Jeff Halper

Jeff Halper (ג'ף הלפר; born 1946 ) is an Israeli-American anthropologist, author, lecturer, and political activist who has lived in Israel since 1973.

He is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a co-founder of The One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC).

He is a Jewish Israeli.

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.

He is a supporter of the BDS movement and the academic boycott of Israel, and considers Israel to be guilty of "apartheid" and of a deliberate campaign to "judaize" the occupied Palestinian territories.

Halper was born in Boston in 1946 but grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota.

He received his B.A. from Macalester College and his Ph.D. in Cultural and Applied Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Stage 1, "Inside Israel" (1948-1960s), involved the destruction of Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods " so that the refugees could not return and their lands could be turned over to the Jewish population."

Stage 2,

During the 1960s Halper was active in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, resisting military service in the war.

He served as the chairman of the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews, having been active in the 1960s in championing the rights of Ethiopian Jews and in researching the history of the Jewish community in Ethiopia.

ICAHD took as its vehicle of resistance the Israeli government's policy of demolishing Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories (more than 47,000 since 1967, according to ICAHD), only a little more than 1% being demolished for security reasons.

"In the Occupied Territories" (since 1967), removed homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Halper emigrated to Israel in 1973.

He was director of FWC's Middle East Center in Jerusalem, and when FWC merged with Long Island University in 1991, he became Director of its International Academic Operations and was promoted to the rank of associate professor.

His academic research focuses on the history of modern Jerusalem, contemporary Israeli culture, and the Middle East conflict.

In addition to teaching and research, Halper is involved in issues of social justice activism in Israel.

He spent ten years as a community volunteer in Jerusalem's inner city neighborhoods, and was a founder of Ohel - a social protest movement of working-class Mizrahi Jews.

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 as political acts of resistance (ICAHD has rebuilt 189 Palestinian homes).

Halper co-founded the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) in 1997 to resist Israel's occupation and to work for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Halper was nominated, together with the Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 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."

In his 2008 memoir, Halper says that upon arrival in Israel "I suppose you could have called me a 'Zionist.' " Until witnessing a house demolition in 'Anata in the West Bank in 1998, Halper described himself, as "a Jew who had emigrated to Israel from the United States 25 years earlier" who "generally subscribed to what may be described as Zionist principles ..."

Halper says: "I took umbrage to Mazzini's famous dictum: 'Without Country you are the bastards of Humanity.' That alone seemed enough to me to justify the existence of Israel as a Jewish state while subordinating Palestinian claims to the historical necessity of Jews to control their own destiny."

By contrast, in a 2010 interview, Halper said: "I don't talk about it that much but I did go into the Israeli army ... I did reserve duty like everybody else for twenty some years."

Although, in his 2010 interview, Halper claimed: "I came with my eyes open. I never came [to Israel] as a Zionist."

Halper served as an adjunct lecturer in anthropology at the University of Haifa and at Ben Gurion University, though most of his academic career was spent at Friends World College (FWC).

In 2013 Halper initiated, with a group of international activists, The People Yes!

Network, intended to provide an "infrastructure" that will enable left and progressive groups to find each other across issues and geography, communicate, coordinate, share analyses and materials, and plan joint campaigns, especially around global issues.

The ultimate goal of TPYN is to generate a conception of a just, inclusive, pluralistic and sustainable post-capitalist, "human-centric" (or "life-centric") world system and to help create the global movement that would bring it into being.

Many of the homes are demolished as "collateral damage" in military operations (18,000 in the 2014 attack on Gaza alone), others because Israel uses discriminatory planning and zoning policies to restrict the granting of building permits, virtually freezing Palestinian building in 1967, demolishing them when Palestinian are forced to build "illegally."

The objective for this, according to Halper, is not to ensure security for Israeli citizens but simply to confine residents in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to small, impoverished, and disconnected enclaves, leaving most of the land free for Israeli settlement and annexation.

As ICAHD's Coordinating Director, Halper has organized and led direct action in opposition to Israeli policies.

He has faced IDF bulldozers coming to demolish Palestinian homes, and he organizes, in the framework of ICAHD, Palestinians, Israelis and internationals to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes.

Typically, ICAHD will get a call from a Palestinian family informing it that bulldozers have arrived.

ICAHD thereupon sends out an action alert, in response to which activists from different groups turn out and engage in civil disobedience by standing up to the bulldozers.

ICAHD also raises funds to rebuild these homes in their original locations.

In addition, under Halper's leadership, ICAHD encourages dialogue between groups in an effort to open communication, foster reconciliation and challenge stereotypes.

ICAHD works in coalition with a wide range of left-wing Israeli organizations including: Rabbis for Human Rights, the Alternative Information Center and Ta'ayush, as well as Palestinian groups such as the Land Defense Committee, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC) and BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights.

"The Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including occupied and illegally annexed East Jerusalem," according to the ICAHD, "continues to endure violence, displacement, dispossession and deprivation as a result of prolonged Israeli occupation, in most cases in violation of their rights under international law. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, demolitions are a major cause of the destruction of property, including residential and livelihood-related structures, and displacement."

The organization describes Israel's demolition campaign as breaking into three stages.