "state" while holding on to any parts of the West Bank that it feels it needs, whether for strategic, economic or political reasons. The world will be too tired of dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to raise any objections. In Halper's opinion, the international community, who has for so long called for a Palestinian state, will be satisfied to see some entity called the "state of Palestine" and not bother much with what form it takes. In order to implement their plan, Halper asserts that Israel needs to find a "quisling" Palestinian leader, a "collaborator" who will work with the Israeli government. Arafat has refused to play that role, and accordingly has been marginalized and attacked with increasing ferocity by the Israelis. The Global Campaign to Rebuild Palestinian Homes represents a vehicle
for Israelis and Palestinians to non-violently and cooperatively resist
the occupation. The Campaign brings Israeli volunteers into the Occupied
Territories to rebuild demolished homes together with Palestinian laborers
using Palestinian materials and supplies. Halper hopes to raise enough
money to rebuild 20 homes in the West Bank, Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem
simultaneously. Violence will never be the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. As Shawamreh put it, "they will never finish us and we
will never finish them." But the Campaign hopes to offer a model
of a solution which at least one side will be happy with--the side that
desires a just peace and reconciliation. This information first appeared in For the Record No. 134, 4 October 2002. |
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