BY JEFF HALPER
BEER SHEVA For the past six years, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has been working on the issue of house demolitions. Every time we think: "OK, we've exhausted the subject, let's go on to other, perhaps more pressing issues", the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes returns to the centre of the conflict with a vengeance.
It happened in the Jenin refugee camp, where the indomitable drivers of the massive D-9 Caterpillar bulldozers laboured for three straight days and nights demolishing more than 300 homes in the densely packed camp, thereby becoming the heroes of the invasion. And it is happening today as Israel demolishes dozens of houses belonging to families of terrorists, a form of collective punishment that is clearly a war crime.
Why? Why do house demolitions remain at the centre of the conflict? Why have they been at the centre of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians since 1948? There are many specific reasons given: security, deterrence, punishment, self-defence, warfare, "illegal" construction, enforcement of the law and on and on. But one element remains throughout: the message.
Sharon, like his predecessors, never tires of warning that Israeli attacks on the Palestinians will continue "until they get the message". What is the message? As stated by Ariel Sharon and the others (going back some 80 years to the "Iron Wall" concept of Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion), the message is: "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent."
But the message goes even deeper, is more sinister than that. The message of the bulldozers is: "You do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and prevented your return, and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."
"Transfer" has become an acceptable topic of television talk shows. And that is why house demolitions remain so prominent, the bulldozer beside the tank because in the end this process of reoccupation is one of displacement.
The bulldozer certainly deserves to take its rightful place alongside the tank as a symbol of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians. The two deserve to be on the national flag. The tank as symbol of an Israel "fighting for its existence", and for its prowess on the battlefield. And the bulldozer for the dark underside of Israel's struggle for existence, its ongoing struggle to displace the Palestinians from the country. For Israel has always treated the Palestinians as an enemy, never as a people with collective rights and legitimate claims to the country with which it might someday live in peace.
In 1948 Israel played an active role in driving 75% of the Palestinians from the land. Over the next four or five years the bulldozer, following the tank, systematically demolished 418 Palestinian villages. Since 1967, as Israel's tanks suppress Palestinian resistance to the occupation with increasing frequency and ferocity, its bulldozers (aided by artillery and missiles) have demolished more than 9000 Palestinian homes and counting.
Even as I write this, a day after the Israeli High Court of Justice gave its consent on August 7 to demolishing houses of families of terrorists without warning or a chance to appeal to the court, houses are being bulldozed in Bethlehem and Gaza with dozens more threatened throughout the Occupied Territories. And not only there. Throughout Israel proper, in the "unrecognised villages" and Palestinian neighbourhoods of Ramle, Lod and elsewhere, houses continue to be demolished 54 years later.
Jews now live in Palestinian houses in Israel's major cities and Palestinian villages have long disappeared under the agricultural fields of kibbutzim and moshavs. Amidst this destruction 150,000 housing units have been built for the 400,000 Jews living across the 1967 border.
The bulldozer remains at the centre of the "action" for the simple reason that repression and control alone do not secure the country for those Jews whose claim excludes all others. Those with competing claims the Palestinians must be displaced if the Jews are really going to take possession, or at least confined to small islands where they cannot interfere with or challenge Israeli dominion.
But just as Israel cannot insulate itself from the occupation, so too it cannot escape the ravages of its own house demolitions policy. Fear that the displaced might yet rise again and claim their patrimony prevents Israelis from enjoying the fruits of their power.
The country has been seized by rising xenophobia and national-religious fanaticism. Polarisation characterises the relations between the right and left, Jewish and Arab citizens, Jews of European and Middle East origin, the working and middle classes, religious and secular.
Israelis are "hunkering down", increasingly isolated from the world. Young Israeli men and women are themselves brutalised as they are sent as soldiers to evict Palestinian families from their homes. Even the beauty of the land is destroyed as the authorities rush to construct ugly, sprawling suburbs and massive highways in order to "claim" the land before Palestinians creep back in.
Aesthetics, human rights, environmental concerns, education, social justice these are the finer things of life that cannot coexist with displacement and occupation.
"Fortress Israel", as we call it, is by necessity based on a culture of strength, violence and crudity.
In the final analysis, it will be the bulldozer that razes the structure that once was Israel.
[Abridged from CounterPunch <http://www.counterpunch.org>. Jeff Halper is the coordinator of ICAHD and a professor of anthropology at Ben Gurion University.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 28, 2002.
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