Some notes about why the Israelis demolish Palestinian houses:
[url]http://www.nigelparry.com/diary/hebron/jul97d.html[/url]
"In the Intifada period, family houses were actually demolished if their kids were caught throwing stones."
[...]
"Did the family of Yigal Amir, the Israeli student who assasinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, see their home demolished? No. Well, it happens to Palestinians here - who have done a lot less - on a regular basis.
Recently, there have been a spate of house demolitions in the Jerusalem area, on the pretext that they were built without permits. The fact is that permits are almost never granted to Palestinians, an attempt to force them to leave Jerusalem in order that the State of Israel can point to higher numbers of Jews in the city as a basis for claims of sovereignty.
The story of Jerusalem is a sad tale of Israel's fondness for apartheid laws to remove residency rights, racist housing policies, boundary gerrymandering and a variety of other distasteful manifestations of ethnic cleansing.
In the case of house demolitions for example, Jewish home extensions are not being destroyed for the lack of a permit and indeed are often granted them retrospectively. In 1992, there were 2,019 cases of illegal construction in (Jewish) West Jerusalem and 226 in Arab (East) Jerusalem.
In 1993, there were 1,509 and 361 cases respectively. Most of the West Jerusalem cases involved floor space (usually with a commercial emphasis), demolitions taking place only of fences and windows, and certainly not of Jewish family homes and businesses."