House Demolition in Ar Tur, East Jerusalem

The large arms of the bulldozers jackknifing their way through the concrete roof of the Abassi home drowned out all other sounds in the area, as plumes of dust spewed into the air under the blazing sun. We stood on a hill just above the scene, along with a handful of international aid workers, students, and reporters, but all we could do is watch. The order to demolish the home had come down that morning despite last minute appeals from the family’s lawyer for a stay on the order.

Audrey, one of my fellow EAs, had seen the bulldozers driving down the street outside her bedroom window and informed the rest of us of what was underway. The house, it turned out, was located just behind the Augusta Victoria complex on the Mount of Olives where we are staying. The family had built their home there two years ago without the necessary permits from the Israeli authorities who control the Eastern Palestinian part of Jerusalem. They moved there because they had been displaced by Israeli settlers from their home in nearby Silwan, the neighborhood I mentioned in an earlier blog. And it is very difficult for Palestinians to get permission to build in East Jerusalem, or even to add additions to existing structures. We have heard figures in the realm of less than five percent getting permission to build. Thus, many families, faced with few desirable alternatives, build without permits and are subject to a similar fate. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) reports that over 18,000 homes have been demolished over the years.

Before the demolition began, the family and a team of yellow-vested workers began removing the family’s belongings, and a small skirmish erupted after one of the workers scratched a piece of furniture as they carried it out. The family was then detained and escorted to another part of the property, while the children were moved to the neighbor’s house but not spared from the sights and sounds of it all, as they watched through the slats of the neighbor’s balcony railing.

There are seven people in the family including three children, of which the youngest, a girl, is 7. As they watched their home slowly dissolve into twisted metal and rubble, I thought of this popular reality show in the U.S. called “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” where impoverished and hard luck families are given new homes. I have to admit, it is a warm feeling to see a family being given a second chance with a new home, but I never imagined what it would be like to witness the other extreme. It was awful.

We approached a soldier to ask what he thought and, in his broken English, used the analogy of driving a car without a license. Despite the obvious flaws in his reasoning, it was clear that there is a legal aspect behind the destruction, a misuse of laws and bureaucracies to force people from their lands and homes.

After about an hour, it was all done. The house was gone and the family left homeless. All we could do was walk away, sweaty, speechless, and sad.

To learn more about ICAHD, go to their website at http://www.icahd.org/eng/

Planting Olive Trees

We set off for Dey Istra last Friday to help a group of four Palestinian families plant olive trees to replace the ones that had been uprooted by settlers from the surrounding hills. We were there with an activist peace group from Israel called Rabbis for Human Rights. The Rabbis are known for their support of Palestinian villagers, particularly farmers, and have been on many excursions such as this, both as extra farm hands and a protective presence. That day there was only one Rabbi but seven Israeli volunteers.

After walking about 2 miles through winding trails in the picturesque valley of Dey Istra, we arrived at our destination where around fifty trees wrapped in plastic covering were waiting for us. The local farmers dug the holes with basic tools, as we unwrapped the plants and sank them into the inhospitable ground. The searing heat made the task rather arduous for those who have yet to acclimate to the weather, but our guests were happy to appease our thirst with fresh water and juice. And after we finished, we were given a picnic under the shade of an established olive tree. We ate pita and humus and shared sweet, black tea that was brewed over an open fire. We observed Israelis and Palestinians working together, each with grace and good humor (a side of the conflict you do not see in the international news).

We shared openly with the Israelis about their concerns for the effects of the occupation for all parties. “If you want a decent world, you have to do something to bring it about,” said Hillel, an American born Israeli, as we inquired about what led him to get involved. Yehoshua (Joshua), who fled Germany at the age of 6 in 1937, said his friends ask why get involved? He said thoughtfully, “I am not a religious man, but someday I’m going to have to answer the question what have you done to help, and I’ll be able to answer…I did my part.”

To learn more about the Rabbis for Human Rights, visit their website at http://rhr.israel.net/

Archeology in Jerusalem: Uncovering the Past or Rewriting the Future?

Silwan is a Palestinian neighborhood just a stones throw from the Old City with clear views of the al-Aqsa mosque. It is also the home of 5000 years of history binding together the varied stories of different nations and peoples. And it is the home of the original Jerusalem, which in Biblical history is the place where King David built his capital 3,000 years ago. Today, however, it is the home of a new story: one of archeology in the name of politics and dispossession. But this isn’t a story you will hear from the “official” tours run by Elad, a right-wing settler organization that has slowly taken control of Silwan over the past twenty years. As is often the case in Israel, you have to seek out alternative sources of information to find out what is really happening. Our alternative source was aptly named the alternative archeology tour (you can visit them at http://www.alt-arch.org/), which was conducted by Rafi Greenberg, a professor of Archeology at Tel Aviv University.

We began at the City of David Visitors Center (run by Elad) where there has been much excitement and conjecture over whether the structure below the Center was once the Palace of King David, something that has been accepted by many as fact even though it has yet to pass the muster of archeological standards for such determinations. Professor Greenberg basically painted a picture of archeology at this site as focused solely on confirming what is written in the bible, with little to no interest in the history of the everyday people of that or previous periods, something of great value for understanding cultural life in ancient Jerusalem--not to mention the thousands of years before the Biblical story of David. This lack of interest in the histories of the people and cultures that lie beneath Silwan mirror a lack of interest in the people living there today, which professor Greenberg would argue is based on motivations for the future make up of greater Jerusalem.
To apply for a National Geographic grant, professor Greenberg told us an archeologist must answer the following questions on page 13 (the ethics page) of the grant proposal: how does your project affect the community? What are you doing to mitigate that effect? Have local people been involved in the decisions that will affect their environment? How will you leave the site after completing the excavation? Of course, if you answer these questions in the negative, your grant proposal will most certainly be rejected. Yet, that is what is happening in Silwan. People’s homes are being damaged because of excavations being done under them, while others are in danger of losing their homes to make room for future excavation sites and even a proposed “archeological park."

The politicization of archeology in Silwan is all done with the complicity of the Israeli government at the urging of Elad. The Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), for example, once in opposition to handing over archeological sites to settlers because of their intentions to build over them, is now Elad’s subcontractor. And although archeology is one of the main tools by which to get Palestinians to leave their homes, it is not the only means. Settlers have been using legal, buying homes for millions of dollars, quasi-legal, absentee landlord laws, and illegal means, forged documents and the like, to make room for the ever growing number of settlers living in Silwan.

Even though one could argue that most of this is technically legal according to Israeli law, where does it leave the village of Palestinians and the greater Israeli public at the end of the day? For the two weeks I have been here, the story is one of settlers wedging their way into Palestinian villages and towns in East Jerusalem and the West Bank with very little noise from Israelis, although there are a growing number of people and organizations that are speaking out. And the Israeli government remains complicit if not altogether supportive of these settlement expansions, which have been roundly rejected by the International community. Yet they continue to grow, while the peace process continues to shrink.

(The house on the top has been demolished to make room for the "archeological park," and the one on the bottom is one of many that belongs to settlers)

To get a more detailed picture of the politics of archeology in Jerusalem, please read Professor Greenberg’s article, “Contested Sites,” and for more information about Elad, go to this article in the Guardian.

The First Annual Palestine Festival of Literature

A lot of the entries for this blog will show the humanitarian effects of the occupation, disheartening realities to be sure, but I also wanted to include the positive things people are doing to cope with their situation and to rise above it. That said, last week, from May 7-11, there were a series of readings and lectures as part of the first annual Palestine Literature Festival.

It can be difficult for Palestinians to maintain a cultural life under occupation, with its curfews and incursions, and authors and artists must make extraordinary efforts to keep the lines of communication with the outside world open. The Festival was part of that effort, inspired by the call of Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.”

I attended the closing ceremony held at the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian author who was recently awarded the Orwell prize for his book “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,” started the evening with a reading from that work describing a walk along the Galilee before the occupation. Then the guest authors from around the world, who had spent the week traveling around the West Bank, read from works that inspired them and related to the conflict today. Irish novelist, Roddy Doyle, read from the opening of Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” and Pankaj Mishra, an Indian author and essayist, read from James Baldwin’s reflections on force during the Vietnam War. Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian American Poet, choose a different track and gave us a glimpse of the people she met during her stay by reading from her diary—it was mostly in Arabic with some lines in English, “last year we had a barbeque there, now the wall.”

The evening also included several performances by “Yasmeen” a group of musicians from the Edward Said National Conservatory, although they had to change their program a bit because two of their members were held up at checkpoints. I guess that was part of the irony of the evening: it was a Palestine Literature Festival, but a majority of the audience was composed of internationals--the closure of checkpoints that day prohibiting more Palestinians from attending.
The final reader was a Palestinian actor from England, Khalid Abdala, who closed with a passage from an essay by professor Said. Khalid's reading, delivered with the skills of a trained actor, left a lasting and hopeful impression on me: we don’t have to be resigned to the conclusion put forth by Samuel Huntington that civilization is headed for the clash of culture. On the contrary, the rich complexities of culture contain cross currents of understanding that will help heal the wounds of yesterday and provide for a better tomorrow.

To read more about the event and the authors who participated, go to http://www.palestinelitfest.org/

The Nakba

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” which led to the displacement of more than half of historic Palestine in 1948. Yet, last week, just miles away, there was a 60th anniversary of a different sort—the celebration of 60 years of independence in Israel. In that one year, 1948, two very different stories emerged, and I got a chance to witness them these last two weeks.

The Israeli celebrations were filled with fire works and barbeques, much of what you would see in America on the 4th of July, while the Palestinians held demonstrations focused on the right to return as stated in UN resolution 194 (which is what you see on the boy’s shirts).

The demonstration started with one minute of silence in the city center of Ramallah, one of the biggest cities in the West Bank located just north of Jerusalem. There was music, marching bands, UN and Palestinian flags everywhere, and even an Arafat look alike. We then proceeded to a soccer field near the Qalandiya checkpoint, the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. At that point, the crowds let loose thousands of black balloons to represent their hope for a better future.

Unfortunately, the day ended with a standoff between a group of kids from the nearby refugee camp and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from the Qalandiya checkpoint. The boys hid behind trash cans in the middle of the road and threw rocks at the soldiers, although they fell far short from hitting anyone. The soldiers then responded with rubber bullets and sound grenades. It was a very jarring experience, but what shocked me the most wasn’t the sound of gunfire and the sight of burning tires, rather the fact that Palestinians went about their daily routine in the midst of all this: the cars continued down the road that was clogged with garbage dumpsters, and the builders across the street kept laying bricks for the shop on the corner. Fortunately, there were ambulances around and I didn’t see anyone get injured. At one point, I was really concerned for the boy who climbed a latter to place a Palestinian flag atop the “security fence” because soldiers have the authority to shoot people who attempt to climb over. To me, it seemed liked the boys were playing a game, like the make believe games I would play with cap/water guns when I was a boy, but this was not make believe; it was real.


Most of the day was peaceful, filled with nonviolent demonstrations. But, as what seems to happen all too often, the emotions involved in this conflict spill over.

If you want to learn more about the Nakba and the right of return, you can check out the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq's position paper here

About Me

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Marty Harms (I'm the one on the left), and I will be spending the next three months in Israel and Palestine as an Ecumenical Accompanier (EA). The EA program, run by the World Council of Churches, was created to support the nonviolent Israeli and Palestinian peace movements that seek an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories. As an EA, we are here to “accompany” these people both literally and figuratively, whether that be through escorting Palestinian children to school, observing checkpoints, being present at nonviolent demonstrations, or just listening to their stories. We are also here to accompany by giving them a voice to the outside world, through the blog I’m writing, or the presentations I will be giving to people, organizations, and churches when I return home.

The Programme consists of six different placements in Israel and the West Bank, each with four members from a collection of different countries around the globe, including Sweden, the U.K., Norway, and South Africa to name a few. Each person brings with them a unique background and perspective to the conflict, some are nurses, others are pastors, journalists, students, engineers, but they all have a desire to see change that translates to peace and security for both sides. I have been placed in Jerusalem along with Audrey Gray, a 74 year old retired nurse from England, Erik Persson, an economics student from Sweden, and Brigitte Siegenthaler, a pastor from Switzerland (the man in the picture is Kurt, a nurse from Norway who was on the previous Jerusalem team). The other placements are Bethlehem, Tulkarem, Yanoun, Jayyous, and Hebron.

A little more background information,

I received my bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan in 2003. After spending some time as an intern on the Hill in Washington D.C., I returned to U of M to work as the research coordinator for the Korean Studies Program at the International Institute. My focus on Korea would bring me to Seoul a year later on a scholarship to study Korean and continue my research interests there. After three years in Korea, where I did a variety of jobs from teaching English to translation work for the National Museum, I came back to Michigan where I learned more about the conflict in Israel and Palestine from my father, a Lutheran pastor who has been very active in advocacy work on the region both here and abroad. Before attending law school in the fall of 2008, I decided to get involved myself.

To learn more about the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, check out the website at http://www.eappi.org/