Madison Rafah Journal

The message below is from Cassandra Dixon, who is about to leave for Palestine for a two-month stay in the West Bank with Christian Peacemaker Teams, accompanying Palestinians to deter attacks by settlers. (I hope that Cassandra will be allowed into Palestine, since earlier this month, two people who were scheduled to lead a CPT delegation were arrested at the Israeli airport, deported and told they could not return for 10 years. Two CPT members were similarly turned away last fall (more on that story).

If you would like to be on Cassandra’s e-mail list for updates while she is in Palestine, please contact her at chrepairs(at)yahoo.com.

Note that she is also in need of support for this trip.

Thanks,
Barb Olson

Dear Friends,

I hope that your holidays have been peaceful and happy, and the New Year finds you well.

I’m getting ready to pack for another two and a half months of work with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine. I’ll be back in the village of At-Tuwani , in the West Bank , from mid-February until the end of April. It doesn’t seem possible to me that a whole year’s gone by, but it has, and I’m writing now to thank you for your concern for the people of At-Tuwani and the surrounding South Hebron Hills area of the West Bank, and to ask for your prayers and help as I prepare to go back.

In the months since I was last in At-Tuwani the schoolchildren, shepherds and farmers there have continued to suffer the harassment and violence of Israeli settlers.

On December 30 the schoolchildren had been waiting near the Israeli outpost of Havat Ma’on for the army escort to arrive for nearly thirty minutes when an Israeli settler came out from a house in the outpost. The fourteen Palestinian children, ages six to fifteen, immediately began to move away from the settler, back towards their village. The settler ran after them, hurling stones at them with a slingshot. He chased them several hundred meters, all the way back to the village of Tuba.

Tareq Ibrahim Abu Jundiyye, a fifteen-year-old boy from Tuba, said, regarding the experience, “The younger kids started crying as we were running away because they were afraid the settler would catch them. I mean, we had to run away. If I had stayed I would have been struck on the head by a rock.”

While the children were waiting, CPTers made calls to the local army office, urging them to send soldiers to escort the schoolchildren. The army dispatcher claimed that the soldiers thought there was no school because it was raining. The army only arrived after the mayor of At-Tuwani called the Palestinian District Coordinating and the DCO, in turn, spoke with the Israeli army. The escort finally arrived nearly ninety minutes late. The children, who by then had not only been chased by an adult hurling stones at them but were also soaking wet and very cold, missed the first two classes of their school day.

It was these schoolchildren who brought internationals to the village of Tuwani. Parents asked for accompaniment of their children in 2004 after they were repeatedly attacked by Israeli settlers as they walked from the small villages of Tuba and Maghayir Al-Abeed to school in nearby Tuwani. After international media reports focused attention on the attacks the Israeli Army was ordered to escort the children. But too often, as on December 30, the escort is late, or does not escort the children far enough, or in some cases does not arrive at all.

The school children of the South Hebron Hills face these daily threats because of the ongoing efforts of settlers from the outpost of Havat Ma’on to take over more and more Palestinian land. Except for the short time when the Israeli military escorts the schoolchildren, Palestinians have lost access to the road they built to connect Tuba to Tuwani. Many families have already lost substantial areas of land to the settlement of Ma’on and the illegal outpost of Havat Ma’on, and are now vulnerable to violence from settlers and soldiers when they use the land that remains.

But despite the fear and frustration of these attacks, and of life under occupation, the people of Tuwani remain committed to nonviolence. Time after time I’ve seen these people react to the threat of violence with calm and steadfastness. A recent nonviolence training hosted by the village was well attended, and people are committed to seeing their nonviolent struggle grow – not just endure. They believe their children will weather these attacks, and finish school, and become adults – without becoming perpetrators of violence themselves. They believe the children of their children will find playmates among the children of the Settlers children.

For American peace activists these are some sad days. As our military involvement in Afghanistan escalates, and our hopes for peace dwindle, the violence inherent in our nation’s economic system starts to seem too big to change. The direction of our foreign policy is so disappointing that it’s tempting to throw in the towel, declare our unhappiness with the Obama administration, and just take a break from peacemaking. Maybe read some books, and knit those mittens.

But for the schoolchildren who walk from Tuba in the morning past angry settlers, and for their parents, taking a break from peacemaking is just not an option. Daily under occupation they’re faced with situations where plenty of people (or as in our case governments and armies) would retaliate with violence. For these people a commitment to peacemaking and nonviolence means living with that commitment every day. It’s been an amazing opportunity and an honor in the four years I’ve worked with CPT to walk with these families, and witness their continued nonviolence in the face of systematic injustice, intimidation and assault.

This is grazing season in the South Hebron Hills, and as subsistence farmers and shepherds the families of these villages have little choice but to risk their safety in order to graze sheep on their remaining lands. Grazing season is relatively short, and it is vital that shepherding families have access to their grazing land if they are to survive in the area.

So on January 7 at about 10:30 in the morning Palestinian shepherds were grazing their sheep on Palestinian land when they noticed Israeli settlers observing them from the outpost of Havat Ma’on. A short time later, Israeli soldiers arrived, spoke with the settlers, and then ordered the Palestinian shepherds to leave. The shepherds explained that it was their land, but agreed to move further down into the valley. The soldiers followed them and grabbed at one of the shepherds. As the shepherds tried to flee with their sheep, soldiers hit them with their rifle butts, forced them to the ground and kicked them.

Other members of the family came to the area, and the women tried to intervene, hoping to de-escalate the situation. However, the soldiers also forcefully pushed the women to the ground. Internationals trying to videotape the violent attack were roughly pushed and a soldier grabbed and broke a video camera.

Other villagers came to the area and tried to calm the situation by talking with the soldiers, but the soldiers ignored all pleas for calm and instead fired sound grenades and tear gas into the women and children. One elderly woman, Umm Juma’ Raba’i, and a young woman, Umm Ribhi Raba’i, who is two months pregnant, had to be taken to the hospital, to be treated for tear gas inhalation. Three of the shepherds were hospitalized for their injuries, and a young boy had his tooth broken.

The soldiers arrested one of the shepherds, Musab Musa Raba’i and took him to a nearby army base, where they beat him severely, and then took him to Kiryat Arba police station in Hebron. The police held him there for one half hour, then drove him back to the South Hebron Hills and then threw him – still blindfolded and handcuffed – from a jeep near the city of Yatta. He suffered severe bruising to his eye, his face and his back and legs.

Throughout this incident, and in the days that followed, the people of Tuwani maintained nonviolence. These villagers are just barely hanging onto their land and their way of life. One season of drought, one illness, one more heartbreak, and any of them could be forced to leave. Their land would immediately taken by settlers, and they would never be able to return to these hills that have been home to their mothers and their mothers mothers for 900 years. The loss of a few families could mean the loss of entire villages, and eventually the entire region. Every time that these people remain calm, and refuse to lash out, it is with the knowledge that their entire way of life is vulnerable.

As Americans, we know now that it will take more than an election to shift our national focus away from the militarism that has such a lock on our culture and our foreign policy. If we want to seen alternatives to military intervention and occupation, we may have to create them ourselves.

The challenge posed by Christian Peacemaker Teams – to send teams of trained peace activists into conflict situations where our country’s foreign policy is a contributing factor to oppression and injustice – provides an alternative to the violent response we are so accustomed to. In addition to working at home to change the social structures that cause violence, CPT offers a chance to “get in the way of violence”, and bring that violence into the light.

In Tuwani and the South Hebron Hills, the presence if internationals and Israeli peace activists makes an undeniable difference. It mitigates the terrible imbalance of power faced by rural Palestinians in the shadow of Israeli settlements and outposts, and it frequently opens a space for the work of nonviolent change.

I’m writing to ask you to help me return to Tuwani – and among the many things I need help with, I have to admit that money is high on the list. The cost of serving as a reservist for CPT is $2,000, which covers airline tickets and the cost of maintaining teams in the field, including rent, transportation, translators, phone, email and food.

To meet this cost and, and my obligations to Mary House for the time I am gone, I need to raise about $3,000 before I leave in early February, and although I am working, and lucky to be doing so, I would be enormously grateful for your help. It is unbelievably difficult to ask – I seem to spend quite a lot of time asking for help for other projects, and all of you are doubtlessly over committed already. But the challenge to stand against injustice without the use of violence feels so important to me now, as we watch our tax dollars go to increased military involvement in Afghanistan , and as the suffering continues in Iraq , that I am, in fact, asking you to help me make this trip again.

If you’d like to send money to support this work, you can make checks out to me, or if you would like your donations to be tax-deductible, you can make checks out to Mary House, or to Christian Peacemaker Teams, and write my name in the memo line. Address: Cassandra Dixon, 3579 County Rd. G, Wisconsin Dells, 53965.

There are photos and more information available on Christian Peacemaker Teams’ website, or you can write to them at PO Box 6508, Chicago, Il 60680. If you would like to hear from me while I am in Palestine, please send me your email address.

I am extremely grateful for your kind thoughts and prayers, especially for the well being of my children Helen and Carl, and for Mary House, the Catholic Worker house where I live. If you would like to help care for Mary House while I’m gone, please contact me at chrepairs@yahoo.com, call me at (608)-586-4447, or call my friend Fr. Jim Murphy at (608)-742-6998 while I am gone.

And to those of you who have been so kind as to hire me to repair your homes in the past, please let your friends know that I will be desperately looking for work by the end of April, and I would be grateful for their calls. For my friends in the Madison area I’ve enclosed a business card, and hope you will pass it on if you know someone who needs home repairs in the coming months. Traveling to Tuwani is scary in many ways for me, and high on the list is the fear that I won’t be able to continue earning a living when I return. I’m extremely grateful to all of you who have trusted me to work on your homes, and hope that you will remember me when I return this spring.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, for all of your own efforts for peace and justice, and for your support.

Gratefully & Sincerely,
Cassandra Dixon