A few weeks ago, I joined the Holy Land Trust for the day, rebuilding a home that has twice already been demolished by the Israeli army, and which will very likely again be knocked down. There are about 65 other homes and a mosque slated for demolition in this West Bank village near Bethlehem.

The village land has been repeatedly down-sized, from 1948, 1967, and subsequent years on until now. After the formation of Israel in ’48, about 10% of the original village and land remained. After the 1967 land-grab, half of the re-drawn ’48 village left. In the ‘70s, Israel began limiting building permits for villagers. Without permits, the houses became “illegally-built” and, thus, “demolishable”. In 1981, Israel decided to annex the village into Jerusalem municipality—as “Israeli public land’’—but not to provide services or rights of Jerusalem residents, giving village residents orange (West Bank), not blue (Jerusalem) ID cards.

Along with absence of services, these West Bank IDs ensure that residents cannot travel to Jerusalem to work as labourers, as they used to. Even applying for a special Israel work permit entails the workers must be over 40. Thus, men in the key, family-building and sustaining ages of pre-40 have no work, little land, no prospects. The high rate of unemployment has caused many to leave for other countries. The settlements which surround the village continue to expand and eat West Bank land and resources.

After the first demolition—unannounced and sudden, in the early hours of a January winter morning—Seham, her husband and children lived in a tent for 2 months in the winter chill. The reason for the sudden demolition: the house did not have a permit.

So when the family set out to re-build the home, at their own expense, they first sought the Israeli-required building permit. This is in the West Bank and is an Israeli law imposed in the 70s and which renders it nearly impossible for Palestinians to build, as the golden permits are nearly impossible to attain. Having paid the necessary fees for the permit, they were then refused. So, they rebuilt anyway.

At the end of the year, again in winter, the second demolition came.

Now, in danger of a 3rd demolition, the family has chosen to yet again rebuild. What else can they do? The permit is unattainable, particularly now that the Apartheid Wall is scheduled to cut across a corner of the space where the house stands, and they need a home.

Their strength and determination to re-build time and again, to resist land-grab and Occupation policies with dignity, inspires and impresses.

“Imagine sleeping in your home and someone knocks on your door telling you to get out of your house, that it will be demolished.”

I can’t imagine this. Most of us can’t. Yet Israel has honed and normalized this procedure, along with every aspect of the Occupation, rendering it common, inevitable, normal.

There is nothing normal about the Occupation injustices, about a family twice losing their home during winter months, about Israel’s harassment of Palestinians in the long-term aims of stealing every dunum of land that hasn’t been divided, labeled, and acquired by the Israeli machine already.

This family and this village are each one example of a wide-spread phenomenon across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian areas continually dissolving into Israeli illegal ownership, boundaries being re-drawn before the next so-called peace negotiations to ignore ’67 (let alone ’48) borders.