Brighton Community Group funds building of 'illegal' School in Occupied Palestin

The Brighton Tubas Friendship and Solidarity Group, a community group
making links with grassroots groups in Tubas region, Palestine, is supporting the building of a school in the Jordan Valley in an area where Palestinians are prevented from building. The Jordan Valley was illegally occupied by Israel in 1967. Since then Palestinians have had 95% of their land stolen from them and in most areas are stopped from building, improving or repairing their homes by the Israeli Army.

Palestinians in Fasayil have not had a school for the last 40 years. In defiance of Israeli Army restrictions they have begun building a school with financial help from the Brighton-Tubas Region Friendship and Solidarity Group. Brighton residents visited Fasayil in April and agreed to work with the villagers on the project.

Two volunteers from Brighton will travel to Fasayil in September to help with the building work and to provide protection from reprisals and possible demolition by the Israeli army.

The Brighton-Tubas Friendship and Solidarity Group has donated £1500
towards the cost of materials towards the school, which is being built
against the explicit orders of the Israeli army, who have threatened to
destroy any new buildings built by the people of the village. This is no
idle threat, on the 8th of August buildings were demolished in five villages near Fasayil.

The villagers will be building the school with brick made of mud and clay. The aim is to minimise the cost of the building so that if the Israeli army demolishes it they can quickly rebuild again.

The Israeli military claim that these buildings are built without planning permission and so are illegal. In reality permits to build are almost never given to Palestinians, who have to negotiate a long and complicated bureaucratic maze, often for many years, before their applications are inevitably turned down.

The recent spate of house demolitions form part of a plan to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel. Palestinians are denied permission to build on the land whilst Israelis, who are encouraged to illegally settle in the valley, are given loans and subsidised housing to colonize the area.

The project aims to assist the people of Fasayil and the Jordan valley to non-violently resist repressive Israeli policies which amount to ethnic cleansing - the forceful replacement of one group by another. One member of the village council in Fasayil said in April that building a school in the village ‘will fix our community on this land. It will make it more difficult for the Israelis to force us out.’

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