http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=37346&mador=4
A View from the Arab World
Palestinian houses, Jacob, and the road to heaven or hell
By Rami G. Khouri, Ha'aretz, Wednesday, January 6, 1999
AMMAN - There I was the other day reading an
Israeli rabbi's fascinating article on the moral
and material legacies of biblical Judah and Joseph
- the sons of Jacob - when I learned that Israeli
troops had destroyed two more Palestinian homes in
a rural area near Hebron. I was confused - more
confused than usual in this land of spiritual and
political extravagancies.The rabbi explained that
Jacob blessed his son Joseph with a double portion
of material well-being (political-military skills),
and blessed his son Judah with the kingship and the
spiritual legacy of Israel (a redemptive mission).
The rabbi concluded: "Hopefully, the newly
established Jewish state will merge both messiahs
so that a spiritual Torah can provide the proper
shape and form for science, technology, art and
politics in a peaceful world perfected under the
Kingship of God."
Wow!, I thought to myself, we should have no
problem living together peacefully with an Israeli
state and a Jewish people that seeks to perpetuate
such fine values. The Prophet Jacob, I thought, was
key to this quest for justice, peace and
coexistence. Jacob wrestled with God and had his
name changed to Israel; his encounter with God
transformed him from a selfish, materialistic
schemer to a person who trusted in God and spent
the rest of his life trying to manifest God's law
and righteousness on earth. But then I was rudely
brought back to the present reality of soldiers of
the state of Israel destroying Palestinian houses.
The television pictures were more shocking than
usual - Israeli troops firing tear gas grenades and
then bulldozing into rubble the simple, three-room
concrete home of a young Palestinian man named
Husam Abu Yaqub. He ended up bloodied and beaten
after trying unsuccessfully to protect his house,
wife and young children.
Israeli soldiers destroying Palestinian houses was
nothing new - Israeli groups have documented over
2450 Palestinian homes that Israel has destroyed
since 1967, and another nearly 300 that Israel has
sealed. This policy has made over 10,450
Palestinians homeless.
I kept pondering the images of Husam Abu Yaqub
trying to defend his family and their simple,
three-room home, alongside the image of Jacob's
(Israel's) blessings to his children. Suddenly, I
realized the cruel but powerful irony: Husam Abu
Yaqub in Arabic means the Sword of the Father of
Jacob.
It just did not make sense to me: the Children of
Jacob (Israel) were destroying the three-room home
of the Sword of the Father of Jacob. We Arabs and
Israelis share a common God, a common patriarch in
Abraham, common reverence for numerous prophets,
common attachment to this blessed land, and many
common names: Ibrahim/ Avraham/ Abraham, Yitzhaq/
Ishaq/ Isaac, Jacob/ Yaqub/ Yaakov, and many
others. In practice, however, that which we share
in common is negated by practices such as
destroying houses.
Say it again - "destroying houses" - and think
about it for a moment. The reality is far worse
than the mere words. Where in God's plans or ethics
is there moral space for such a practice? What
possible purpose other than demonic cruelty and
sheer, vindictive inhumanity could be served by the
state of Israel heartlessly destroying nearly 2,500
homes and making over 10,000 Palestinians homeless
in the past 32 years? Politically, the policy of
systematic house demolitions is not working;
legally, it is clearly against the provisions of
the Geneva conventions on the behavior of an
occupying power; emotionally, it only breeds
greater anger and almost certainly gives birth to
humiliated and desperate young Palestinians who
will seek revenge by killing Israelis. This Israeli
policy of destroying Palestinian houses is cruel,
ineffective, illegal, counter-productive, and
morally disgraceful.
What are we in the Arab world to think about Jews,
Judaism and Israel that pursue this policy of
callous house destruction? Is the Israeli House of
the Lord of Jacob to be built by stones retrieved
from the destroyed house of the Arab Sword of the
Father of Jacob? One Jacob's house built from the
rubble of another Jacob's house is not a durable
edifice at all - it is a monument of death and
double-standards, eternally haunted by its own
cold-heartedness, perpetually vulnerable to the
desperate need for revenge by those who are
brutalized and dehumanized, and forever condemned
to fear and to carrying rifles and bullet-proof
vests. Jacob's mission was to rid our world of such
menaces, not to perpetuate them.Of all the
contentious things that Israelis and Jews have done
in Palestine, the physical destruction of the homes
of Palestinians is perhaps the most monstrous and
morally egregious, especially when judged by the
noble and life-giving values of Judaism itself. I
simply cannot understand how the state of the
Jewish people - after their own terrible history of
suffering - can destroy other people's houses as a
systematic, deliberate and official policy.
I went back to reading the rabbi's article about
Joseph and Judah, and the Jewish quest for "a
peaceful world perfected under the Kingship of
God," but the words were suddenly less convincing.
I wanted to believe them, but I kept being
distracted by poor Jacob - this enigmatic man,
tribe, and nation that builds and destroys at the
same time, that preaches life while also causing
death, that takes us and itself to heaven and hell
in a single, dizzying journey.
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