Tonight marks one week since Loretta and I arrived in the Holy Land. I can't begin to give you a chronology of all that we have done and seen in this week. To date we have seen virtually none of the typical "pilgrim" destinations of Holy Land tourists, and that is fine with us. We have visited more than a dozen Israeli and Palestinian people and organizations and sites working for peace and justice in this troubled land. It has been deeply moving to hear story after story of the suffering caused by war on each side.
We have spent most of the past week in Hebron or the Hebron district. Hebron is a city of some 150,000 Palestinians and 300 Israeli settlers "protected" by some 1500 Israeli Defense Force soldiers. We stayed in the old city of Hebron several nights at the CPT Hebron Team apartment. Strangely, we felt very safe within the Palestinian city, and very anxious when near one of Israeli settlements in the city.
(On our first tour of the old city, one of our delegates, a 70 year old man, was pushed to the ground when a young settler boy rushed out of the settlement we were passing, filled with hate, and rather blindly struck out at the person nearest him. It rather took us all aback. This occurred in the presence of an Israeli soldier standing nearby.)
I would like to share just two days or events of particular signifcance to me thus far. Last Saturday our team went to the very rural and remote village of At-Tuwani south of Hebron and most of us stayed the night in that rural village. They have a generator providing a little electricity for a few hours in the evening. The 150 or 200 residents are all subsistence farmers and shepherds. They all live very simply in homes which they have lived in for centuries and which fit neatly within the landscape. Next to them are two Israeli settlements (illegal settlements of Israeli people on Palestinian land). In those settings there is much irrigation and industrialized agriculture (large chicken barns and a diary), and modern suburban style houses and apartment buildings. Our host in this village was one of the leaders who is committed to non-violent responses to the frequent attacks they suffer from the Israeli settlers. Indeed, this man's mother had been beaten by several settlers while tending the sheep a few months ago. He repeatedly says that he and his fellow villagers just want to live in peace with their new neighbors, but they also express determination to remain where they have lived for centuries rather than to allow the Israeli settler harrassment to drive them from their land. In this village, two CPTers live to accompany villagers on their tasks. One of the CPTer's assignments is to observe that children from small outlying villages who attend school in At-Tuwani are escorted to school on their several mile walk each day by the Israeli soldiers assigned to protect them as they walk between the two Israeli settlers most close to At-Tuwani.
Life in the village seems bucolic and idyllic and Biblical in its form. You see shepherds tending their long-haired sheep and goats on the rocky hillside, olive trees beginning to leaf out, spring flowers blooming (including bright red poppies), and women in traditional dress carrying five gallon buckets of water up steep rocky paths to their homes on their heads. Sadly, these people who only want to maintain their way of life in their simple way are daily in danger of being dispossessed and attacked. Our host showed us the ruins of his brother's house which the Israeli military had demolished.
Today was a different kind of day. Perhaps some of you saw that last Thursday eight Jewish seminary students, young teenagers, had been killed, and several dozen wounded, by a Palestinian gunman in West Jerusalem. That was the night before we left Jerusalem last week, and it made security very tight as we left the city. Today we were scheduled to visit an Israeli settlement here in the West Bank not far from Hebron. It happens that the woman who was to meet with us was the mother of one of these eight young men who had been killed. She called our leader yesterday to inform us that she was going through the seven day mourning period Jewish people observe at the death of a loved one. Yet she wanted us still to come and to grieve with her, if we would. So we went to her home in the settlement of Efrat, entered the crowded house, and sat down. She took the opportunity to address us in English as a group of twelve delegates surrounded by Israeli mourners, to tell us about her son and how special he was as a student of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testmant). She talked about how she grieved that her 16 year old son would not give the grandchildren she longed for. And she grieved the lack of spiritual leadership that her country would endure because of the death of these youth who had devoted themselves to the study of God's law. She also indicated that she did not want the death of her son to result in more suffering and reprisals against the Palestinian people. It was an extremely moving time for us, and we felt very privileged to share in this intimate sharing of a grieving mother.
After that, we continued with our schedule for the day. That was to visit several communities of Bedouin farmers around Beersheba in the south of Israel, in the Negeb. These farmers and nomadic tribesmen, though Israeli citizens since Israel's founding, have been systmatically oppressed and confined on reservations, much like Native Americans in our land. The land in this area is very desert like. The Bedouin plant wheat which was now green and growing. Someimes it may make a crop, but when it is too dry for that, these farmers still use the young wheat crop as grazing for their flocks of sheep and goats. Again it was very moving to hear the stories of these people, and their longing for justice and peace.
Tonight we are in Bethlehem, in a guest house run by an evangelical Protestant church just off Manger Square, where Jesus was born. Tomorrow morning we will have our daily worship in the Church of the Nativity. Would that we all might follow in the ways of the Prince of Peace born here in this place.
Loretta and I are doing well. Loretta is often quite tired and has had a cold, and the pace of our delegation and the continual presence of living communally with twelve others we did not know a week ago is stressful. Yet we are both feeling how good it is to be here. Keep us in your thoughts and prayers, especially in the next week or two until we arrive in Greece. The rest of our delegation time with CPT will be mostly in Jerusalem, and we will have some spare time to visit some holy sites in Jerusalem.
Hoping that all is well for you all back home. Roy
