Jeff Halper

Infobox Person
name = Jeff Halper


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birth_date = 1949
birth_place = Minnesota
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residence = Israel
nationality = Israel, U.S.
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known_for = founder and Director of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
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occupation = retired lecturer, director of Israeli NGO
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religion = Jewish
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website = http://www.icahd.org/eng/
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Jeff Halper (born 1949 in Hibbing,Minnesota) is an Israeli-American Anthropologist, author, lecturer, political activist, and co-founder and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). 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 has created a new mode of Israeli peace activity based on nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to the Israeli Occupation authorities.cite news
url=http://icahdusa.org/about/jeff-halper
title= Dr. Jeff Halper, Coordinator
publisher= Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
location =
accessdate=2008-05-16] Dr. 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."cite press release
url= http://www.afsc.org/news/2006/nobel-nomination.htm
title= AFSC's nomination for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize: Ghassan Andoni and Jeff Halper
publisher= American Friends Service Committee
date= 2006-02-14
accessdate= 2008-05-16] 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.

Early career

Jeff Halper grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, and became involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. In 1973, he immigrated to Israel after attending rabbinical school.cite news
url=http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3149.shtml
title= American Israeli Jeff Halper arrested for the 8th time in Jerusalem
publisher= Online Journal
date = 2008-04-08
accessdate= 2008-05-19]

Halper was an outside lecturer anthropology at Haifa University and Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva. His academic research focused on the history of Jerusalem in the modern era, contemporary Israeli culture, and the Middle East conflict. In addition to teaching and research, Dr. Halper was active on issues of social justice within Israel. He worked as a community volunteer for ten years in Jerusalem’s inner city neighborhoods, and was one of the founders of "Ohel" - a social protest movement of working-class Mizrahi Jews. He served as the Chairman of the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews, having been active on issues concerning the rights of Ethiopian Jews and researching the community in Ethiopia in the mid-1960s.

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.cite news
url= http://www.afsc.org/israel-palestine/profiles-of-peace/jeff-halper.htm
title= Jeff Halper
publisher= American Friends Service Committee
date=
accessdate= 2008-05-19] According to Professor Halper, 95 percent of home demolitions have nothing to do with security. Some 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 Israel 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.cite news
url=http://www.encyclopedia.com/printable.aspx?id=1G1:139344328
title= A Conversation with Jeff Halper
publisher= Catholic New Times
date = 2005-11-20
accessdate=2008-05-19]

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 faced bulldozers in front of Palestinian homes and confronted 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.

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.

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".

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. At the same time, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes (from 1967 to 2008 approximately 18,000 homes were demolished), and prevents the Palestinians from developing land-use plans. 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."

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

elected published articles

* [http://www.counterpunch.org/halper05152008.html Rethinking Israel After 60 Years] , "Counterpunch.org", May 15, 2008
* [http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11272007.html When the Roadmap is a One Way Street] , "Counterpunch.org", November 28, 2007
* [http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/08/5095/ Whose Road Map?] , "Jerusalem Post", November 7, 2007.
* [http://middleeastwindow.com/node/947 A Just Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Towards an Integrated Strategy] , "MiddleEastWindow.com", 2005

ee also

* House Demolitions in the West Bank
* Aqabah

References

External links

* [http://www.icahd.org/eng/ ICAHD website]
* [http://www.icahdusa.org/ ICAHD-USA website]
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8849846742802382846 video interview with Jeff Halper]