But in general, as you are saying, to raise this issue that's so difficult to raise in the mainstream American media, or even in universities. You can get fired for raising this issue.
DB: And you do.
JH: And people have been, that's right. So we're trying to go from the micro to the macro. From actually resisting demolitions on the ground, but really from there with our pictures and our maps and our analyses, to say "Why is Israel demolishing these homes? Where is it going with this whole thing?" And then bringing that analysis forward to try to mobilize the international community to finally end the occupation.
DB: Before we jump into the bigger picture, I want you to paint a little bit more of a picture of the nature of house demolition. So, what happens? Somebody shows up at your house? How's that work?
JH: Well, there are three kinds of demolitions, actually. Just briefly, you know if you think of demolition, you think well, these must be homes of terrorists. That's what Israel leads you to think, but it's not true. Of the 47,000 homes in the occupied territories that have been demolished, about 1 percent were demolished for security reasons. It has nothing to do with security or terrorism or anything like that. Those are what we call punitive demolitions. In fact, Israel demolishes most homes ... in military incursions.
For example, last summer, the summer of 2014, in the assault on Gaza, 18,000 homes were demolished, and not targeted. It's kind of collateral damage ... that have not been rebuilt. And you think, "It's the Middle East," but it can be pretty freezing in Gaza in the winter. And these homes have not been rebuilt. The third way of demolishing, that we work most on, is that Israel simply has zoned ... it uses very dry-grade, Kafkaesque mechanisms to control Palestinians.
So it zoned the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as agricultural land. So, although most of it is desert, the Aegean Desert, ... when a Palestinian who owns land comes to the Israeli authorities and says, "I want to build a home," their answer is, "Sorry, but this is agricultural land." Of course, if you want to build an Israeli settlement ... I mean there are 600,000 Israelis. They live on that same land in the occupied territory. But, of course, Israelis sit on the planning councils.
So if you want to rezone from agriculture to residential, it takes you a second. So it's really the manipulation of law and planning. And so that's the point. Palestinians since 1967, we're talking about 50 years now, have not been allowed to build new homes. You have children, and your children have children, and you have nowhere to live. And if you build a home, you are building illegally, right, because ... you don't have a building permit. And so immediately you get a demolition order from the Israeli army and they can come any time. They can come tomorrow morning, they can come next week, they can come in five years, maybe you'll win the lottery [and] they'll never come. Who knows? So even if you're living in your home, year after year, you are not living as securely, relaxed. ... Your home is not your castle.
DB: Because there always could be that knock on the door.
JH: I talked to many Palestinian women that say to me, "The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I look out the window, to see if there are bulldozers, the army, police. And if the coast is clear, I get dressed and wake up the kids and start making breakfast." That's the psychological state that Palestinians are living in.
DB: Let's talk about this book. Let's talk about how you say Israel uses the occupied territories as a training ground, a weapons and control of people training ground, which is then exported. It's sort of Israel's front line, forward trade. This concept, and these weapons, and this technology, and these techniques, are then sold to the rest of the world. Set that up for us.
JH: Over all the years of my activism, it was kind of a question that was in the back of my mind, nagging me all the time. And that was, "How does Israel get away with this?" After all, we're in the Twenty-first Century, we're well after the period of colonialism. Human rights [and] international law have entered into the public consciousness. I mean, they kind of matter to people.
Here you have a brutal occupation, on T.V. all the time. I mean, this isn't happening in the Congo or Vietnam. This is in the glare of television cameras, in the Holy Land, no less! How does Israel get away with it? And the usual explanations ... you know, AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby, and guilt over the Holocaust ... it just doesn't work. That doesn't explain why China supports Israel the way it does, and Nigeria, India.
There was some big elephant in the room that we weren't talking about, that I wasn't seeing myself, to explain that. And as I sort of looked up at Israel's place in the world, I suddenly discovered, in a way, that actually, the quid quo pro is that Israel delivers to elites all over the world. Whether you are here in the global north, (the United States or Europe), in the middle, (Brazil, India, China, Turkey, Mexico), or a poor country in the global south, you all have elites, that are struggling for control. ...
And I put this within the context of the capitalist world system. You have a neoliberal world system. OXFAM came out with a report two weeks ago. Now, 1 percent of the population controls half the resources: most of humanity has been excluded as surplus humanity. You have more and more repression, especially as resources are being extracted from poor people. And they're excluded. So there's more and more resistance. ... You had the Occupy Movement and you've got Black Lives Matter. There's more and more resistance, so that the capitalist world system, itself, and all the different elites that are dependent upon it, somehow have to start looking more and more towards repression.
In other words, capitalism always tried to have a happy face: Ronald McDonald, and Hollywood and Walt Disney. But the more people are starting to see through it, and are starting to see those inequalities ... the velvet glove over the iron fist has to come [off]. And so the elites are getting more and more insecure. But the kinds of wars they're fighting are not the wars we think of. You know, Rambo and F16s and tanks ... they're not those kinds of wars. They are what generals actually are calling, "Wars Amongst the People." ... I took that to say what that really is, which is, "War Against the People." In other words, urban warfare, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism. It's also called asymmetrical wars. There are a million terms.
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