The irony of 'bulldozer terrorism' The same kind of equipment used by Israel to destroy Palestinian homes is being turned against Israelis - with deadly consequences MARK MACKINNON July 29, 2008 JERUSALEM -- There was carnage on King David Street last Tuesday afternoon. A white Peugeot had been cleaved in half, the driver's side of the car mashed into the passenger side. A grey BMW had been flipped upside down by the metal shovel of a front-end loader. The cab of the yellow construction vehicle - where 22-year-old Ghassan Abu Teir sat as he plowed into Israeli vehicles in the heart of Jerusalem - was littered with bullets, broken glass and blood. By the time Mr. Abu Teir's rampage was brought to a halt by several bursts of gunfire from a policeman's assault rifle, 24 people were injured. The attack came three weeks after another Palestinian at the wheel of a construction vehicle, 30-year-old Hussam Dwayat, killed three Israelis and injured 45 others before he too was shot dead during a similar flurry of violence on nearby Jaffa Road. To an unsettled Israeli public, Mr. Abu Teir and Mr. Dwayat became known as the "bulldozer terrorists" and the media immediately began wondering whether a "bulldozer intifada" had begun. There were calls to ban Arabs from driving construction equipment, and the government announced that the family homes of Mr. Abu Teir and Mr. Dwayat in East Jerusalem would be demolished. Lost in the understandable hysteria was the tragic irony and thick symbolism of construction equipment being used by Palestinians to inflict harm on Israelis. Though few would dare say it last week for fear of being seen as justifying the attacks, the truth is that the bulldozer has long been an Israeli weapon of choice in this uneven conflict. And the two Palestinian attackers had experienced first-hand the violence a bulldozer can inflict before using the tool as a weapon themselves. Bulldozers have long been associated with the harsher side of Israel's 41-year-old occupation of the Palestinian Territories. In the past eight years alone, they've been used to destroy more than 2,300 Palestinian homes, uproot orchards of olive trees and construct the controversial 723-kilometre-long barrier that weaves through the West Bank, effectively annexing large chunks of land to Israel. American peace activist Rachel Corrie was famously crushed under an Israeli army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip as she sat in front of a Palestinian home in 2003, trying to prevent its demolition. An international boycott campaign has been launched against Caterpillar, the company that provides much of the equipment the Israeli army uses to demolish homes and build the barrier, and some Palestinians admitted to experiencing a moment of schadenfreude when Mr. Dwayat turned a Caterpillar machine against the Israelis. "The bulldozer has been used before, to demolish Palestinian lives, to cut down that house and that house and that house," said 50-year-old Salim Shawamreh, field director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, pointing to three piles of rubble that once were homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Anata. His own home in the area has been demolished four times, he said, and he is now rebuilding for a fifth time. "Go to Gaza and see what bulldozers have done there. I don't know what was going on in [Mr. Dwayat's and Mr. Abu Teir's] heads, but they had their reasons." No one does know what motivated them. The families of the dead men say that neither was involved with any of the Palestinian militant factions that routinely plot attacks against Israelis, though Mr. Abu Teir was related to a senior Hamas parliamentarian who is currently in an Israeli prison. The Israeli press has portrayed both men as petty criminals who had drug problems. But a trip to the hardscrabble East Jerusalem neighbourhoods the two men grew up in provides some insight into the anger they harboured. The bulldozer - or the threat of it - figured prominently in both their lives long before it played such a spectacular role in their deaths. Mr. Abu Teir lived on the ground floor of his grandparents' home in the neighbourhood of Umm Touba, across the potholed and litter-strewn street from the uncompleted concrete shell that his father had intended to be their family's home. His father started work on the house in 1998, but had to stop in 2003 after he was fined 30,000 shekels (about $7,500 U.S. at the time) for building without a permit. He managed to pay that fine, but even though the land had belonged to the family for generations, he never got a permit to continue building and the family knew half-finished structures could be bulldozed at any time. While construction in the illegal Jewish settlements that ring East Jerusalem has continued apace in recent years, Palestinians living in adjacent neighbourhoods are routinely denied permission to build on their own land. When Mr. Abu Teir's funeral reception was held in his family's incomplete home last week, a square hole cut in the wall of the concrete structure for a window provided a perfect view of the ongoing construction at Har Homa, the Jewish settlement just to the south of Umm Touba. "My son's main goal was to build himself a life. He wanted to make money to buy his own tractor, to build a house and get married," said Mr. Abu Teir's father, Mustafa. But for a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem, his son's simple goals were made "very, very difficult" he said. "The main point here is that there's a situation where the victim is being made out as the guilty person, the ugly terrorist." Meanwhile, Mr. Dwayat - whose handsome face now smiles down on the adjoining village of Sur Bahir from posters proclaiming him a "martyr" - had a long-time Jewish girlfriend and even fathered a child with her before she left him because he was abusive. But his relationship with Israelis was even more complex than that. His family says he was troubled by his job that required him to bulldoze Palestinian structures and uproot olive trees to clear a path for the construction of the West Bank barrier that many Palestinians refer to as "the apartheid wall." "They forced him to work there," said Mr. Dwayat's 31-year-old brother, Wissam. "It was difficult for him. They made him uproot olive trees and clear the route for this wall that separates the Palestinian people." Mr. Dwayat lived with his parents, as well as his Palestinian wife and the two young children he fathered with her, in a five-room house that he built himself six years ago. But like the Abu Teir family's unfinished house, Mr. Dwayat's residence was built without a permit. Three years ago, he received notice that the home would be demolished, something that may have contributed to the hatred he displayed when he used his Caterpillar machine to flip over an Israeli bus and attack half a dozen other cars on July 2. After the attack, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak ordered that the demolition be carried out as soon as possible. Though Israel formally stopped demolishing homes as a punitive measure three years ago, Mr. Abu Teir's family home is expected to receive similar treatment. Both men's families say the destruction of their homes would only breed more resentment and hatred for Israel in East Jerusalem. "The bulldozer as a destructive and even lethal weapon was not invented by the Palestinians. They are merely imitating an Israeli 'fashion' that is as old as the state, or at least as old as the occupation," Gideon Levy, a columnist for Israel's left-wing Haaretz newspaper, wrote after the King David Street attack last week. "What is good for us is good for them. And how do our security experts propose to fight the new fashion? By demolishing the houses of the terrorists. With bulldozers, of course." (F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. 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