Feb 16 1999

On the morning of February 13th, the team went to the Beqa'a Valley to the site of what used to be Fayez and Huda Jabber's house. We had come in order to clear away rubble so that eventually a new house could be built on the original foundation. At the site we were met by Fayez and Huda as well as Jeff Halper from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

We were joined by members of families from throughout the West Bank who have experienced house demolition first hand. Atta and Rodeina Jabber were there with their three children. Yussef and Zuhoor Al Atrash came. Salim Shawarmeh came from Anata, a village north of Jerusalem, where his house was demolished last year. And Atta brought a man named Jabrin whose house, north west of Hebron, was demolished on the same day last September that Atta's second house was bulldozed.

When the military bulldozes a house, the dozer rams at the corners until the walls collapse inward and the roof falls down flat and intact. What is left is a huge concrete slab full of hundreds of pounds of iron reinforcement bar lying on top of a mound of cinder blocks that used to be walls. Consequently, clearing the site is almost as much work as building the house in the first place because the roof must be broken into thousands of pieces in order to separate the concrete from the re-bar and so that the pieces will be small enough to be carried away by hand.

Thankfully ICAHD provided the funds to hire what people here call a "bagger" for the day. Basically a bagger is a front-end loader, except that the arm on the back has a jackhammer attached to it instead of the scoop that is more commonly seen in North America. Throughout the morning the bagger chiseled away at what used to be a roof, while we separated and stacked reusable cinder blocks from the rubble.

At 1 p.m., Fayez and Huda invited us into their newly acquired Red Cross tent for lunch. We were greeted by the aroma of two huge trays of Maq'lube, a traditional Palestinian entree. Maq'lube is really more of an event than a meal. The whole operation is orchestrated to create a party atmosphere. If you ever have the good fortune to participate in a Maq'lube dinner, don't be surprised to find yourself being hand fed a slab of chicken by your host. Every time this happens to me, no sooner have I said, "nabaatee (I'm vegetarian)" than I find the chicken replaced by a hunk of fried cauliflower or eggplant. You can't help but have fun.

When we had eaten everything but the trays on, we went back outside to find that the bagger had almost finished chewing up the roof. Now it was time for us to start throwing the basketball and bowling ball sized chunks of concrete into a pile next to the foundation. From there they will be taken away later by a bulldozer.

As the shadows lengthened, the pile of rubble on which we were standing got noticeably smaller. When we said good night to Fayez and Huda, the job wasn't completely finished, but an end was in sight. We all expected to be sore in the morning, but felt a day like that was more than worth a little muscle ache.

This was the first time that many of the families present had ever met. Before yesterday, many of them did not even know that the others existed in more than an abstract way. But now, each of them knows that there are others who share the story of waking up to find a bulldozer and a phalanx of soldiers waiting outside to demolish their house. The writer of Ecclesiastes said that a single thread is easily broken, but a cord of many strands is almost unbreakable. A community is beginning to form around this principle, around trays of Maq'lube and above a jumble of broken cinder blocks and shattered hopes; Atta even has a name for it: The Beloved Community of the Refugees of '98.