Jeff Halper

Jeff Halper
Born	1949 Minnesota
Nationality	Israel, U.S.
Occupation(s)	professor, director of Israeli NGO
Known for	founder and Director of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Website	http://www.icahd.org/eng/

Jeff Halper (born 1949 in Minnesota) is the co-founder and Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a retired Professor of Anthropology. In 1997, Halper co-founded ICAHD to challenge and resist the Israeli policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, and to organize Israelis, Palestinians and international volunteers to jointly rebuild demolished Palestinian homes. He is credited with forging a new mode of Israeli peace activity based on nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to the Israeli Occupation authorities. Professor Halper was nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, together with the Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni, for his work "to liberate both the Palestinian and the Israeli people from the yoke of structural violence" and "to build equality between their people by recognizing and celebrating their common humanity." Halper is the author of several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is a frequent writer and speaker about Israeli politics and culture, focusing mainly on nonviolent strategies to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Academic positions

Born in Minnesota, Halper was educated in the U.S. and was involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. He immigrated to Israel in 1973 after attending rabbinical school. In Israel, Halper taught anthropology at Haifa University and Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva. He was the head of Friends World College, an international university program. His academic research has focused on the history of Jerusalem in the modern era, contemporary Israeli culture, and the Middle East conflict.

Founding of ICAHD

In 1997, Halper co-founded the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions to challenge and resist the Israeli policy of demolishing Palestinian homes and severely restricting Palestinian growth. According to ICAHD, since 1967 more than 18,000 Palestinian homes in the Palestinian Territories have been destroyed by the Israeli military or civil authorities. According to Professor Halper, 95 percent of home demolitions have nothing to do with security. All of the demolished homes are on Palestinian private property. The Israeli government will not grant permits for them to build on their own land, thus freezing and preventing the natural development of Palestinian towns and villages. Halper says the Israeli Occupation employs various means to prevent normal living conditions for the Palestinians, including land expropriation, discriminatory planning and zoning policies, restrictive granting of building permits and the demolition of Palestinian homes. The reason for this, according to Halper, is purely political: to confine more than three million residents in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza to small, impoverished and disconnected enclaves, effectively foreclosing any viable Palestinian entity and ensuring Israeli control.

As ICAHD’s Coordinating Director, Professor Halper has organized and led nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience against Israel’s occupation policies and authorities. He has put his own personal safety on the line, facing bulldozers in front of Palestinian homes and confronting Israeli soldiers. He also organizes Israelis, Palestinians, and internationals to help rebuild demolished Palestinian homes. On April 3, 2008, Professor Halper was arrested for the eighth time while nonviolently protesting the bulldozing of Shadi Hamdan's home in a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem - a house that had already been torn down once by Israeli authorities and had been rebuilt by ICAHD with a group of Israeli, Palestinian and international volunteers.

Under Halper's leadership, ICAHD uses dialogue between groups to open communication, foster reconciliation and challenge stereotypes. In acts of political resistance, ICAHD works in coalition with a wide range of Israeli human rights organizations including: Bat Shalom, Rabbis for Human Rights, Gush Shalom and the Alternative Information Center, as well as Palestinian groups such as the Land Defense Committee, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC) and Rapprochement. Typically, ICAHD will get a call at 5 a.m. from a Palestinian family telling them the bulldozers have arrived. ICAHD sends out an action alert and activists from different groups go out and engage in civil disobedience by standing up to the bulldozers. ICAHD also raises funds to rebuild these homes right where they had been before.

Matrix of control

According to Halper's analysis, Israel has set up a matrix of control - a thick web of Israeli settlements, bypass roads, and a Separation Wall guaranteed to make the occupation permanent by establishing facts on the ground. By doing so, Israeli authorities make conditions so intolerable for the Palestinians that the Palestinians will have no choice but to get up and leave. Professor Halper calls this policy "a quiet transfer" of Palestinians from the land. Halper says that Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories are illegal according to the Fourth Geneva Convention which states the status quo must be retained and unilateral actions are prohibited.

Halper identifies two stages in making the Israeli Occupation permanent: The first was establishing the facts on the ground - the settlements. Today, there are approxmiately half-a-million Israeli Jews living in the Occupied Territories. Because of the settlements and the Jewish-only roads, the Palestinians have been forced into truncated mini-states that Halper calls "prison states." The second stage began in April 2004 when the Bush Administration approved the Convergence Plan and eight settlement blocs. Halper maintains "this is just like South Africa...It is apartheid and Bush and Hillary are both willing collaborators." Responding to claims that Israel is acting in self-defense, Halper says that "Israel denies there is an occupation, so everything is reduced to terrorism. It is our job to insist upon the human rights issue, for occupied people have international law on their side."

Nobel Peace Prize nomination

For his work as Director of ICAHD, Professor Halper was nominated in 2006 for the Nobel Peace Prize. American Friends Service Committee, winner of the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian work during World War II, nominated Halper and Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni, explaining that both "have worked to liberate both the Palestinian and the Israeli people from the yoke of structural violence - symbolized most clearly by the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza," and stating further that "they have worked to build equality between their people by recognizing and celebrating their common humanity."

Upon receiving the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize nomination, Professor Halper stated:

In my view, however, the nomination is not merely of two individuals but, through them, of the critical voices they represent -- voices loud and clear in the cause of universal human rights yet only faintly heard in the corridors of power or in the mainstream media.

...

Ghassan the Palestinian and I the Israeli Jew refuse to be enemies. We are not on opposite “sides” of a conflict, but are united in our common struggle is to achieve a peace between our peoples based on human rights, international law and reconciliation – the only kind that addresses the inequalities of power and the underlying causes of the strife that pits our peoples against one another. This is what makes our message relevant and universal, for virtually every conflict in the world today arises from oppression and exploitation of one “side” by another of superior strength. As an advocate of a just peace, I consider Ghassan my partner and comrade, and am proud to be sharing this nomination with him. And I am especially proud and honored to be nominated by the AFSC. May the voices of the critical peace-makers acknowledged in this nomination be amplified.

Social activism

In addition to his work with the Israeli peace movement, Professor Halper has been active on issues of social justice within Israel. He worked as a community volunteer for ten years in Jerusalem’s inner city neighborhoods, where he was one of the founders of the Ohel social protest movement of working-class Mizrahi Jews. He served as the Chairman of the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews, having been active on the issue of Ethiopian Jewish rights and researching the community in Ethiopia in the mid-1960s.

Professor Halper also serves on the steering committee of the UN Conference on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Published books

• An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, Pluto Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0745322261

• Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century, Westview, 1991, ISBN 978-0813378558

Selected published articles

• Rethinking Israel After 60 Years, Counterpunch.org, May 15, 2008

• When the Roadmap is a One Way Street, Counterpunch.org, November 28, 2007

• Whose Road Map?, Jerusalem Post, November 7, 2007.

• A Just Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Towards an Integrated Strategy, MiddleEastWindow.com, 2005

See also

• House Demolitions in the West Bank
• Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
• Aqabah

External links

• ICAHD website
• video interview with Jeff Halper