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

Unsettling history post 6-Day War

At the end of the pre-emptive Six Day War, a senior legal adviser for Israel cautioned the government in writing that any new expansion or settlements would violate international law. That secret memo, long ignored, makes headlines in todays's London Independent, and Judge Theodor Meron, a holocaust survivor, still stands by his advice to the cabinet. Settlement, he concluded, would directly conflict with the Hague and Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.
The road forward for Israelis has been anything but straightforward, according to Jerusalem-based journalist Donald Macintyre's take on the past 40 years since that victory.

Unhappy Easter - thousands to stay away

The Holy Sepulcher may be a little less crowded this Easter.

Some 2000 Egyptian Christians will be denied exit visas by authorities in Cairo, thwarting their annual Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem, according to Israeli press reports today. These would-be travelers, mostly Coptic or Greek Orthodox, are further incensed because Jerusalem hotels refuse to refund their deposits, and insist that foreign Christian visitors have already reserved rooms elsewhere for high season. Egyptian Christians find themselves unwitting pawns in the row between their predominantly Muslim country and its Jewish neighbour state.

Tensions between Egypt and Israel have heightened recently during the spy trial of Mohamed Essam Ghoneim, who allegedly worked undercover for Mossad.
And a diplomatic spat over an Israeli documentary doesn't help matters much.

Shaked Spirit, which aired last week, relates how during the Six Day War, an Israeli elite unit killed 250 enemy captives. Egypt regards the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed POWS as a notorious 60s war crime. Fuming Arab politicians want to re-examine financial ties and trade with Israel after this old controversy was resurrected.

So far, there has been no perceptible change in the number of visitors to the Holy Sepulcher following another controversial documentary: the broadcast of James Cameron's 90-minute special about the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" this week. The Titanic director and the "Naked Archaeologist" Simcha Jacobovici conjectured that the remains of Jesus Christ and his family were discovered in a crypt in suburban Jerusalem, even though most archaeologists who specialize in the Near East were highly skeptical of such claims. And the docu-drama doesn't have a prayer of changing the minds of any true believers. Yet if the claims prove valid, the discovery at Talpiyot would contradict the essential Christian tenets of Resurrection and Ascension. Every spring, thousands of Christian pilgrims flock to the little chapel built atop an empty tomb at the heart of the walled city to celebrate Easter Mass. By all accounts, they are continuing to do so in droves.