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An eye witness account by way of Christian Peacemakers Teams
Yesterday was a day I won’t forget. Neither will Salim and Arabiyeh
Shawamreh or their six children.
We had planned a
joint Israeli-Palestinian protest against home demolitions. The idea
was to set up a tent on the site of a demolition that would serve
several purposes: protest, solidarity, documentation, and
compassionate listening to the family members. We planned to move
this tent from site to site, wherever the Israeli army used its
bulldozers. Yesterday’s inauguration of the tent was planned for
opposite the so-called “civil administration” headquarters-- the
nerve center of Israel’s control of the occupied territories-- those
who actually do the dirty work of demolishing people’s homes and
other acts of oppression.
Our bus from
Jerusalem held activists from several peace movements-- Bat Shalom,
Rabbis for Human Rights, Gush Shalom, and Peace Now. We are all
partners in a coalition called the Israeli Committee Against Home
Demolitions, and our demonstration was to be held jointly with the
Palestinian Land Defense General Committee.
Through the bus
microphone, I listened to Meir Margalit explain the action and
sketch one chilling scenario. “If the soldiers try to prevent us
from holding the demonstration, proceed in an orderly manner to the
planned alternative site. There must not be violence on our side,
but if the army engages in violence, do not separate from the
Palestinians. The army will be more brutal to the Palestinians if
the soldiers manage to separate us.”
It was a sobering
thought as we drove across the Green Line and toward the protest
tent. Suddenly a call came across a mobile phone and Meir took the
mike again. “We have just had word that a demolition is taking place
at this very moment not far from here.” It’s a rare occurrence to
catch a demolition in progress, no less with a group of peace
activists; most demolitions take place with virtually no warning,
and hence no time to protest. With no further discussion, we turned
toward Anata on the edge of Jerusalem, a town composed almost
entirely of Palestinian refugees who had lived in the old city of
Jerusalem and fled in 1967. They thought they had found refuge in
Anata.
After driving the
narrow unpaved streets of Anata for what seemed an interminable
time, we finally located the area and the bus parked as close as
possible. We still had to walk 10 minutes down narrow, zig-zagging
dirt roads between crowded homes until we came to the outskirts of
Anata. There we practically ran toward the edge of the hill and
looked below-- a beautiful home set into the pastoral valley with
one of its walls now crumpled into rubble by a roaring bulldozer; a
family and neighbors sobbing nearby; and a unit of Israeli soldiers
preventing anyone else from approaching the scene.
The scene was
horrific. We surged down the hill in our small group until the
soldiers blocked our progress with their guns and bodies. There were
scuffles trying to get past them, but more soldiers joined the
barricade. M.K. Naomi Chazan who was with us demanded to see the
order proclaiming this a “closed military zone”, as the soldiers
claimed, and after several long minutes the officer complied. Who
knows if the order was genuine or invented at the last minute. But
the guns were real.
So there we stood on
the side of the hill and watched with an unbearable sense of
helplessness as the “civil” administration’s bulldozer took the
house apart wall by wall. He drove through the front garden with a
profusion of flowers and a lemon tree and slammed the front door as
if he were God Almighty. Backing away, he slammed again until the
entire front was shattered and dangling from metal rods. Then he
came from every side, slamming and crashing his shovel against the
walls. Finally he lifted off the roof, barely suspended, and sent it
crashing below. When that was done, he went around the back of the
house and crashed through all the fruit trees, including a small
olive stand. He saw a water tank on a platform and knocked that
over, the tank tumbling down and a cascade of water drenching the
trees now uprooted and broken. He saw two more tanks nearby and
knocked those over as well. I have never seen anyone in the Middle
East deliberately waste so much water. Then he cleated treads
grinding and squealing over the rubble he had to climb over. The
shack was an easy swipe for his shovel, and we were surprised to see
two doves fly out, one white and one black, frightened out of their
wits. They flapped their wings briefly and landed not far from their
former home.
All the while, a
crowd of Palestinian neighbors and young men were gathering behind
us on the mountain crest, cat-calling and jeering. From our Israeli
group, many engaged the soldiers in challenges: “How can you sleep
at night?”; “Is this what is meant by defending Israel?”; “Don’t you
understand the immortality of this action?”, and the like. Every
single soldier, from the high commander to the lowest GI responded
the same way: “This is legal; we’re only following orders.” One
woman tried to yell at the bulldozer driver every time there was a
lull in the din. But nothing we could think to say stopped the roar
of devastation.
By then I had managed
to move down past the soldiers and was with the family outside their
former home. One woman was sobbing and I put my arms around her.
When I began to cry too, she put her arms around me. A weeping girl
joined us and we both encircled her with our arms. I later learned
that this was 14-year-old Lena and this house had once been hers.
Then suddenly, gunshots rang out. Some of the young Palestinian men
had begun throwing stones-- from a very great distance, I note-- and
Israeli soldiers retaliated by opening fire and running up the hill
after them. The soldiers were shooting as they ran, setting of their
guns like the wild west. I saw the commander and told him that this
was illegal, a clear violation of the “open fire regulations” of the
Israeli army, which stipulate that a soldier’s life be in danger
before he opens fire. I demanded repeatedly that he tell the
soldiers to stop. The commander shrugged and didn’t bother
answering. After 10 minutes or so, the shooting stopped. Amazingly,
no “stray” bullets had hit any of our group, although the
Palestinians, as usual, were not as lucky. A man approached the
crowd of neighbors, said a few words, and instantly two women let
out piercing shrieks and tore up the hill, running at top speed. The
son of one of them had been hit by a bullet. I don’t know his
condition. Already in the hospital was Arabiyeh, the mother of the
family, who had been violently struck by soldiers when she tried to
prevent them from destroying her home.
By then there was
nothing to do but sift through the rubble. I picked through the
rocks and talked to Jeff Halper, who is organizing the program to
“adopt” Palestinian families whose homes are slated for demolition.
Jeff had sat in the living room of this home last week, now a pile
of jagged concrete slabs, hearing Salim and Arabiyeh talk about the
problem of Palestinians not being issued construction permits. “Just
last night,” Salim told Jeff during the demolition, “friends and
family had sat in this home watching the World Cup soccer game.” Now
there are six children without T.V., toys, books, diapers, bottles,
or a place to lay their heads. Instead, they remain with the trauma
of the Israeli bulldozer turning their home and security into a
bottomless pit of hatred for this occupation and the people who
carry it out.
I looked up and, for
the first time that afternoon, noticed the scenery around us. On a
nearby mountain were the classrooms and amphitheater of the Mount
Scopus campus of Hebrew University. Had they looked out their
classroom window, the students studying ethics and justice could
have had a clear view of the scene of brute power and the trampling
of this family’s lives. And surrounding everything, on mountains and
hilltops to our left, right, and center, were the bright orange
rooftops of the settler homes in the Occupied Territories. The
settlers have no problem whatsoever in getting construction permits.
And no one would dare uproot their olive trees, waste their water,
harm their homes, or turn their children out into the streets.
A lot of us picked up
olive branches from the yard as we walked back to the buses. Most of
the branches, like mine, were crushed by the treads of power run
amuck.
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