On October 20, I attended a presentation by Stav Adivi of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolition. He is a Major in the IDF, and is thereby the highest-ranking officer of the Israeli Armed Forces that has refused to serve in the Occupied Territories on the grounds of conscience. He describes himself as a Secular Jew and a loyal Israeli, but he finds himself at odds with the strategies and tactics of his leadership. Sound familiar?

After paying careful attention to his presentation, studying his handouts, and spending hours on the phone with two people who are more informed on the issues than I am, I have to admit that I still don't get it. Israel gets more foreign aid from this country than we give to any other nation on the planet, yet the Israeli people are not impoverished, and the leadership commits flagrant abuses of human rights as a matter of policy. What hold does that regime have over the government of this country?

Adivi stated that home demolition is only one tactic on a larger agenda of disenfranchisement, demoralization, and ghettoization of the Palestinian people, but the ICAHD has chosen to resist home demolition because the human value placed on the family homestead has a universal appeal that other culture-specific values may lack. Since 1967, 12,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished. This action is taken not with the sophisticated weapons used in Iraq and elsewhere, but rather with common bulldozers. Then the giant drills are sent in to destroy the foundation so that it will be more difficult to rebuild.

The resisters stand in the way of the bulldozers or chain themselves to the property and refuse to move. The military demolition crew arrives on about 20 minutes notice, but they must jump through a lot of beaurocratic hoops to arrest and bodily remove the resisters, so that, for example, a troop that set out to demolish six homes that day ends up demolishing only two. The family is simply left with scrap out of which they may build a lean-to for shelter and try to start over - and a bill for some $1500 for the cost of the demolition!

The bewildering part is that the Israeli people join together with the Palestinian family and their friends to do the rebuilding. On the grassroots level, the mainstream Israelis recognize the rights of the Palestinians to the property their family has owned for ten generations or more. It is only the extreme Zionists who insist, in contradiction to international treaties, that all of the land west of the Jordan River is rightfully Israel, and that Islam must not be allowed even minority rights there. How can Americans support such an extremist minority? On a purely selfish level, what's in it for us? Israel is a major broker for the lucrative arms trade, but we have to give them financial support so that they can buy the weapons that they then sell to nations that may or may not be well disposed towards the U.S.

There have been two types of criteria for selecting Palestinian homes for demolition: administrative and punitive. Administrative demolitions tend to be in sparsely settled areas where the Israeli "settlers" want to develop barriers between Palestinian residential areas and the commerce and services that the residents require to maintain education, employment, and quality of life. Punitive demolitions are undertaken against the property of those who are suspected of association with the Palestinian suicide bombers. Adivi reports that there has been a decrease in the punitive demolitions because the regime has correctly surmised that such reprisals serve to increase the attacks rather than suppress them. However, the increased strategic presence of the settlers is apparent even from a distance by the growing number of red-tiled Israeli rooftops as compared to the dark flat rooftops of Palestinian dwellings.

The isolation and marginalization of the Palestinian people is furthered by official policy called the closure system. This includes 2000 miles of highways and walls that the Palestinians are not even allowed to use; these roads run east to west and are meant to isolate Palestinian residential areas while providing mobility to the Israeli settlers. There are 400 unmanned roadblocks that consist of huge concrete blocks across exit ramps, and 69 manned checkpoints where an Israeli can drive through in less than a minute due to the color of his ID card and license plate, but where a Palestinian may spend up to six hours standing in line, undergoing searches and ID checks, etc., before being allowed through - unless there happen to be Americans or other tourists around to bear witness. Curfews are so severe that Palestinians lack access to emergency medical care at night. None of these roads, walls, or checkpoints has anything to do with maintaining a border guard. These measures are terrorist tactics that serve only to inhibit freedom of movement of Palestinians within occupied Palestine.

Israel conceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians about five weeks ago, but instead of serving to empower the movement to recognize Palestinian rights on the West Bank, this has resulted in withdrawal of active support from the Israeli left. They have accepted this move on the part of the regime as evidence of moderation and willingness to compromise even as the situation on the West Bank continues to deteriorate. ICAHD, however, continues its vigilance and asks for the support of the world community to put an end to the insidious incursion of Israeli settlers into territory that was "supposed" to belong to Palestine.

We saw lots of maps - maps of what Israel and Palestine were supposed to look like after WWII, maps from the six-day war of 1967, maps at intervals since that time, and theoretical best-of-all-possible-world maps according to the various special interests. The ideal regime map shows five small non-contiguous "cantons" that would collectively be called Palestine, all of which are totally surrounded by Israeli lands, roads, and checkpoints. The ideal U.S. administration map shows the five cantons with enough additional land so that the country at least has an unbroken border. While the ideal U.S. Democratic Party map shows the greatest area for the nation of Palestine, there is a disturbing division between a northern and a southern area that would belong to Israel. I was not surprised to find that this hypothetical strip of Israel includes Jerusalem.

Adivi discussed all of these "two-state" solutions, but he seemed to dance around what to me seems the most obvious solution. If the Zionists find it necessary to have political control over all of the West Bank, why not give it to them as long as they respect the human and property rights of the Palestinians? In what sense is Palestine a nation? They have a president and a defense force, but no border. I don't get it. Why bother? Families have hyphenated names, so why not nations? But I suppose that's another issue for another day. Adivi's plea is to end the occupation of Palestine, not only for the sake of the Palestinian people, but because an end to the occupation is in the best interest of the Israeli people, too.