Date/Time
Date(s) - 21 Jun 2014 until 21 Jun 2014
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
On Saturday June 21, in addition to our regular picket outside the Ecostream shop, we’ll be demonstrating additionally at the Clock Tower in central Brighton with a special demo on the theme of HOUSE DEMOLITIONS. This will be an awareness-raising event which will include distributed information, visual displays and an art installation around the issue of house demolition in Palestine.
We’ll be there from 11.30am – please join us, and circulate the information widely.
Some background to the topic:
Since the early 20th century, Zionist interests have prioritised the forced acquisition of legally-owned Palestinian land in order to assert the ‘historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine’. This self-referred mandate has been carried out to the present day in a most ruthless and brutal manner, with cynical disregard for the rule of law and the Geneva Convention of Human Rights.
Since 1967 over 25,000 homes have been demolished and 144,000 people made homeless. There are no accurate statistics for homes demolished since 1904 or since the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. However, it is known that during the Nakba nearly 600 villages and communities were ‘disappeared’ – destroyed from massacres and land clearance.
The situation of house demolitions, the acquisition of farmland, destruction of crops and the theft of underground water supplies to make way for Israeli settlements and /or national parks, has escalated exponentially to the present day. We see in 2013 a 124% increase in settlement building.
Watching your house, your family home and your belongings crushed in front of you by a giant bulldozer, in the space of half an hour, with your children and elderly parents looking on (a common occurrence among the extended Palestinian families in the occupied territories), could only be one of the most traumatising events ever to be experienced. For the young it creates lasting psychological damage.