Stop Urbicide

Israel and the destruction of Palestine

California professor: Israel's policy toward Palestine aims at destroying the fabric of their society

[8-26-02]

Fred Bush, a professor from Orange, California, spoke at the Peace Fellowship booth during G.A. in Long Beach, CA, in 2000. Witherspoon President Jane Hanna heard him there, was impressed, and is now on his e-mail list for the Justice and Peace in Israel/Palestine Group.

With a delegation from various Los Angeles justice and peace organizations, Bush recently visited Senator Diane Feinstein's LA office to urge her to end US military aid to Israel, end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, stop supporting Israeli war crimes, support Universal Human Rights, and support a just peace based on International Law and U.N. resolutions.
Bush (Fred, not George W.!) was one of the people who spoke at the demonstration. His remarks lay out accusations that Israel's current "policy" in dealing with Palestine is "urbicide" - "the deliberate and systematic destruction of the very fabric of Palestinian life and society."

For another view of this issue, you may want to check out an essay by Stephen Graham, Professor of Urban Technology at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, Great Britain, on the very interesting website, openDemocracy.

The government of the United States has declared as its policy the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. The US has accepted UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338 and 1397 as the basis for this policy, since they safeguard the rights of the Palestinians wherever they are and the security and welfare of the people of Israel. An independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, alongside the state of Israel, and a fair solution to the refugee problem, are the only means for bringing about a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.

Yet, in the recent Israeli invasions and occupation of the West Bank, perpetrated under the guise of searching for terrorists, Israel has engaged in the deliberate and systematic destruction of the very fabric of Palestinian life and society, a strategy that has been termed urbicide, the ordered and methodical destruction of the city, the modern urban home. In an article published April 24 in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz shortly after the Israeli army's invasion called "Defensive Shield," the Israeli journalist Amira Hass described this strategy as follows:

It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield. This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, or a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure.

In addition, dozens of roads have been dug up and ruined, hospitals bombed and medical equipment looted and wrecked. The Gaza airport and the Gaza ship port were systematically bombed and destroyed, together with Palestinian radio and television transmitting installations. Any cultural or bureaucratic symbol of the proto-Palestinian state has been ransacked or destroyed, most of which were paid for by millions of dollars provided by European and American governmental and private organizations. The loss is immeasurable. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country. And this process of urbicide is continuing at the present time, day after weary day. It is a policy of creating facts on the ground designed by the Sharon government that will render impossible the American government's announced policy of a viable Palestinian state.

And what makes this brutal Israeli policy of urbicide possible, despite its manifest illegality and despite efforts to call Israel to account? The answer, Senator Feinstein, is very obvious, very simple and very damning. It is the American government and, ultimately, the American Congress, namely you, Senator Feinstein and your senatorial and congressional colleagues. You refuse to see or acknowledge the patent and obvious truth of the urbicide that Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinians through your political cowardice in the face of the power and effectiveness of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee and the other American Christian and Jewish Zionist organizations in this country.

And so you continue to support the Israeli occupation and its brutal policy of urbicide by granting Israel between 3 to 4 billion dollars of the American taxpayers' money in foreign aid every year, year after year after year. Every bullet and shell that kills a Palestinian, every bomb that blows up their buildings, every helicopter gunship, F-16 fighter plane and tank that unleashes these weapons, and every bulldozer involved in destroying ordinary Palestinian homes is labeled "Made in America."

Senator Feinstein, by you and your colleagues' uncritical and cowardly financial and political support of the Israeli war machine, you are making the pitiless and unmerciful Israeli policy of urbicide possible.

We call upon you today to implement your own declared policy of the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel within the 1967 borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We urge you to do this by all the means at your disposal, especially the suspension of your morally indefensible and unjustifiable foreign aid to the state of Israel, in order to ensure that Israel ceases its destructive policy of urbicide, assassinations and gross abuses of human rights. Senator Feinstein, there will be no comprehensive, just, viable and lasting peace in the Middle East until Israel dismantles its settlements and ends its illegal occupation. To modify a phrase coined by your former successful Democratic candidate for the White House, "It's the occupation, stupid!"

The sponsors of the demonstration were: The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee - LA/OC Chapter; American Friends Service Committee - Pacific Southwest Region; Coalition for World Peace; Council on American Islamic Relations - Southern California; Fellowship of Reconciliation - LA; Friends of Sabeel - LA; International Action Center; Los Angeles Jews for a Just Peace; Middle East Fellowship of Southern California; National Lawyers Guild; Pasadena Area Coalition for a Just Palestinian-Israeli Peace; Pasadena Mennonite Church; Women in Black - LA