Barak’s Government Handling Jewish Settlers With Kid Gloves Three Months After His Election

By Neve Gordon

Unlike her eight siblings, 16-year-old Ali’a al-Halsa finally snapped. Twice the Israeli authorities had ruined her parent’s stone house, and she had remained silent. The third time she refused to keep calm, and on a desolate hillside in the middle of the Judean Desert, Ali’a kicked and scratched the police who had come to destroy her home again. For creating a nuisance and resisting arrest, she was locked up in a military jail. She spent seven days in the slammer before her lawyer managed to secure her release on bail.

The house which the Israeli authorities were so determined to destroy was a tin shack with no electricity and no running water. It consisted of just three bare rooms. This shack, however, was home to Ali’a’s large Bedouin family, whose ancestors had resided in the area ever since the beginning of the Ottoman Empire more than 400 years ago.

On July 14th the Israeli military, accompanied by police and a bulldozer, again demolished the house, neither realizing nor caring that on that very day over 200 years ago the Bastille was stormed and the great French revolution erupted. Liberty, fraternity, and equality were surely not on their minds.

Since 1967, Israel has reduced to rubble some 6,000 Palestinian houses in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. Over 500 of these houses have been destroyed following the signing of the Oslo peace accords in September 1993.

According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the motivation for demolishing Palestinian houses is purely political. Committee chairman Prof. Jeff Halper of Ben-Gurion University maintains that although an elaborate system of housing regulations, laws, and procedures has been employed to give the policy a legal justification, the real purpose “is to confine the two million residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to small, crowded, impoverished, and disconnected bantustans.”

This strategy is used to foreclose the possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian entity. It is employed to ensure Israeli control even after the Palestinians have achieved some form of internal autonomy.

One might have thought that with the change from a Likud government openly opposed to a land-for-peace agreement with the Palestinians to a government which has promised to resume the peace process, Ali’a’s home would have been safe. Its demolition, however, was no random incident.

On Aug. 11, two additional houses were destroyed just outside Jerusalem, in a small village called Wallaja, leaving yet another 11 people homeless. A few days later I visited the families, who had moved into tents. I was told that in their village alone 40 houses have been designated for destruction, while a total of 4,000 demolition orders remain outstanding in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The orders for demolitions are signed by Interior Minister Nathan Sharansky. This is the same Sharansky who became famous while spending a number of years in a Soviet prison cell.

Sharansky’s former accomplishments and reputation as a freedom fighter have not stopped him from destroying Palestinian houses for the simple reason that his moral judgments are based upon a two-tiered system, one morality for Jews, another for non-Jews.

But it is unfair to place the blame entirely on Sharansky’s shoulders. After all, Prime Minister Ehud Barak is the one who, since his election in June, has not ceased speaking about the importance of a true and meaningful peace. Words, apparently, are one thing and deeds are another.

During this period Barak has not only failed to stop the demolitions, but also has done nothing about the 37 illegal Jewish settlements that have recently been established in the West Bank. Jews confiscating Palestinian land, ruining fields, and violating numerous laws are handled with kid gloves, while a Bedouin family building a tin shack in the Judean desert is handled with an iron fist.

Given this treatment it is not hard to understand why Ali’a snapped. Her sense of justice merely echoes the teachings of the prophets who once wandered through the desert that she calls home.

Neve Gordon writes from Jerusalem and can be reached at <ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il>. His book, Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel, is available from the AET Book Club.