Examination of Witness (Questions 96-99)
11 NOVEMBER 2003
MR JEFF
HALPER
Q96 Chairman: Jeff, could you firstly,
in literally a couple of sentences, introduce yourself and, just
for the record tell us a little bit about the Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions. Who do you represent? Is it an NGO?
Is it a charity? Who are your supporters? How is it funded? Just
a bit so that other Parliamentary colleagues, when they are reading
this evidence, have some idea of where you are coming from?
Mr Halper: I am the co-ordinator
of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, because there
is a very strong Israeli component in this whole issue of development
amongst the Palestinians. We are a coalition of a large number
of Israeli peace and human rights organisations that got together
about six or seven years ago when there was a real concern that
the Oslo Peace Process was collapsing and that Israeli civil society
had to be much more involved in resisting the occupation and leading
the way towards peace and developing relations with Palestinian
civil society, something that had not been very strong up until
that time. The issue that we focused on at that time, in talking
with Palestinians, was the issue of house demolitions. Since 1967
Israel has demolished more than 11,000 Palestinian homes, so it
is very hard to talk about development and about a normal civil
society, about normal life, when people are actually denied homes.
The human tragedy—the trauma—is really incalculable,
but beyond that what we discovered over the years was that this
was really the essence of the conflict, because when you deny
someone a home and collectively you are denying them a homeland,
that is really the essence of the conflict between Israeli Jews
and Palestinians. We have to remember that most of the Palestinians
whose houses are demolished are refugees. So the message of the
demolition policy is "You cannot go home because your home,
your village, within Israel is destroyed and gone" or, if
it is in the city, "You have Israelis living in your home,
but we are also going to deny you homes and housing, the right
to live, in your place of refuge." So the message is clear;
it is: "Get out. There is no place for you whatsoever."
So for us, as Israelis, this is a very important issue, not only
on a political level, not only in terms of solidarity with the
Palestinians whose homes are demolished, but also it is a form
of resistance on our part to the occupation. In other words, we
rebuild houses that have been demolished, together with Palestinians.
In that way, it is not that the Palestinians need our acknowledgement
certainly, but that gives us an opportunity as Israelis to acknowledge
that the Palestinians are the native population, that they have
every right to live in the country, that we want them to live
together, that we refuse to be enemies and that we are, together,
resisting in every possible way this whole policy. The Committee
Against House Demolitions gets its funding both from donations—we
have worldwide campaigns—for rebuilding homes, we also get
the funding from the European Union and we have funding from other
projects, from other NGOs, such as Christian Aid, for example
and other groups. So I think it is one of the important civil
society institutions, and because we are a coalition we are able
to work a lot with other Israeli groups on all kinds of issues
like the Wall, like the closure, like the settlement issues—on
all the expressions of the occupation on the ground. If I can
just bring one sentence that a friend of mine, Salem Shawamreh,
who is a Palestinian whose house has been demolished four times
(we have just built it again for the fifth time), says: "What
is good for the Palestinians is good for Israel". I think
it is a crucial point to understand that we cannot deal with Palestinian
society—certainly under occupation—in a vacuum and
in isolation; that Israelis and Palestinians are, in some way,
Siamese twins and they both have a stake in the development of
each other's societies. I think we have to be careful, especially
in development work, not to adopt an either/or attitude—that
we are either for this side or for that side—that both sides
have the same interest in terms of development, including regional
development, not only development in a particular area.
Q97 Mr Battle: Could I ask you about
the process of demolition? Do you think there is a strategy there?
I have visited, but I wondered whether it was to make way for
roads and clear people out of the way; or whether it was for other
settlements. Is there a definite process, in your view, and has
there been significant change in the last two years?
Mr Halper: The first thing to
emphasise is that 95% or more of the demolitions have nothing
to do with terrorism, nothing to do with security issues; the
people have never been charged with any crime—in other words,
the popular conception is there is a link into terrorism and it
is a deterrent, it is a punishment or whatever. That is not the
case. In fact, Israel is claiming, and this is government policy,
somewhere around 60% of the occupied territories for itself. Israel
denies that it has an occupation at all, so it has done everything
in its power to normalise its presence, its rule over what the
Israelis call Judea, Samaria and Gaza—even taking the Palestinian
Arab names out of the equation. One interesting thing is that
because Israel presents itself as a democracy and because it wants
to normalise its rule it uses planning, zoning, administration
and laws in a very simple way in order to further its political
agenda. The British played a crucial role in this. One of the
things that Israel did—in other words, they do not demolish
a house because you are a Palestinian. No one says "You're
a Palestinian, you cannot have a home", but the basis of
demolitions is a British mandate plan from 1942 that, essentially,
zoned the entire West Bank as agricultural land, even though—you
have been there, you know—most of it is not fit for agriculture.
It was an attempt on the part of the British at that time, I think,
to preserve the landscape, to prevent urban sprawl, to ensure
that the villages are built in clusters and that agricultural
land and open land is kept free. It was not meant to be a policy
against the local population, but the Palestinian population at
that time was a quarter of what it is today. Israel came in and,
at the end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, the Israeli Supreme
Court said "We are caught in our own petard; we are a democracy,
we have laws, we cannot simply take lands from Palestinians and
give them to settlers, you have got to find a way" (it told
the army and the government ministries) "to equalise the
law, to give us a basis for administering the occupied territories."
This British plan was ideal, because it had the force of law,
it was a formal law that had never been superseded by any other
plan, and it basically froze Palestinian building in 1942. So
that until today about 70% of the West Bank is zoned as agricultural
land, and that means that even though Palestinians have title
deeds to their own properties, lands privately owned, they are
not allowed to get building permits; they are not given building
permits because it is agricultural. Of course, the point of this
whole policy is to force them into what we call today Areas A
and B—this 40% of the West Bank and into parts of Gaza—and
the same is true of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians are a third
of the population of municipal Jerusalem but only have access
to 6% of the urban land. So that is also shoving them into these
tight kind of ghettos in Jerusalem, certainly, in order to keep
the land free for Israeli settlements. So it is a very sophisticated
use of law and zoning and planning that seals the occupation,
because it allows Israel to then present itself—if I was
the Israeli ambassador I would say to you "Well, in London,
too, you need a building permit to build. You have your policies,
we have our policies, they are not discriminatory". However,
of course, the whole basis of the law and of planning is what
we call "partisan" planning, and that is to advance
the interests of one group against the interests of another group.
Q98 Mr Battle: What sometimes surprises
people who visit the Palestinian territories is the notion of
refugees and refugee camps, which is a misnomer in this context,
is it not? It is not tented cities—people actually own buildings
there and in urban areas within towns and cities. Could I ask
you this question: I have seen urban evictions before on a mass
scale, and violent evictions—Korea in 1988 before the Olympic
Games, for example—but where do Palestinians who are evicted
go? Who provides housing for them? What is the plan for those,
and who works with those that are evicted? If you are saying it
is 11,000 homes, have they just been absorbed?
Mr Halper: It is 11,000 homes
but we have to remember there are thousands of demolition orders
outstanding. Demolitions are happening all the time. Two weeks
ago 20 houses were demolished in East Jerusalem. The people are
left to fend for themselves. In other words, they are considered
the offenders because they are the ones that built without a permit.
So they are the ones that violated the law. Just to give one example
of that, we are now trying to negotiate this fifth house we have
built for the Shawamreh family to try to preserve the house and
let the family live somewhere. Because there has been such a public
outcry, including among MPs here, the Israeli authorities are
considering a negotiation. What they want to do is demolish the
home and then give the family a building permit; the idea is that
"If we allow them to continue living in the home we are destroying
respect for the law because we would be condoning building without
a building permit." So that they are criminalised. This is,
really, a point that is important in general. All of Palestinian
society is criminalised: you cannot function in Palestinian society
without lying, cheating, trying to get around all the rules. In
other words, it is impossible to develop a civil society and good
citizenship. In direct answer, what happens is the people are
left to fend for themselves, they go and live with brothers-in-law,
they go and live with parents, they live in tents—the Red
Crescent Society provides tents for a while—and basically
it creates tremendous overcrowding and very serious housing problems.
Q99 Mr Battle: You mentioned the
law and the context of the roots in the legal system. Has there
been any case at all of any evicted Palestinian, arguing a case
for, taking a case for and indeed even getting compensation for,
being evicted?
Mr Halper: Not in my experience.
The system is pretty watertight. The demolition actually goes
back not to 1967, it goes back to 1948, and of course it was a
British policy even before 1948 as well, so it goes back a long
time. Civil administration is the legal body that administers
the occupied territories. It has a whole bank of lawyers and,
essentially, they have created a corpus of law that has been approved.
The measure is "Will it pass the Supreme Court?" In
any kind of step the army and civil administration wants to take
the first thing, before it is taken, is "Would this pass
the Supreme Court?" It has all been pretty much worked out
with the Supreme Court, and the Palestinians really have no grounds
on which to appeal—they can appeal and Palestinians do appeal
because it buys them time, but they never win in court.
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