The sun rose on Anata, East Jerusalem, this morning to reveal Beit Arabiya, rebuilt less than four months ago, reduced to a pile of rubble during the night for the sixth time in its cyclical lifetime.
Read ICAHD’s report published on their website early this morning.
In July this year, a beautiful house rose from the rubble of the fifth demolition by Israeli authorities. It was a powerful testimony to a coming together in a summer camp of internationals from around the world, with Israelis and Palestinians, in a spirit of cooperation, solidarity and positive reconstruction. It was an act of resistance, a tangible and visible response to Israel’s institutionalised forces of destruction.
Many of us, who are linked with Beit Arabiya at all sorts of varied levels, will be outraged and bereft that Israeli authorities reckon to get away with impunity with such a gross violation of human rights. Some of us may not be totally surprised or incredulous.
It is a direct punitive assault on a determined Palestinian couple and an organisation who have consistently stood up to the disgraceful policy of demolitions of Palestinian homes and whose resistance has been seen and heard at the highest level in the UN and among European and US political circles. The report in June this year by UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the OPT, Professor Richard Falk, when Beit Arabiya lay demolished for the fifth time, included references to the story of Beit Arabiya. Falk had met personally with Salim Shawamreh and others from ICAHD prior to submitting the report.
It may be that with this act of aggression by Israeli authorities, so early in the life of Beit Arabiya’s latest incarnation, they are hoping to deal a decisively fatal hammer blow to ICAHD. With ICAHD’s recent presentation to the UN General Assembly and its voice increasingly heard in recent times, they may regard our small organisation as an irritant, as an insubstantial chicken whose neck the world’s fourth biggest military power has decided that it is time to wring. Well, ICAHD family, let’s work together, show some Churchillian spirit, and prove that we are “some chicken, some neck!”
Letis work to make Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh, and all others who have borne the brunt of the fallout from resistance to the Israeli iprincipalities and powersi, know that their sacrifices have not been in vain. Letis use this latest outrage, through real sacrifices of our own, to help change the dynamic of the struggle, to help build the sort of critical mass of opinion and activism which brought down the South African Apartheid system.
First action: Contact our MPs and MEPs TODAY! www.writetothem.com.
Second action: PLEASE, without money, our options for effective, timely action are limited. Please make a donation to ICAHD UK via the Donate button on this website.
(If you are not already member, please consider becoming so with a regular donation. See “Becoming a member” on this website.
Third action: Come to the Parliamentary Lobby Day for Palestine on November 28th. Jeff Halper, ICAHD Director, will be attending,meeting MPs and speaking at the public meeting in the Commons at 7p.m. that evening. So endeavour to come along and hear what he has to say so soon after the sixth demolition of Beit Arabiya.
Fourth action: social media networkers, GET NETWORKING! LIKE this page , share it, etc ((button above))! And those resistant to it, grit your teeth and take the plunge with Facebook and Twitter, or other social media! (the author of this needs to walk more that talk!). Ask a younger family member to help.
Another (non-)action, which should perhaps be the first: take a short time to get still, read the following, or a favourite verse of encouragement of yours, and stay with it a few minutes with it in a non-analytical way.
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
ICAHD UK thanks you on behalf of those on the frontline for ICAHD, in anticipation of your support – yet again, for many of you.