This Is Our Home

By Basil Al-Adraa

When I was about nine years old, I remember seeing two monstrous orange bulldozers surrounded by Israeli military vehicles roll into my village of Tuwani. Everyone in the village climbed up onto the roofs of their homes, trying to see where the convoy would go.

In that moment, I was still a child, but I felt strong because I was with my parents and I knew that they would always protect me. I felt even stronger seeing the faces of the other families on their rooftops. 

But I can’t lie: At that moment, I understood also that the bulldozers and the soldiers were stronger than the community and that we would not be able to stop them from what they were going to do. The mothers were praying and everyone was waiting, wondering: What would they destroy? Whose house would be demolished? My dad turned to me and my siblings and said that the convoy was going to the mosque!! They were going to demolish the village mosque.

Minutes later, the soldiers cordoned off the mosque and expelled anyone who tried to approach the building by force. Strange workers, brought in by the army, entered the mosque. They took everything out -- the Qur’ans, shoe lockers, and the prayer rugs -- and then moved away from the building. The bulldozer approached and started demolishing the walls and the roof. In a matter of minutes, this house of God had been reduced to rubble.

The bulldozers went with the soldiers to my neighbors' house and the workers started emptying the house of all my neighbors’ belongings. Mattresses, blankets, kitchen utensils, and school bags were dumped out onto the street. The grandmothers, cursing the soldiers, approached my neighbors’ house and began to pray for the end of this injustice. This reaction of our people is present every time there is an invasion into the village until today.

Why do these soldiers do this? Do they not feel the impact of what they are doing? Don't they have homes too? Don’t some of them go to synagogue? Why did they throw my friends' school bag into the street? Why did they demolish the house and the mosque here in this village?  I’ve been asking myself these questions every week for the past 17 years. 

With the demolitions complete, the forces left the village. People gathered on the rubble and started talking to one another in hushed tones. Had the workers removed all possessions from the mosque and the house before the demolition? The people looked under the rubble to see if anything had been left behind. Later, all the men gathered near the site of the former mosque and started to pray. That night, they erected a tent for the displaced family to sleep in and stay.

This was the first demolition I saw in my life, but, unfortunately, not the last. I wish it would have been the last. For the past five years, I have been documenting and witnessing weekly demolitions in Masafer Yatta.

I remember when I was 11 years old, the men in the village started rebuilding the mosque and my friends and I helped them. It was summer, so it was hot during the day. It was also Ramadan. The adults in the village, including my father, pleaded with us not to work so hard, fearing we would become thirsty and might be tempted to break our fast. But we were so excited to do the work and help rebuild the village mosque.

In contrast to the thirty minutes it took for the bulldozers to demolish our village’s mosque, it took us 5 months to gather all the building materials and rebuild a mosque that would accommodate more than 50 people. It is easy to say that we are building illegally and the demolitions are legal but what is the real crime here: Building a house of worship or demolishing one?

Now that I’m grown, I understand that the demolition of our homes and the attacks on our community is not a legal problem. Why? Because Israel rejects 98% of the permit applications that we, as Palestinians, submit in order to build homes. Despite not having the power to vote in Israeli elections, the people still try to play by the sovereign’s rules. But as anyone who cares to examine the situation knows, the game is rigged.

I’m not a kid anymore. I understand why Israel destroys the homes in my village. The occupation carries out these demolitions in an effort to force us to leave this land and move to the nearby Palestinian city of Yatta. Their aim is to annex more of our lands and give it exclusively to the Jewish settlers. Perhaps you know some words that capture this evil process? Ethnic cleansing? Apartheid? Occupation? Settler colonialism? I have some words too. But more than words, I have a fire in my belly. We need to fight for our homes, our roads, our schools, our sheep shelters. As much as they demolish, we need to rebuild. Because this is our land. This is where we want to live. This is our home.