My wife and I had been thinking of moving house; closer to the children's schools and to a house with more space for the family.

I asked my kids about moving and was amazed by their response. They couldn’t contemplate a move, they loved their home, all their friends loved their home and they were not moving! It was after all home, the only home they knew.

I have never had any emotional attachment to any of the 5 houses I have lived in since my birth so found it difficult to relate to what my kids were saying. I have never had a life free of the normal petty racism that my generation all experienced growing up in the UK. In all the places I have lived the broken windows, the graffiti and things pushed through the letter box. I thought that this was normal life as it had happened to me everywhere we had lived, except for where we live now.

My children though have never experienced any of this, thank God, and have a real emotional attachment with our house.

I’ve already said that I couldn’t relate to the emotional attachment to one house over another. I can understand the trauma of losing your house completely with nowhere else to go.

If you think of the Palestinian families living in the refugee camps. Palestinian children might have had an emotional attachment to their home. The ones demolished to make way for Israeli settlements. If my children do, I am sure that Palestinian children did. I wonder whether they had emotional attachment to their olive or orange trees prior to their uprooting and theft? Again I am sure there must have been some emotional attachment along with the financial dependence.

It is difficult to imagine how someone living next to a settlement now must actually feel. The settlement expansion has not stopped for the last 50 years and continues today in East Al-Quds. Never considered newsworthy by the UK and US media. Palestinians know though that at some point the armoured Caterpillar bulldozer will turn up on their street and destroy their home to make way for another settlement or road to a settlement.

President Bush stands with Ariel Sharon and talks of US agreement and the legitimisation of Israel taking land by force and to the denial of a right of return for Palestinian refugees. The new border will be between Israel and a Palestinian enclave, to refer to it as a state would be an insult.

This is not Bush’s fault, after all he is a politician whose basic focus is to get re-elected. You will probably hear John Kerry say in the next few weeks that he would support Israel taking more land and is a better friend of Israel than George Bush.

Here in the UK, we have the European elections this summer and a general election due within a year. Make sure everyone in your community is registered to vote. MPACUK will continue giving you information on candidates, their voting records and what they stand for at mpacuk.org.

Make sure you go and vote. We do not want to end up like our brothers and sisters in the US, with a choice between the lesser of two massive evils.

In the North West the leader of the BNP is standing for election as a Euro MP. We must vote smart to ensure that he doesn’t get elected.

We hope to see the mobilisation of Muslim block votes at the next election, this all takes time and money, please fund MPACUK.

To complete the original story above, my house extension will be complete in a few weeks time.

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