Reflections on the Road: Rebuilding a Palestinian's Home (Part 1)

(Part 1 of 2)

Having worked for several months in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, I could confirm much of what I saw on the news.  I had heard Palestinians express support for violence toward Jews, and I had witnessed the shattered remains of a storefront after a suicide bombing.  I had ducked behind walls as Israeli soldiers shot at stone-throwing children, and I had looked on as angry soldiers - someone had thrown a rock at their jeep -shot holes in the water tanks of innocent Palestinians.  In so many ways-a thousand more than I can recount here-the "Holy Land" was a difficult and ugly place to live.

Yet I loved the place and its people passionately, because more lay behind the scenes than what was covered in the news.  In the midst of the brokenness was hope.  It emerged daily in laughter and hospitality.  I witnessed it in the parents who, knowing that the only Jews their children had ever seen were holding guns, told them stories of other Jews with whom they had been friends in better times.  "Do not hate," the parents would say.  "The world is more than what you can see now."  And I witnessed it as well in middle-aged Israeli women who traveled daily to stand at military checkpoints notorious for abusing Palestinians.  They stood watch like observant mothers, reminding the soldiers that in protecting Israel there was no need to humiliate or abuse their Palestinian neighbors.

Part of what I loved, then, was how this complicated sliver of land along the Mediterranean illustrated what every traveler already knows:  the view from up close is never the same as the view from a distance.  A television or newspaper, seen or read 6,000 miles from the place it is attempting to describe, is limited in what it can do.  It is incapable of leading us to know a place, especially in the ancient Hebrew sense of the word.  The Hebrew implies an intimacy with the subject that is known, or, as I once heard a professor describe, knowledge is connected to responsibility is connected to caring.  Knowing, then, is not the collecting of facts and figures and opinions; it is to care.

One of the underreported tragedies of the conflict in Israel and Palestine is the demolition of more than 14,000 Palestinian homes by Israeli authorities since 1967.  Of the various kinds of demolitions, the most controversial are those carried out when a Palestinian has built without a proper permit.  These are known as "administrative demolitions."   A visitor walking the streets of East Jerusalem will undoubtedly pass Palestinians who are selling souvenirs, slicing shwerma, and shouting out prices at vegetable stands.  But the visitor will also pass countless people who are wondering, Will my house be demolished this year?

The people who first brought this aspect of the conflict to my attention were not Palestinians but Israelis.  Angered by the institutionalized racism they believed pervaded their government's interaction with Palestinians, they had made it their business to speak out against it.  Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, complained that "the Israeli government is one of the few governments in the world that uses the destruction of homes as a political policy tool....I, as a rabbi, feel that to destroy homes in this way is to trample on the Torah and on everything we hold dear in the Jewish tradition."

Perhaps the most vocal critic was Professor Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).  "The bulldozer," he writes, "certainly deserves to take its rightful place alongside the tank as a symbol of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians.  The two deserve to be on the national flag.  The tank as symbol of an Israel ‘fighting for existence,' and for its prowess on the battlefield.  And the bulldozer for the dark underside of Israel's struggle for existence, its ongoing struggle to displace the Palestinians from the country."

Here is the situation:  In order to build a home in Jerusalem (or in those parts of the West Bank administered by Israel), a landowner is required to obtain a building permit from the proper government office.  For Palestinians this process is not only expensive - in the West Bank an applications runs about $5,000, and in Jerusalem it can be considerably more - it is also exacerbating.  Even if they meticulously navigate their way through the entire process, in the end their application will generally be rejected.  Then, having been denied access to a legal permit, they are left with three options:  give up and move to a country where they will be allowed to build, move into a Palestinian administered portion of the West Bank but risk losing their right to enter Jerusalem again, or stay where they are but build illegally.

And this is why Israelis like Rabbi Ascherman and Professor Halper are angry.  Today, most Jewish neighborhoods in the Jerusalem area are preplanned by the Municipality or private developers and then housing is sold.  Hence, because they do not face the same bureaucratic challenges a Palestinian does, it is easier for a Jewish resident to procure legal housing.  Human rights groups argue that the system is designed to facilitate the movement of Jews into Jerusalem while hampering the ability of Palestinians to stay.

Early one August morning a taxi dropped me off at a construction site in the West Bank village of Anata, a Palestinian community just outside the Jerusalem city limits.   The day was already fast evolving into a scorcher, and I found 47-year-old Salim Shawamreh, a Palestinian, sitting in the shade of an olive tree.  With him were one of his seven children and two Jewish friends, including Jeff.  We were the first of some two dozen people who would gather at the construction site today.  While we waited for the others, Salim told me his story.

Born in Jerusalem's Old City in 1956, Salim married in 1981 and moved with his new wife to Saudi Arabia.  There he worked as a construction manager to save money so he could eventually build a home in Jerusalem.  But upon returning to Jerusalem, the cost and challenges in obtaining a building permit - even for a native Jerusalemite-led him to purchase land just outside the city.  Over the next three years he twice applied for a building permit-an expenditure of $10,000 - but both times he was rejected.  Like thousands of other Palestinian families who were not granted permission to build on their land, Salim eventually began construction anyway since he had a family to raise.  That was in 1994.  The following year Israel's Civil Authority ordered the home demolished, and the order was carried out in 1998.

Jeff continued Salim's story.  When the soldiers came to destroy the house, they dragged Salim out and beat him.  Salim's wife, fearing for her family's safety, locked the door behind the soldiers, who then hurled tear gas through the windows to remove her and the children.  With the house now vacated, a bulldozer moved in to tear it down.  Jeff threw himself in front of the bulldozer, but he too was dragged away and beaten.  "If the authorities sent a bulldozer to destroy a Jewish house," Jeff explained, "there would be a revolution-this is absolutely unthinkable."

In the non-violent tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Salim, with the assistance of ICAHD, committed to rebuilding his home as an act of resistance.  Predictably, the house was demolished three more times in the five years that followed.  This, of course, is why Jews, Palestinians, and others were descending on Anata today.  We had come to rebuild.

(To go to Part Two, CLICK HERE)

In December 2006, a Palestinian sits on the remains of his home in Jerusalem, demolished earlier in the morning for the second time in four years.

		Joel Carillet, Gather Travel Correspondent
	Joel's column, "Reflections on the Road," is published every other Thursday to Gather Essentials: Travel. His articles, based on extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, seek to shed light on humanity, both our own and that of others.   They aim not merely to entertain and inform but also to develop a sense of connection between the reader and the world. Joel's writing and photography have appeared in several magazines and newspapers, including the Kansas City Star and Christian Science Monitor.  Currently he is seeking an agent for a book manuscript entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia. When not on the road, he happily calls Tennessee home. Keep up with Joel's article series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.