HOMELESS IN ANATA

Imagine leaving your house or digs or hostel in the morning then coming back later to find a pile of rubble where your dwelling was, with all your kit strewn across the road and a note left by Police to pay a fine of £3,000 to pay for the demolition.

How would you feel inside? Disbelief? Despair? Shock? Rage?

Sound like something from a horror movie or a dictatorship state? It couldn’t happen in our modern Western World could it! Imagine also that Police checkpoints stop you getting to your Jobcentre, or medical appointment, or, that if you have kids, they can’t get to school because the Police have closed the school down for the week, or your factory for a week. No freedom of movement, no right to work or live in your own house. Hassled constantly for your ID, under ‘sus’ just for being Palestinian. Impossible? Well actually it goes on all the time. In the Arab territories Israel administers.

Thousands of families in the Israeli-administered territories live in houses that are under threat of demolition. The Jerusalem City Council even has a ‘Demolitions Office’ to carry out contract demolitions on a random basis so if where you live is under a demolition order it could happen to you. Only- you don’t know when. It could happen next week, next month, next year, or tonight. You usually get a phone call at around 9 p.m. telling you to get out now with all your stuff. The Council rings you then so that if you have a telephone number of the office of a human-rights lawyer, they’ve gone home for the night and you can’t contact them till the following morning. And just in case you are waiting for the lawyer’s office to open at 8 the following morning so you can call them then, the Council-contractors arrive with their bulldozers at 6 in the morning. With a heavy Police escort armed with tear gas, pepper spray, and M16 automatic rifles. Just to ensure there’s no protest or barracking you understand.

And just in case you did manage to contact your lawyer the night before, the Council instruct the Police not to let anyone through their cordon, and the contract foreman has told his guys to keep all mobile phones switched off. The last thing the Council wants is some fast-acting lawyer arriving with a ‘Stop Demolition’ order that must be physically handed to the demolition foreman before he is then legally bound to stop the demolition of your house.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the lawyer gets through or a telephone from the Magistrate’s Court gets through. Or, you have the option of paying a hefty fine to delay the demolition. But it takes time to get together the serious money the Council demands, and often the demolition foreman won’t wait. It costs the Council around 80,000 Shekels (about £12,000) to pay the contractors to demolish the house, and if a stop order comes through and demolition does not go ahead, the Council still has to pay the fee to the plant hire company.

On top of this, the area you are living in is a virtual slum – no proper road surfaces, just badly-holed ‘roads’, no proper sanitation or rubbish collection and not much electricity and water. But across the hill there is another suburb – modern, well-lit at night, top class roads and pavements, excellent sewage system, regular refuse collection – not a scrap of litter anywhere. And yet you pay the same Council Tax as the folk on the hill but you get only a fraction of the budget spent on the estate where you live, because your Ward doesn’t get the same amount of money back in taxes as the folks on the hill. The difference? You live in an Arab suburb and they don’t.

In the UK, even though we might be down on our luck, or something sweet happened that boosted our luck today, at least we have the right to walk to the Jobcentre or Benefits Agency or Council Finance Centre. We can have access to counselling if we can’t man the day or week ahead. We can take the shortest route, to work, if we have a job, or get on a bus which will probably run that hour, and there’s a fair chance we’ll get to where we want to get to in sensible travelling time or walking or pushbike time. Our kids know that because the school is a mile away, it will take about 25 minutes on foot and the school will be open all day for lessons. If we could afford it, we could even go to a leisure centre for a swim, in clean, chlorinated water safe to bathe in. We take all of these things for granted because they are there – they happen for us.

But in another part of the ‘civilised’ world, in an apparent parliamentary democracy just like ours here in the UK, that has trading and cultural ties with the UK and the European Union, it can take the kids hours to get to school because of the detours they have to take owing to the roadblocks and flying checkpoints. Or the school is closed for ‘security’ reasons. One school in Bethlehem is run by the United Nations. But the UN school in the Bethlehem refugee camp has had to have all its classroom windows bricked up because soldiers kept on taking potshots at it for fun, With live ammunition. Or you can be detained because your papers are not in order so you can’t go to that doctor’s appointment with your pregnant partner. You or your kids could be hauled off the bus for an armed police ID and security check and made to sit on the ground for hours. And you dare eyeball that copper with as much as a flicker of protest or ‘attitude’ and they round on you with truncheons and then drag you off for ‘resisting’ arrest. They provoke and poke and prod at you and diss you to rile you and you raise your arm to deflect a jabbing arm. All they need – that’s the reaction they wanted to get from you - they pile in with clubs and beat you senseless then take you away for ‘assaulting a police officer’. And that’s for just daring to protest as they demolish your house in front of your eyes because you didn’t apply for a building permit.

And to keep troublemakers out they have built a 25-metre high security wall. Hard luck if your house is on one side and your allotment or orchard you need to feed your kids is on the other side. In Anata the Security Wall has separated the school playground from the school building. And your estate is soon to be surrounded by this Wall. As it is, residents have to queue for up to an hour or more to get off the estate in the morning, and the same to come back home at night.

A building permit costs a Palestinian Arab around 30,000 Shekels (about £4,000). And that’s just the price of applying. One of the houses here in Anata, Greater Jerusalem, has been demolished 4 times and rebuilt 4 times and is awaiting demolition for a fifth time. The first time because the Council claimed it was built illegally on land set aside for farming. (Same kind of land the houses on the hill where the non-Arabs live). So the owner, Abu Ibrahim, went to Court and showed that the land was just rocks and thistles. But the demolition went ahead anyway. So he built it again, borrowing the money to do so. (He has a wife and 4 kids to house).

This time the Council needed a different reason for demolishing the family home house so they said it was unsafe because it was built on a slope. (So are all the non-Arab houses in the estate on the hill). So Abu Ibrahim flattened the ground and rebuilt it again, and again with more borrowed money. This time they say the house could stand, but only if Abu Ibrahim could get his side of the hill fully surveyed, within a week to present the fully-surveyed hill’s plans to the Council and the necessary signatures proving he owned the land. So Abu Ibrahim got all the signatures of all his neighbours but could not possibly get a full survey of the hill to be carried out and plans drawn up showing all boundaries, sewage pipes, drains, public rights of way etc and so on, done in the timescale or afford to pay for such a huge survey. So the Council bulldozers demolished the house again.

Abu Ibrahim had the house built again and this time it went to the Supreme Court because the Council argued they didn’t need a new demolition order to pull down the same house on the same plot of land. Incredibly the Supreme Court disagreed with the Council. So then the Council pulled his house down with a fresh demolition order and he rebuilt it again.

This time the Council, now running out of reasons, said that two crucial signatures on his application were missing. When asked in Court which ones, the hapless Council official was not sure which two signatures were missing and anyway they had lost the file so Abu Ibrahim had to pay to submit a completely new housing application. That was 2 years ago and each time the Court case comes up the Council keep asking for a 6-month deferral. His case is due again in December 2006 and his house still stands, so far.


One of the houses demolished today on the Arab estate belonged to Adnan Abu Younes, a man about 65 years old with heart disease. His physical condition is such that when the demolition equipment arrived, his family removed him from the scene so as to reduce the stress. He, his wife Amal and their six children, one of whom is disabled, became the latest victims of Israel's demolition policy. The family's representative, with the help of the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights, succeeded in delaying the demolition for 30 minutes to give the family time to pay a fine of 50,000 shekels (about £7,000) to delay the demolition further. Because it had to be paid at a specific post office which happened to have a long line today, the lawyer didn't succeed to make it in the half hour.

The court allowed another half hour but word of the reprieve didn't reach the demolition site on time as the delay at the post office allowed the municipality to begin demolishing the house. Though the site commander was informed that the exorbitant fine was being arranged and would be ready shortly he refused to wait even another fifteen minutes, all it would have taken to keep a family housed. It was perhaps half destroyed when the court ruling freezing the demolition order came through, leaving the family having shelled out 50,000 Shekels (about £7,0000) and with an uninhabitable half-house. Far from the headlines in Lebanon is this, just another day in Greater Jerusalem.

Some demolitions take place during the day. The children go to school happy in the morning and come back the same day to see their Mum and Dad crying and rocking side to side with grief, staring at the family home which was there this morning, but is now a pile of rubble and twisted metal, with the furniture reduced to matchwood and valuables taken. The trauma and shock caused by house demolitions on the wives and children of the affected families is devastating because they have no access to psychological counselling or Referral Services like we have.

There is no state benefits or welfare safety net or emergency overnight accommodation or short-stay hostels for these families. Once your house is demolished the lucky ones might be taken in by relatives. But most are given a tent by the Red Cross, some rice, flour, water and other basics and are just left to man it.

So next time we think we are having a bad day, think about those Palestinian Arab families being administered by a non-Arab country that itself enjoys favoured-trading status with the same European Union we are in, and who live in constant dread of getting that phone call at night telling them to get out because the bulldozers are coming to demolish their home in 9 hours’ time.