Peace Now doing the right thing

I just spent the day with Peace Now in the West Bank, and my commitment to our cause has been reinvigorated. Peace Now is the conscience of this nation. They will look into the big, dark truthful mirror and then raise it up so that the rest of society can see for itself what we look like and what we are doing.

On our tour today was Yair Oppenheimer, the head of the movement, and many activists. We went to Nokdim, the settlement where Foreign Minister Lieberman has his private residence and we saw many demolished homes in Beit Jallah. We also saw hundreds of vacationing settlers climbing the Herodyon as if greater Israel were a fact on the ground.

All in all, the trip was sad on two levels. First of all, we are constantly marginalized, and our numbers really do point to our position on the fringe of Israeli society (not fringe in terms of our positions). There were plenty of empty seats on our tour bus during Sukkot vacation throughout the country. Granted, people travel, but there are also many more of us with time off from work. We should have been a larger group.

Second, what we saw was disgusting. Usually you think of house demolitions as a kind of family punishment for a terrorist, but the houses we saw were demolished on false pretenses: they were built illegally. The problem is that many of them were built before Israel conquered the land. Even my building in Chicago has many problems grandfathered in, so it seems highly unlikely that the Jerusalem municipality was working in the best interest of all of its citizens when they decided to wreck these homes. This was simply a matter of forced, unjust, eminent domain for the benefit of Jerusalem's Jewish citizenry.



To give some proportion to this issue, a house replacement costs about 80,000 NIS, which is slightly over $20,000, less than my annual rent in Tel-Aviv, but this cost is low because the houses are built by the sweat of the families that live in them.

Anyway, I want to encourage anyone involved in Peace Now to continue the good work and anyone still undecided to tip in our direction.