Jeff Halper

American anthropologist and activist

Jeff Halper (; born 1946 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. 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 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 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.

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. During the 1960s Halper was active in the civil rights movement and the anti Vietnam War movement, resisting military service in the war. 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." Halper emigrated to Israel in 1973. 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." Although, in his 2010 interview, Halper claimed: "I came with my eyes open. I never came [to Israel] as a Zionist." only a little more than 1% being demolished for security reasons. 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,

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. The organization describes Israel's demolition campaign as breaking into three stages. 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,
"In the Occupied Territories" (since 1967), removed homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. And Stage 3, "Back Inside Israel" (1990s present), involves demolition "at an ever accelerating rate." Halper has been arrested numerous times by Israeli authorities for protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes. "As Israelis, we are privileged," he said after one arrest. "They [the police] are not going to shoot us if we resist the demolition, but if a Palestinian had done it, they would have certainly shot him." "ICAHD staff and activists," explains the organization's website, "embark on extensive speaking tours abroad at the invitation of our international partners, participate in international conferences and gatherings, and appear frequently in the international media. Besides our work with our international partners, we meet with government officials and diplomats, both in Israel/Palestine and in their capitals, in an effort to affect their governments' policies." ICAHD says that the "overall objective" of its "intergovernmental organization work is to ensure that the protection and promotion of Palestinian rights and a just peace become an essential component of international relations in a consistent, principled and effective way." ICAHD has observer status in the UN and regularly interacts with the UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteurs, the High Commissioner for Human Rights and other international bodies. ICAHD offers a variety of "alternative" tours of Israel and Palestine, during which visitors can "meet Palestinian families suffering under Israeli policies of separation and home demolitions" as well as see "how Israel's settlement project has created irreversible ‘facts on the ground.'" ICAHD has branches in the United Kingdom, the US, Finland, Norway, Germany and Australia. Donors to ICAHD have included Trocaire, NGO Development Center, United Nations Development Programme, World Vision, Mennonite Central Committee, the European Union, and the government of Spain. ICAHD was awarded UN Economic and Social Council Special Consultative Status in 2010.

Halper has frequently appeared alongside Rev. Naim Ateek, the head of Sabeel, a Palestinian Liberation Theology group based in Jerusalem. "As a Jew and an Israeli," wrote Gerald M. Steinberg of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, "Halper's appearances are seen as providing 'legitimacy' for Sabeel's extremist agenda, in the form of a counter to allegations of anti Semitic motivations." Halper was a "member of the support committee" for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. He has taught at universities in Israel, the US, Latin America and Africa. He was one of the four Israeli citizens on the ship. He explained his reason for participating as "I cannot stand idly aside. I can no more passively witness my government’s destruction of another people than I can watch the occupation destroy the moral fabric of my own country. To do so would violate my commitment to human rights, the very essence of prophetic Jewish religion, culture and morals, without which Israel is no longer Jewish but an empty, if powerful, Sparta". Contesting Ehud Olmert’s declaration of willingness to withdraw from 100% of the occupied territories, Halper argued that, following Bush’s acceptance of settlements, which at the time effectively extended over 20% of the West Bank, would not leave Palestinians with a viable state but a series of sterile swatches of land whose border s would be controlled by Israel. By 2012 he argued that in complicity with the Palestinian National Authority, Israel appeared to be readying to annex Area C, creating a ‘viable apartheid’. In March 2010, Halper was a keynote speaker at Israel Apartheid Week in Glasgow. Halper's lecture was entitled "Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS," during which he described the way that Palestinians are ‘warehoused' in Gaza.

In 2006, 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." In 2007, ICAHD received the Olive Branch Award from Jewish Voice for Peace.