[Beerinkol]

It was said:

"Moawiya Kabha, an Arab ambulance driver on duty nearby, rushed to the scene, gathered the unconscious bleeding boy in his arms and delivered him to the hospital emergency room Sunday -- just in the nick of time.
"The doctors said one more minute and he would have lost all his blood," said Kabha, 24. "

So why then are these 'Good Arabs' (who prefer to call themselves Palestinian-Israelis. 'Israeli Arab' is a Jewish designation) so discriminated against in israeli society. For example I imclude a recent story of one family's tragedy.

Dabash Family
Sur Bahair - Jerusalem

The Dabash family patriarch, Ahmed Dabash, is in his eighties, a gentle old man with a white Kaffeyah on his head, looking every inch the proud father of four sons and an extended family of 55 people. Their family history in Sur Bahair extends back before the Ottoman Empire claimed Palestine and beyond. Five or six hundred years of continuous residence. The lore has been handed down from father to son, with tales of the great Grandfather’s exploits as a soldier in The Ottoman Army.

The village of Sur Bahair is home to 14-15,000 Palestinian Muslims and sits at the crest of a hill overlooking the valleys separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem and Beit Sahour. It is a pastoral scene of olive trees and farming plots, marred only by the lines of Israeli tanks on the opposite hills. The tanks occasionally fire shells into Beit Sahour and Bethlehem, seeking the perpetrators of real or imagined resistance to the Israeli Occupation. Usually it is the innocent who are killed or maimed. Sur Bahair is hemmed in on three sides by encroaching Israeli settlements. Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, Hermon Anatseev, Har Homa, West Talpiot and the growing suburbs of Jerusalem. A four lane highway circles one side of the village, a stark strip of concrete forging a link to Maale Adumim, the largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank, east of Jerusalem. Thus the Jerusalem Municipality is ensuring territorial contiguity for the ever-expanding Jewish presence on the land, without regard of the rights of the existing Palestinian population, and in violation of International law.

The four sons of the Dabash family are thrifty, hard working men. Ibrahim works for Israeli radio, Mohammed is an ambulance driver, Omar drives a bus for the Israeli national company, Egged, and Imad is a driving instructor. Imad is also a volunteer for the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, Mogan David Adom. Together they support their father, wives and children, a total of 55 people living in a single home of perhaps 150 meters (approx. 1,400 square feet), the size of a suburban home in the USA or Europe. Fifty-five people! Their home is immaculate; the children friendly and well behaved. Exactly the kind of decent people anyone would welcome as neighbors.

Two of the brothers, Omar and Imad, bought a small building plot in 1997 from the Abu Kaf family and spent their life savings to build a home for their two families and father. The other two brothers were to keep the original home, thus allowing all their families to live in relative comfort instead of on top of one another. Over $100,000 was invested in the new home. The family paid cash, the net result of endless years of savings and dreams, and by the beginning of June 2002 the home was being painted and almost ready to occupy. On the 11th June those dreams were smashed by the Jerusalem Municipal authorities.

At 8am, without notice, over 200 police and combat troops arrived and stationed themselves around the home and the adjacent neighborhood. Then the Caterpillar bulldozers arrived and proceeded in a short time to totally destroy the home. The work of years reduced to rubble in a few hours. The hopes of 55 people reduced to shattered dreams. And why?

Jerusalem has a policy of restricting the growth of Palestinian communities. The land use planning regulations and zoning laws have decreed that the privately owned land in and around most Palestinian villages to be green space, "for the villagers own benefit" according to Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert. However the village families must build new homes to accommodate growing families. They must build, and they do it in the traditional fashion by adding homes to the edge of the community, on their own land. If they try and apply for a building permit it will cost $20-30,000, go through a process often lasting years, and then be routinely denied. So the Dabash brothers, like many others, had gone ahead and built without a permit.

Currently the village of Sur Bahair has about 50 homes under threat of demolition with 7 houses destroyed so far this year. None of the families are offered any aid by the Jerusalem Municipality. This would be unthinkable for a Jewish family in similar circumstances. No social worker calls, no temporary shelter is offered, nothing. The family is left to their own resources.

The contrast to this situation is the adjacent Jewish settlements that are provided with spacious public areas, community facilities, subsidized synagogues, low cost housing and subsidized mortgages. Yet their encirclement of the villages is strangling the life out of Palestinian communities, reducing their daily existence to a fear of the bulldozer and the police. Even access to villages is often restricted through arbitrary closures of the winding roads that hug the hillsides and follow trails that are centuries, perhaps millennia old. Four lane highways now slice through the hills destroying the biblical landscape, and huge settlements built with no regard to the topography of the land.

The Dabash family story is repeated daily throughout East Jerusalem and the West Bank as the expansionist policies of the Israeli government continues to create the Zionist dream. A total of 10,000 homes are under threat of demolition in the Occupied Territories. 10,000 families living with little hope. 10,000 families with no future. 10,000 families with 3-400,000 dependants. What are they to do?
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We have to keep in mind that less than 1% of these demolished homes were the houses of terrorists or their families. I have visited many of them and they clearly fall under the category of 'Good Arabs'. However don't be surprised if their children become the next attacker of israeli civilians.

Imagine the American Indians, back in the pioneer days, watching their land swallowed up by hoards of European settlers. They became terrorists too, and had their culture destroyed, and confined to reservations. Is this what we truly want to do to the Palestinians? It looks that way to me.