[ The writer’s Palestinian friend, a blind school principal, has
resisted eight years of Israeli efforts to drive his family out of
Jerusalem. Ethnic cleansing is not just the moment of violence when a
family is uprooted, or a neighborhood emptied.]
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NURREDIN AMRO’S EPIC BATTLE TO SAVE HIS HOME FROM DEMOLITION  
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Nora Lester Murad
April 24, 2023
The Markaz Review
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_ The writer’s Palestinian friend, a blind school principal, has
resisted eight years of Israeli efforts to drive his family out of
Jerusalem. Ethnic cleansing is not just the moment of violence when a
family is uprooted, or a neighborhood emptied. _

Nabiha Amro helps her daughter, Aseel, enter their home using a
ladder after Israeli authorities surrounded the house with a wall.,

 

My friend, Nurredin Amro, his extended family and their entire
neighborhood are on a list: their homes in East Jerusalem are targeted
for demolition by the Israeli authorities.

"The demolition of Palestinian homes and lives is not a humanitarian
tragedy, like an earthquake or tsunami, but a policy of apartheid in
the service of ethnic cleansing. The campaign against Nurredin is part
of a long-term, systematic, multipronged process of forced
displacement and transfer — crimes against humanity. Israeli
officials don’t hide this."

Ethnic cleansing is not just the moment of violence when a family is
uprooted, or a neighborhood emptied. As I’ve watched Nurredin
experience it, demolition is a slow, confusing, and surreal process of
breaking people — and resisting it is a tiring battle requiring
heroic levels of energy, patience and hope plus support from
justice-minded people around the world.

When I tell people Nurredin’s story, they doubt my claim that one
family could withstand such cruelty for so long and stand up against
the entire Israeli government apparatus. But Nurredin has, and so have
tens of thousands of Palestinians who with their steadfastness, their
sumud, thwart Israel’s ongoing colonial project. Their stories are
important.

 

Nurredin, Nabiha, Abed and Aseel Amro cleaning freshly picked olives.
November 2022.
I first met Nurredin in Jordan at a gathering of the Arab World Social
Innovators, a program of the New York-based Synergos Institute.
Nurredin has been recognized by Synergos, Ashoka, the British Council
and others for his trailblazing work advocating for education for
children with disabilities. Wherever Nurredin went, there was always a
crowd gathered around him laughing at his jokes. That was in 2010, the
same year that Nurredin, blind since birth, ran in the New York
Marathon.

 

I was living in Jerusalem at the time, and I became a supporter
[[link removed]] of Siraj
al-Quds School and Society for the Blind
[[link removed]],
a place for inclusive education that Nurredin founded in 2007, and
where he is the director. It was clear to anyone who visited the
school that Nurredin’s leadership and love uplifted the lives of
hundreds of Palestinian children and families, many who live in
poverty, victimized by violence and suffering multiple disabilities.

Nurredin’s heroic work on behalf of these children and families is
an example of the critical grassroots community support that helps
Palestinians in Jerusalem resist the relentless efforts of the Israeli
government to make Jerusalem unlivable for Palestinians, so they
can maintain a Jewish majority
[[link removed]] in
accordance with their municipal plans
[[link removed]].

 

Children at Sir al-Quds school. September 2013. (photo Nora Lester
Murad)
As if it weren’t enough running a Palestinian school in the very
challenging context of Israeli control over East Jerusalem, in 2015
Nurredin’s house in the as-Sawanna valley between the Old City of
Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives was partially demolished. The police
admitted to neighbors they had no permit for the demolition, and the
home was built legally. (Palestinians in East Jerusalem are often
forced to build their homes without Israeli permits because they are
so infrequently granted.)
 

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Watch here [[link removed]]  

Terrifying to imagine, police with dogs and helicopters surrounded the
neighborhood before dawn, preventing journalists and activists from
coming to the scene. Nurredin and his wife, Nabiha, were home with
their three children ages 5-12, and his brother Sharif (who is also
blind) was in the adjoining house with his wife and four children, all
under age 14. Their mother lived with them at the time. By the time
the partial demolition was over, each family was left with a room, a
kitchen, and a bathroom. Afterward, Nurredin put up a fence to protect
the house from the adjacent road. That was also demolished some months
later: Israeli officials claimed it was a cleanliness violation.

Nurredin wrote an op-ed about his experience in _The Washington Pos_t
under the title “Israel Wrecked My House And Now It Wants My
Land”
[[link removed]] in
2015. Sadly, he was right about the land.

In the years following the 2015 home demolition, many buildings on the
hill behind Nurredin’s house were demolished. When the home
inhabited by 13 members of the Tutanji family was threatened, I helped
bring international volunteers to the site to discourage the Israelis.
But the volunteers were only able to stay a short while before moving
on to show solidarity to another family — so many are at risk.

 

International solidarity activists.
I spoke to the Tutanji family as they awaited the dreaded demolition.
Their fear and anxiety were palpable as they moved back and forth
through the rooms in which their children had grown up.
 

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Watch here [[link removed]]  

After the demolition, Hoda Tutanji, matriarch of the family, vowed
never to leave the place where their home had stood, but the blaring
heat of the summer interspersed with soaking rains made it impossible
for them to stay outside, even after they stretched a flimsy tarp over
the rubble-strewn area.

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Watch here [[link removed]]  

When I saw them later, they were staying temporarily in a nearby
village, trying against the odds to find a place they could afford in
Jerusalem. They knew that if they were forced deeper into the West
Bank, they would forever lose the right to live in or even visit
Jerusalem. I suspect that that is what eventually happened to them.

Each and every time one of Nurredin’s neighbors’ homes is
demolished, he and his wife and children have to relive the trauma of
their own demolition experience. Over the years, I’ve seen the
mental health damage in the lines on their faces, the circles under
their eyes, the stoop in their gait, and mostly, in the way their
welcoming smiles feel strained. Yet they resist.
 

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Watch here [[link removed]]  

 

When in a nearby neighborhood Ashraf and Islam Fawaqa’s home
was demolished [[link removed]] in
2017, leaving baby Aya and her sisters homeless, Nurredin and I, with
other friends, held an “Iftar on the Rubble
[[link removed]].”

It brought together community members who had experienced demolition,
those at risk of home demolition, international humanitarian actors
and journalists on the site of the demolished building. Local grocery
stores and restaurants donated food, and there was plenty. When the
sun went down, we ate by the light of one spotlight that Ashraf had
rigged from his neighbors’ electricity. Nurredin’s wife, Nabiha,
was one of the speakers (Arabic [[link removed]]). It
was an uplifting event, an empowering community action in the face of
overwhelming Israeli state power. All present agreed that it was a
special night, one that replenished some of the hope that had been
hacked away by the bulldozers.

 

Islam Fawaqa holds baby Aya on the rubble of their demolished home in
the Sur Baher neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Nurredin and I tried to support families in other ways, too. We wrote
a brochure in Arabic advising families at risk of demolition about
precautions they could take to protect themselves before, during and
after a demolition. I was extremely proud of the document, which meant
it was an especially painful betrayal when international humanitarian
actors blocked its distribution. Sadly, this was only one of many
times when designated “helpers,” both international and Israeli,
used their power to block grassroots self-reliance.

What I have learned from witnessing these atrocities over the years is
that Israeli practices are designed to instil fear and undermine
families’ ability to stand up for themselves or one another. It’s
not just the sole act of demolition that causes harm. Israeli
authorities target them with scattershot tactics to force them to
leave. It seems like every week there is some new kind of harassment
from the Jerusalem Municipality or the Israeli Nature and Parks
Authority. At various times, they have destroyed Nurredin’s phone
and internet lines, followed his children to school, bulldozed the
garden, filled his front yard with building materials, dug holes in
his front yard to store the neighborhood’s garbage, and much more.
One time, Nurredin had loaned his ladder to a neighbor to pick olives.
The authorities arrested the woman and confiscated Nurredin’s ladder
— and refused to return it.

After a reprieve during the pandemic, Nurredin was surprised when the
efforts to kick him out of his house and take his land escalated
almost beyond imagination.

One of the many projects of the Jerusalem Municipality inflicted upon
Nurredin’s family under the guise of development.
In July 2022, the Jerusalem Municipality destroyed the stairs that
Nurredin and his brother used to reach the main street and built a
wall across the opening. In August they destroyed Nurredin’s front
yard as part of the “improvement” of the road alongside his house,
which has now become one-way, greatly inconveniencing the
neighborhood.

In September 2022, they built a trench across the entrance of
Nurredin’s house. Nurredin fell when he tried to cross it to get to
work, causing an injury that inhibited his work as principal of the
school and slowed his efforts to protect his house.

 

When I visited Nurredin and his family last summer on my first visit
since the pandemic, I was sad to find the strong, proud, lovely family
that I’ve known for over 10 years looking tired and without support.
Over the years, the complexities of the situation have even exhausted
Israeli and international solidarity activists, who in some cases are
pulled away by more “famous” or “urgent” cases like Sheikh
Jarrah and Massafer Yatta. It seems the Israelis have succeeded, to a
great extent, to divide Palestinian solidarity by dividing their
attacks against Palestinians into smaller projects, distracting people
from the fact that each and every attack on a Palestinian family is a
connected part of the continuing settler colonial effort. Each one of
these families, including Nurredin’s, are fighting at the frontline
of the ongoing Nakba, the Palestinian term for the catastrophe they
experience from Israel’s Zionist colonial project.

Still, despite being pulled in a million directions, Nurredin took
the time last summer to explain the whole picture to me again
[[link removed]], in hopes of getting someone, somewhere
to understand the priority of shining political light on what’s
happening to him and his neighborhood.

A few months ago, after I was back in my comfortable house in the
United States, Nurredin sent me a video showing a shocking
development. Their sunny yard had become a small, dark postage stamp,
completely surrounded by solid walls, forcing the family to climb over
just to enter and exit their home.

 

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Watch here [[link removed]]  

They keep fighting — meeting with city officials, project managers,
human rights advocates, journalists, and defending themselves in court
— but the forces pushing against them are ruthless. Nurredin’s
entire neighborhood, like others, is being chewed away. In fact, all
the homes in this short video
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I took of Nurredin’s neighborhood in April 2015 have been
demolished, except the one that is slated for demolition this month,
almost completely dismantling  the community. Each Israeli attack,
whether legal or extralegal, leaves broken rooms, rubble, and trauma
in its wake, by design making East Jerusalem unliveable for the
Palestinians under Israeli control.

The demolition of Palestinian homes and lives is not a humanitarian
tragedy, like an earthquake or tsunami, but a policy of apartheid in
the service of ethnic cleansing. The campaign against Nurredin is part
of a long-term, systematic, multipronged process of forced
displacement and transfer — crimes against humanity.

Israeli officials don’t hide this. They admit plainly they’re
planning a Jewish biblical theme park on the site of Nurredin’s
neighborhood. They put up signs just weeks ago on neighbors’ newly
demolished property saying, “This area is under the control of the
Jerusalem Municipal Government. The Nature and Parks Authority is
working to develop the garden for the benefit of the public. Danger
– renovation in progress. Entrance is forbidden.”

 

“This area is under the control of the Jerusalem Municipal
Government. The Nature and Parks Authority is working to develop the
garden for the benefit of the public. Danger – renovation in
progress. Entrance is forbidden.”
Soon afterwards, Israeli authorities put up a sign at the new parking
lot next to Nurredin’s house that was said to be an
“improvement” to the neighborhood. But for whom are these
“improvements” intended when they simultaneously expel
Palestinians? Now suddenly, a sign goes up saying the parking lot is
temporary. Might this mean that the area now designated for parking
will become the foundation of yet another exclusively Jewish
settlement? This would not be the first time Israel’s Nature and
Park’s Authority confiscates Palestinian land ostensibly for public
use, only to turn it over to right-wing Jewish settlers (see Green
Colonialism
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The recent election of Israeli leadership that has abandoned any
pretense of interest in international law or peace — and that
endorses the violent expulsion or killing of Palestinians to seize
their land — makes the prospect of asserting Palestinians’ rights
a difficult one. But Nurredin will continue to fight to stay, to
protect the house for his family and protect the land for the
Palestinian people. He, his wife, Nabiha, and their brave children
Mohammed, Abed and Aseel, are, in my opinion, one of those Palestinian
families whose leadership, commitment and personal sacrifice are what
keep the whole society together as it strains against Israeli state
violence. They do it through their heroic work supporting children
with disabilities and their families, and they do it by holding onto
Palestinian land, despite the hardships they face from the powerful
Israeli authorities.

_The author of this opinion has launched a CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN
[[link removed]] to help the Amros resist expulsion._
 

_[NORA LESTER MURAD [[link removed]] is a
writer, educator, and activist. She co-authored Rest in My Shade: A
Poem About Roots, and edited I Found Myself in Palestine: Stories of
Love and Renewal From Around the Globe (both from Interlink Books).
Her young adult novel, Ida in the Middle
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girl’s journey to belonging. It was released by Crocodile Books in
2022. She lives in Massachusetts where she organizes to expand the
teaching of Palestine in schools, among other social justice issues.
Previously she was a resident of Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, and
serves as a Policy Member at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy
Network.]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx._

_Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of
their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR._

* Israel
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* Palestinians
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* Palestine
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* apartheid
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* East Jerusalem
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* Israeli home demolitions
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* Nakba
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* The Nakba
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* peace
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* Solidarity
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* war
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