Background: Of all the emails I ever wrote, I think this one was most circulated, reprinted, and translated into other languages. Many people have told me that it woke them up to the tragedy of the Palestinian people and induced others to join us in our efforts.
Yesterday was a day I won’t ever forget. Neither will Salim and Arabiyeh Shawamreh, their daughter Lena, or their five other children.
Bat Shalom, a feminist peace organization that works toward a just peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, was part of a joint Israeli-Palestinian protest against the demolition of Palestinian homes. The idea was to set up a protest tent on the site of a demolition to offer solidarity, document the destruction, and provide compassionate listening to family members. We planned to move this tent from site to site, wherever the Israeli army used its bulldozers. That day we planned to inaugurate the tent 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 Israeli peace movements, all partners in a coalition called the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and our demonstration was to be held jointly with several Palestinian human rights organizations.
Through the bus microphone, we heard Meir Margalit describe 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 into the Occupied Territories 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. We turned toward Anata, a town on the edge of Jerusalem composed almost entirely of Palestinian refugees who had fled there from the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1967 war.
After what seemed an interminable drive through the narrow streets of Anata, we finally located the area and 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 a 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. Our small group surged down the hill until soldiers blocked our progress with their guns and bodies. There were scuffles trying to get past them, but more soldiers joined the barricade. One member of our group, Israeli parliament member Naomi Chazan, demanded to see the order proclaiming the site a “closed military zone”, and after several long minutes the officer complied. No one 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, watching with an unbearable sense of helplessness as the “civil” administration’s bulldozer took the house apart wall by wall. The driver plowed 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, crashing his shovel against the walls. Finally he lifted off the roof, barely suspended, and sent it crashing below. When that was done, the bulldozer 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. The he noticed a shack in the corner of the yard and he churned over to that, his cleated treads grinding and squealing over the rubble he had to traverse. 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 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 immorality of this action?” Every single soldier, from the 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 slip past the soldiers to move down the hill to stand 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.
Suddenly gunshots rang out. Some of the young Palestinians 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, setting off their guns like the wild west. I told the commander that this was a clear violation of the “open fire regulations” of the Israeli army, which stipulate that a soldier’s life must be in danger before he opens fire. I demanded repeatedly that he order the soldiers to stop. The commander shrugged and didn’t bother answering.
The shooting stopped after 10 minutes or so. Amazingly, no “stray” bullets 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 at top speed. A bullet had hit one of their sons. I don’t know his condition, but 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 with 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 the previous week, now a pile of jagged concrete slabs, hearing Salim and Arabiyeh agonize about the problem of Palestinians not being issued construction permits. “Just last night,” Salim had told Jeff during the demolition, “friends and family had sat in this home watching the World Cup soccer game”. Now Lena and her five siblings are without TV, 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.
For the first time, I also noticed the scenery around us. On a nearby hill were the classrooms 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 everywhere on the surrounding hills were the bright orange rooftops of the homes of Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories. The settlers have no problem whatsoever in getting construction permits. No one would dare uproot their olive trees, waste their water, harm their homes, or turn their children out into the streets.
Our group – and more, I hope – will return to rebuild this home and carry on a new tradition of non-violent resistance that is gaining momentum. The Palestinians rebuild, the Israeli army demolishes, the Palestinians rebuild again. As one of the neighbors said, “We’ll see who lasts longer.”
Many 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.