Tragedy upon Tragedy - By the time we arrived, everything was over but the grief and the anger

By the time we arrived in Sur Bahir, a Palestinian village in the south of what is now Jerusalem, not far from Bethlehem, on Tuesday afternoon, it was calm. At the entrance to the village, in a small traffic circle where three olive trees were planted, there were rocks all over the road, the only sign of what had happened suddenly earlier that day. Everything was all over, but the grief and the anger.

At 6 a.m., some two thousand Israeli border police and special forces and others descended on the village to demolish a wing of a house that belonged to the family of a Palestinian construction worker who reportedly/allegedly went on a rampage while operating a bulldozer last July.

Three Israelis were killed and dozens injured before the bulldozer driver, Husam Taysir Dwayat, was stopped by being shot by passers-by, then finished off by a special elite mobile unit of trained sharp-shooters who ride around Jerusalem on black motorcycles with red military license plates, wearing black helmets and black jackets, and carrying black weapons slung across their chests and shoulders.

Hardly any Israelis hesitated for a second before proclaiming that this had been a terror attack. They did not think for a moment that it might have been an accident, or a mistake gone badly wrong. There was a later suggestion that the driver was drug-dependent and was having sudden withdrawal symptoms, but that is not in the mainstream media.

His family maintained -- and still do -- that Husam was innocent, that he did not intend to attack.

Nevertheless, there were immediate calls for the demolition of the family home -- a procedure that had been stopped since 2005, at least in East Jerusalem, after an IDF panel headed by Major General Udi Shani reported that punitive house demolitions affecting surviving family of alleged or accused attackers had no deterrent effect that would prevent any future terror attacks. The Shani panel "unequivocally recommended putting an end to the demolition of homes in the territories [and] the chief of staff and the defense minister both fully endorsed and adopted the recommendation", according to an article published in Haaretz last July written by Amnon Straschnov, identified as "a retired chief military advocate general and a Tel Aviv district judge".

By contrast, after a series of what were labelled as attacks by Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem last year, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, both supported the calls for punitive demolition of the homes of the alleged attacker's surviving family members.

Before the first bulldozer attack in July, a Palestinian taxi driver from the Jebal Mukaber neighborhood near Sur Bahir went into a prominent West Jerusalem religious seminary that belonged to the national religious settler movement, the Mercaz Ha Rav, and began shooting at random before being killed by two bystanders. The Palestinian and 8 students died. The home of his family, too, awaits demolition. Right-wing groups have also demanded that the surviving family members of the alleged attackers be deprived of all social benefits, and deported or exiled. Immediately after the attack on the seminary, a family house of a fugitive Palestinian militant was demolished in Bethlehem. The fugitive and three of his friends were assassinated by Israeli security forces while sitting in a car outside a bakery in Bethlehem a week or so later.

In Washington on Tuesday, in response to a question from a journalist, U.S. State Department Spokesman Robert Wood stated that "this is obviously a very difficult issue, but I´d point to what the Secretary said when she was in the region last time, that demolitions, evictions are unhelpful and that the ramifications of such actions, you know, go beyond just the individual families who are impacted by families directed – directly impacted by these actions. And we continue to raise these concerns with both the Government of Israel and the municipal officials about this. I would say, just overall ... both Israel and the Palestinians have obligations that they need to meet. And we want to make sure that both sides are not taking steps that are divisive and that are going to increase tensions in the region. I don´t think I have anything more to add to it than what I´ve just said. But it is – clearly, it´s one of those emotional issues and as I said, we´ve made our concerns known to both the Israeli Government and to the municipal government.

During her recent visit to the region, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was widely quoted as saying that demolition and eviction orders were "unhelpful". She was speaking about pending demolition and eviction orders issued against hundreds of Palestinian homes in the Silwan neighborhood just outside the walls of the Old City in East Jerusalem, to make way for what one Israeli lawyer who defends Palestinian rights called a "Jewish theme park".

Orna Kohn, senior attorney at the Haifa-based Adalah organization (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), said in an interview last year that house confiscation or demolition "is not supposed to be used as a punishment, but only as a preventive measure", according to Article 119 of the 1945 British Mandatory regulations that are still being used by Israeli authorities.

However, many hundreds – probably thousands -- of Palestinian homes, for the most part belonging to families of Palestinian accused by Israel of "terrorism", were demolished in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), during the first and second Palestinian intifadas.

Many hundreds of Palestinian homes have also been demolished in Gaza, and some 4,000 buildings were destroyed (and tens of thousands damaged) in the recent IDF Operation Cast Lead there. There has also been a report that the IDF was very pleased with the performance of unmanned D-9 bulldozers were used in the Gaza Strip during the closing days of the three-week Israeli military offensive. D-9s are huge machines built by Caterpillar and then armored by Israeli Military Industries. It was reported in 2003 that work was beginning on the development of a version that can be operated by remote control – but their use has never previously been confirmed. The article reporting this news, written by Yaakov Katz and published in the Jerusalem Post, said that it has been classified information.

Because the Shani committee had reported in 2005 "that house demolition is not effective, because it is not really working as a preventive measure", Kohen said, "it would be difficult for the military to say now it is destroying a house as a preventive measure after their own experts said it does not prevent anything".

However, over the past year, the political climate in Israel has changed markedly.

And, recently, the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak reversed the conclusions, and decided that house demolitions could, indeed, "deter" terror attacks. On that basis, Israel's Supreme Court allowed this demolition to go ahead, as a deterrent measure.

But, after the demolition today, the Jerusalem Post reported, Barak spoke about it as a punishment [emphasis added], prior to a meeting with Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair: "Today, the home of the terrorist from Sur Bahir, who was involved in the first bulldozer attack, was demolished ... The move is an important punitive measure and we must see such steps taken in the future in a much shorter time than in this case." Barak's comments were reported in a JPost story posted here.

The demolition order was handed down 30 days ago, but the family said they had no advance notice that the demolition would be carried out today. They were in the process of appealing the order in court, on the grounds that it would be collective punishment affecting innocent people. Reportedly, some 14 people live there.

By the time we arrived at the house, at the end of a road in the village, with a magnificent panoramic view across the hilly countryside covered with greenery and spring flowers, and Palestinian villages and Jewish settlements, there were boys and young men standing in a group outside in the sun. Inside a part of the house that was still intact, women were sitting in sympathy with the dead bulldozer driver's distressed mother, whose face was read and swollen from weeping.

The Border Police had, that morning, forcibly moved out some family members living in the part of the structure marked for demolition. Husam's mother fainted in the process. Husam's father was handcuffed and restrained. The soldiers and police entered every room in the entire building, and overturned chairs and emptied cupboards, cabinets, and armoires. The contents were still strewn on the floor, and a child was searching for his shoes.

A bird cage was perched in the spring sunshine, at the very top edge of the demolished part of the structure, overlooking the destroyed structure and the panoramic view. A small bird was moving around inside the cage, and singing. Other birds, flying free in the mild spring air, were also singing.

"It is the most precious, wonderful, esteemed bird", said Husam's father. "It is Husam's bird". Suddenly, the frozen defiance in his face melted, and his eyes filled with tears. He struggled to regain composure.

The door to the damaged part of the family home is shut with a welded iron bar, and a big sign with words in red letters – printed in Hebrew and hand-written in Arabic – warning against entry because the premises were uninhabitable.

Husam's father said that he was told that he is not allowed to remove the rubble, even though he fears that water will collect amidst the debris, and damage the remaining part of the house. "They told us it is now under the control of the State of Israel", he said. He also said that he feared he would be billed for the costs of the demolition, which is apparently the current Israeli practice. "We had two lawyers working on our appeal, and neither of them is worth a damn", he said bitterly.

He vowed that the entire family was prepared to move into a tent, and that they would fight the Israeli occupation.

On our way out of the village, we stopped in the traffic circle where the rocks still dotted the street. One man who had been near the scene that morning showed us the blood of a young Palestinian motorist still visible on the white stone in the center, beneath the olive tree, where he died after being shot around 10 a.m. It was apparently shortly after the house demolition took place a couple of hundred meters away.

"There were about 30 soldiers there", he said. They had apparently set up a "checkpoint" for "security procedures". But, the witness said, some were sitting in the circle, others were sitting on a wall across the street, and they were eating. Suddenly, there was a deafening outburst of Israeli shooting. "They were all shooting at once", the witness said, and the young Palestinian driver was killed. It was the first shooting death, ever, in the village, he said, and there were hundreds of bullets fired -- it was briefly a war zone.

The police said that the driver was shot while attempting to run over the Israeli soldiers (and that three of them were injured in the attack). Witnesses in the village disputed the assertion.

The body of the young man who was shot -- 20-year-old Iyad Azmi Uweisat, a cleaning worker at Hadassa Hospital, according to Maan News Agency, Mohammed Amireh according to an SMS from JMCC [the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center] -- was taken away by Israeli authorities, the witness said.

The man who had been near the scene in the morning criticized the soldiers for not shooting at the legs or arms of the driver of a car that they say threatened them. No, he said, they shot to kill. Afterwards, he said, the body of the Palestinian was roughly removed from his car, and later driven away in an Israeli vehicle (making the customary quick burial impossible). Soldiers cleared away all the bullets, he said, then they threw the left-overs and wrappings from the food they had been eating all over the ground in the traffic circle where the young Palestinian was shot. Their garbage was cleared away later by the shebab (young men), he said.