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Beit Arabiya Peace Center: Cornerstone in Occupied Territory
"I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it. What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues. Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel. After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. It is a moral issue that the churches must address."-Mohammad Alatar, film producer of "The Ironwall" on Nov. 1, 2006 during the coordinating and strategizing meeting at BEIT ARABIYA Peace Center.
Beit Arabiya is the name of the home of the Arabiya family with seven children that has been demolished four times by the Israeli government and rebuilt four times by the efforts of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the JCHR/Jurist Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian NGO focused on legal advocacy for Palestinians in the Jerusalem area.
The home has become a meeting place for Israelis, Palestinian and International peace activists and is the cornerstone and intersecting point of Areas A, B, and C. Area A is under Palestinian authority, areas B and C are areas where Israel has control and demolishes homes.
Since 1967 over 15,000 Palestinian families in the occupied territories have been left homeless due to home demolitions. The reasons for these home demolitions is purely political: to confine the 3 million residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza into small, crowded, impoverished and disconnected enclaves.
