Home. بيت ساحور‎

This past week has been a whirlwind of experiences and I have hardly had a spare moment to process any of it! I am now living in Beit Sahour, Palestine, home to shepherd's fields where the angels proclaimed the birth of the Saviour 2000 years ago.
I will spent the next two months volunteering at the Beit Sahour Medical Center and studying Arabic at the Bethlehem Bible College. I am here on a program called the Palestine Summer Encounter that was created through a partnership between the Holy Land Trust and the Middle East Fellowship.
I live with a beautiful Palestinian couple and their 10 month old daughter (with grandparents, nieces, cousins living right upstairs in the same building). My host Dad works in an olive wood shop carving smaller pieces, while my host mom is a 1-3rd grade teacher in Bethlehem. I have been truly welcomed into this family and I cannot be more thankful for the hospitality I have received from all the people I have met here in Palestine.

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We met with ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition on Sunday and went on a tour with them throughout East Jerusalem to witness the situation there. We wound our way from West to East Jerusalem noticing the marked change in scenery: there is a grave lack of municipal services (trash pick up, street lights, paved roads, sidewalks etc...) throughout East Jerusalem- despite the fact that its inhabitants pay the same taxes to the same municipalities as their neighbors on the West side of the city.
In addition, the Israeli government has been systematically (or rather arbitrarily) demolishing the homes of thousands of Palestinian families living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1967 . Under the current system, it virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits for their own land. Often a house will be demolished, citing that is built on an area zoned as "empty space." Once the land has been sold to an Israeli, the zoning of the area is changed to allow for building on the land. We stopped outside one demolished building that, only two years ago, housed 35 families. No alternate housing is given to these families who lose their homes. They often will stay in a tent on the site of their demolished house until they can be taken in by family.
The incredible injustice of this system is just unbelievable.

(April 14, 2008)

"Yunis Sbeih, his wife and eight children had lived in their home for four years in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Anata. This morning while Mr. Sbeih was consulting with his lawyer about a home demolition order he received four days ago, his wife called to say that bulldozers had arrived at his home....
By the time the activists arrived, the police and Israeli Army had cordoned off the house, giving the family just half an hour to remove their belongings. Then the giant jackhammer attached to the bulldozer began its ugly work, systematically destroying the fruit of decades of Sbeih family savings....
Once the house had been completely destroyed the jackhammer turned its attention to the surrounding trees, and the recently poured concrete slab that was intended for an addition to the original home....
While all this was happening the hapless family was forced to sit nearby, surrounded by soldiers and police, and watch their whole life collapse. Was this a terrorist family? Had a family member committed a heinous crime? No. The Sbeih family story is similar to thousands of other families in the Jerusalem area who are trying to build lives for themselves and their children." -Fred Schlomka (ICAHD)

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I am just blown away by the beauty and resilience of the people here. It is a very hard life under the Occupation and yet life must go on, even as the world seems to close their eyes and turn away from the reality of what is happening here.

Israel's dilemma over sick Gazans

Will anyone pay attention?

Israelis exume Palestinian graves in Yaffa, demolishing 500 buildings 17.05.08 - 16:32 Fadi Yacoub / exclusive / PNN – The Palestinian town of Jaffa on the coast inside Israeli boundaries is in serious trouble. The Municipality of Tel Aviv announced it would evict residents and destroy 500 Palestinian buildings. Bulldozing activities have also begun on what are now the ruins of graves. Corpses are being exhumed from Arab cemeteries, not just in Jaffa, but also in Jerusalem. The Israeli administration is working its policy of ethnic cleansing; there is no other way to put it. The cultural heritage of Palestine is being destroyed, along with the lives of the native inhabitants. Instead of revitalizing the buildings, they are destroying them to make way for high rises and Jewish Israeli homes, as Dr. Nazmi of the Riwaq Center has told a PNN editor. Refat Turk, a Palestinian member of the Tel Aviv Board, said, “There is a cemetery for Muslims and one is 80 acres wide, filled with agents have confiscated 40 dunums of the country and the Supreme Court ruled that those acres will go to a Jewish company to invest in building There is an illegal deal ongoing.” Palestinian Muslims and Christians are facing the same fate. He pointed out that left no difference between Muslim and Christians in the case of expropriation of land or houses. Turk said, “I will try to do everything I can in this country that calls itself a democracy. There are streets in need of rehabilitation, but the requests go unheeded. We tried at least to rename some of them, those that are in Palestinian neighborhoods, to Arabic names such as ‘Taha Hussein, Nizar Qabbani, Umm Kulthum,’ and other Arab names instead of the Jewish names for the streets and have submited requests that have been rejected by the authorities." There are demonstrations taking place to at least save the graves that are being confiscated. On Saturday from dawn until 4:00 there are “tractor shovels with big bulldozers digging up the graves and corpses and skeletons,” and protests along with it. Turk said, “No one is paying attention, we have no media covering it.” He concluded by saying, “Our lives are very difficult here.”