Jerusalem - Ma'an - On Monday, June 11, 2007, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) announced the launch of a campaign to rebuild the home of every Palestinian family whose house is demolished over the coming year, approximately 300 according to ICAHD estimates.

 

The ICAHD activists marked this launch, which coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 June war, with a return to the site where the İsraeli military occupation of Palestinian land first began. On June 11, 1967, Israeli soldiers forcibly roused 135 Palestinian families from their beds in the Mughrabi Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. Their neighborhood was then demolished in order to create the current plaza in front of the Western Wall, the sole remnant of the Jewish temple built by King Solomon and venerated by Jews worldwide. An elderly woman, Rasmia Tabaki, was crushed to death when her house collapsed on top of her, making her the first victim of the occupation policy of home demolitions.

"It was an act that had nothing to do with either the war or with security," ICAHD asserts. "It represented only the creation of the first "fact on the ground" of thousands that would come asserting exclusive Israeli claims over the entire country."

On Monday, as ICAHD activists gathered to remember the start of the Israeli occupation's policy of demolishing Palestinian homes and to start the rebuilding campaign, ICAHD founder and coordinator Jeff Halper told Mughrabi Quarter residents that the Israelis had come along "not only to remember the night the Occupation began but to take responsibility for the actions of our government, responsibility Israel has tried to avoid all these decades."

ICAHD estimates that 18,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied Palestinian territories, including east Jerusalem, have been demolished since 1967. According to a press release from ICAHD, issued ahead of the campaign, the policy of home demolition is "part of a larger Israeli policy of transfer and dispossession."

Halper, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organisation, and who was recently awarded the 2007 Olive Branch Award by the American Jewish group Jewish Voice for Peace, explained that this rebuilding campaign "went beyond mere acknowledgment and solidarity."

"It represents a further intensifying of ICAHD's resistance to the Occupation."

According to a report by Michael Jansen, in the Jordan Times, Halper asserted, “We will replace every house on the spot where it was demolished. This amounts to a political act of resistance and civil disobedience.”

The ICAHD activists and Palestinian Mughrabi Quarter residents then proceeded to the home of Naim Kabaja, whose one-room home in the Muslim Quarter was demolished in recent weeks. There, the activists began construction of the first official house of the campaign.

According to ICAHD, the rebuilding is funded by "Jewish donors appalled by the Israeli government’s house demolition policy."

ICAHD workers suspect that the Jerusalem Municipality will soon place a demolition order on the rebuilt home, and then proceed to demolish it yet again. ICAHD is promising to stay at the Kabaja family's side and resist demolition.

Halper said, according to the Jordan Times: “Our idea is to push it to the end. Our lawyer says there is a very good chance they [the Israeli authorities] will close us down or, even, arrest us. We’ve had 40 years of this: Enough! We’re willing to do what we gotta do to end the occupation. We’re not going to move the Israeli public. It doesn’t care. We’re plugged into the international peace network. Now is the time to parley [our effort] into an international campaign. We must push it, push it, go to jail, use ourselves as a catalyst. Systems of oppression tend to collapse like a dam that bursts once a small hole is opened.”

Ma'an News Agency

13 June 2007