A tale of one city, two policies: build and demolish

[Violet_Crumble]

LAST Thursday, as Jerusalem prepared for this week's celebration of the 40th anniversary of the city's "reunification" by Israeli forces, two very different articles appeared in Ha'aretz newspaper.

The more prominent of the two concerned a proposal by the council's planning committee to build three "Jewish neighbourhoods" in East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city seized by Israel in the Six-Day War of June 1967.

The other piece told how shortly before dawn last Tuesday, the council sent bulldozers and police to demolish a small house in East Jerusalem used as a rehabilitation centre for disabled Palestinian children.

"They came at four in the morning, when it was too early for us to try and get a court order to stop it," said Hani Totah, 45, the building's owner.

"When they came, some children were sleeping there. The manager said he wouldn't open the door for them so they started to break it down. The children were crying and screaming. I pushed myself to the door and said, OK, you've broken the door, so let us get the kids out. Some of them can't even walk. So we got them out and took them down the road until their parents could come for them."

The house was the second built by Mr Totah without a municipal permit on a plot of land that, he says, his family has owned for more than 300 years. The first, built in 1990, was his family home until the council demolished it two years ago. It was then rebuilt with the help of the Israeli Campaign Against House Demolitions, a mainly Jewish non-governmental organisation, and turned over to the Jerusalem Stars, a charity that teaches disabled Arab children to walk.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/a-tale-of-one-city-two-policies-build-and-demolish/2007/05/15/1178995153978.html