Jeff Halper

Jeff Halper
Born	1946 Minnesota
Residence	Israel
Nationality	United States/Israel (dual nationality)
Education	Macalester College (BA); University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee (Ph.D) in Anthropology
Occupation	Anthropologist, Director of Israeli NGO
Known for	Co-founder and Director of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Spouse(s)	Shoshana Halper
Children	Efrat, Yishai, Yair
Website
ICAHD website

Jeff Halper (born 1946) is an anthropologist, author, lecturer, political activist, and co-founder and Director 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 in the Occupied Territories and to organize Israelis, Palestinians and international volunteers to jointly rebuild demolished Palestinian homes -- although ICAHD considers its resistance to house demolitions as a vehicle for exposing how the Israeli Occupation works and ultimately to end it. He has created a new mode of Israeli peace activity based on nonviolent direct action, civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories and international advocacy. Halper was nominated, together with the Palestinian intellectual/activist Ghassan Andoni, for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee 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 has written several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is a frequent writer and speaker about Israeli politics, focusing mainly on nonviolent strategies to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Early career

Halper grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, and became involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s.

Halper served as an adjunct lecturer in anthropology at the University of Haifa and Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, most of his academic career spent in Friends World College, where he directed the Middle East Center in Jerusalem. When FWC merged with Long Island University in 1991, Halper became the Director of its international academic operations, where he earned the rank of Associate Professor. 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, 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 government policy of demolishing Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories. According to ICAHD, since 1967 more than 18,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories have been destroyed by the Israeli military or civil authorities. According to Halper, 5% of home demolitions have to do with security. Some of the demolished homes are on Palestinian private property. Halper says 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, rather than security for Israeli citizens.

As ICAHD's Coordinating Director, Halper has organized and led direct action against Israeli policies. He has faced bulldozers in front of Palestinian homes. He organizes Palestinians, and internationals to help rebuild demolished Palestinian homes. On April 3, 2008, Halper was arrested for the eighth time while protesting the bulldozing of a home in a Palestinian neighborhood.

Typically, ICAHD will get a call 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. ICAHD works in coalition with a wide range of Israeli left-wing 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.

Halper was a "member of the support committee" for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

Published books

• "Obstacles to Peace: A Reframing of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", ICAHD (Fourth Edition, 2009), ISBN 978-965-90626-1-4
• An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, Pluto Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7453-2226-1
• Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century, Westview, 1991, ISBN 978-0-8133-7855-8
• The Falashas: An Analysis of Their History, Religion and Transitional Society, University of Minnesota, 1966

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
• "'We've gone way beyond Apartheid'". Al Jazeera. 2 May 2012. 

See also

• House Demolitions in the West Bank
• Aqabah

External links

• ICAHD website
• ICAHD-USA website
• VIDEO Jeff Halper talks on Israeli - Palestinian relations on ABC FORA
• video interview with Jeff Halper