Rebuilding Peace by hammering the Occupied Territories

A Jerusalem-based NGO plans to rebuild every Palestinian home demolished this past year, 300 in all. (Over the past 40 decades, some 18,000 West Bank and East Jerusalem homes were razed.)

To mark 40 years of Occupation, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) launches a campaign to rebuild every Palestinian home demolished by Israel in the Occupied Territories in a year – some 300 homes. With funding from Jewish donors appalled by the Israeli government’s house demolition policy, ICAHD mounts this challenge to Israel’s Occupation, intensifying a 10-year struggle against the Occupation’s most cruel expression, the demolition of Palestinian homes – 18,000 in the Occupied Territories since 1967 – part of a larger Israeli policy of transfer and dispossession.

The Action: On Monday June 11, at 10 a.m., the group will meet at the Jaffa Gate, and join residents of the Mughrabi Quarter to mark the first act of the Occupation: the demolition, on the night of June 11, 1967, of their entire neighborhood, in order to create an open plaza in front of the Western Wall. Reconstruction work will start in Silwan village nearby.

Background: On the night of June 11, 1967, as the Six Day War was drawing to its close, 135 Palestinian families were roused from their beds to watch as Israeli bulldozers summarily destroyed their homes and the quarter’s two mosques. It was an operation that created the first of thousands of “facts on the ground;” it had nothing to do with either the war or security. In the course of the demolition an elderly Palestinian woman, Hajja Rasmia Tabaki, was killed when her home was demolished on top of her. She became the Occupation’s first victim.

Organizers are Shai Haim, Jeff Halper, Ashraf Abu Moch, Angela Godfrey-Goldstein. For further information, click here or email: info@icahd.org