Home Sweet Home (Part 3) Sally Campbell
Atta Jaber is a 62 year old Palestinian farmer who looks 20 years older. Among other acts of violence, threats and property destruction his family has endured, his home has been demolished several times. As he says: “You can rebuild a house many times. It’s not the house that is damaged. Damage [is to] the heart of the children….To break a child’s heart, it’s like breaking a glass cup. It’s very hard to rebuild.” Atta was born on land held by his family for at least 700 years. Located in the south Hebron Hills, his land has now been declared by Israel’s Civil Administration to be “State Land”. The illegal (Jewish only) settlement of Kiryat Arba was built on his family land. The State of Israel and its settlers are closing in on the whole area by systematically bulldozing olive trees, rainwater reservoirs, ancient terraced hillsides, roads and homes. Young settlers are declaring “ownership” by planting and grazing their newly acquired sheep on Jaber’s land.
I recently watched Voices From the Holy Land’s featured monthly film, Al Jazeera’s “Rooted in the Land”, which shows this relentless destruction and settler cruelty, inflicted with impunity on Palestinians. It is a fascinating longitudinal film as Bruno Sorrentino & Uri Fruchtmann, the filmmakers, follow Atta Jaber’s extended family for 25 years. Also featured is Jeff Halper, an American-Israeli anthropologist and author, who founded ICAHD, the Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions. ICAHD volunteers rebuilt Jaber’s family home after its 2nd demolition. Of the over 60,000 homes destroyed by Israel since 1967, they have rebuilt 179. As Halper recounts, this is a symbolic gesture, a way of raising awareness about what ethnic cleansing looks like, and showing solidarity with Palestinians. At one point, we see Halper and other Israeli activists sleeping on the roof of Jaber’s home, using their privileged status to deter the bulldozers.
When we witness this ongoing violence of home demolition, cloaked under the ruse of removing structures built “without permits” (98% of Palestinian permit applications to build or renovate are rejected), we see that the wasteland that Israel has created in Gaza over the years, and particularly the last 16 months, is no isolated event. It is a continuation of the “matrix of control” (Halper) that Israel exerts over Palestinians in its now 77 year-old settler- colonial project.
Why, one might ask, would Israel bother to destroy these small simple shelters housing shepherds/farmers and their families, who have lived on that same land for centuries? According to one Civil Administration official in the film: “I want to crush any hope you may have. I want to take your dreams”. This theft of dreams is intended to motivate Palestinians to simply “leave”, but as we’ve seen over decades, Palestinians still carry keys to the homes from which they were displaced in the 1948 Nakba. They and their descendants transmit their dreams – of home, of freedom, of equality – down the line through their families and their culture of “sumud” (steadfastness). Palestinians of all ages also carry the weight of a trauma that is never “post”; it is ongoing.
As Halper makes clear, Zionism does not exist in a vacuum; it is an idea acutely sensitive to international politics, and it can only be successful because of Israeli impunity in the eyes of the West. Not only does the West fund the violence against Palestinians by supplying arms & equipment, mainstream media normalizes it by looking the other way (not naming genocide for example), by suggesting it’s a “conflict”, which implies a measure of equality in bargaining power, and by consistently blaming Palestinians (“terrorists”) for their suffering.
I want to write about local housing and yet I find myself pulled to the immensely more serious assault on housing/home experienced by Palestinians for all these many years since 1948.
We do need to pay attention to housing here, and to step up to care about and care for the most vulnerable among us. We have healthy communities where often small groups of volunteers give their time and expertise to create safety and stability for all who live here. In truth, we need to attend both locally and globally, and in my view, let go of what is not important. Let old grievances die. Work together. Uncluttering of the non-essential is very freeing. A global lens puts our issues in perspective.
Voices from the Holy Land offers another example of how a few dedicated people can make a big difference. They showed “Rooted in the Land” and coordinated the panel afterward. VFHL was started about 12 years ago by a small group of people in Virginia. Deeply concerned about Israel-Palestine, and recognizing they couldn’t all travel there, they decided to bring Israel- Palestine home. They offer an excellent film (free or donation) each month which viewers can register to see at their leisure, followed by a salon/panel discussion toward the end of the month, always on a Sunday at noon. Their salons feature the filmmaker and/or people knowledgeable of the film’s content and larger context, and they are great learning opportunities. VFHL is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers with no outside funding. In any given month, they may have well over 1,000 register to see their films. Their next month’s topic is Zionism, the flawed ideology that started the whole debacle in Israel-Palestine. You can find them at VFHLonlinefilmsalon@gmail.com. And “Rooted in the Land” is accessible on Youtube. Just under an hour, it is powerful, vivid, and devastatingly honest.
In the meantime, whatever your concept of home may be, let’s envision safety & security of home for everyone, and act to make that a reality.
