For Chris: A Walk in the Countryside

By Jennifer Kuiper

September 29, 2004

This morning at 7:15am, my friend Chris Brown of San Francisco (and survivor of apartheid South Africa) and his colleague Kim Lamberty of Washington, D.C., were brutally beaten by five Israeli men from the Ma'on Settlement in the West Bank region of Southern Hebron. Both Chris and Kim are volunteers with the internationally recognized Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), living and working in the Old City of the Hebron in the West Bank. They were accompanying five young Palestinian children on their half-hour walk from their tiny three-family rural community of Tuba to their school in the village of Tuwani: the walk is along a settler road but is shorter than the 10km needed to go around. As of Sunday, CPT in cooperation with other volunteer international peace teams, had begun regularly escorting the children to school and then home again as a result of frequent settler attacks on the villagers.

But today, the presence of two unarmed, adult peaceworkers from the United States, one a woman, was too much of a threat to these "hilltop youth" -- typically young men who establish "camps" on highground overlooking Palestinian villages in the West Bank in order to cleanse "Judea and Samaria" of its Palestinian residents, and seen as "extreme" even by the extreme. These young people consider themselves to be devoutly religious.

Apparently, the gang was waiting along the path in what Chris described to me from his hospital bed as "a well-orchestrated ambush." The five were dressed in black with scarves wrapped around their lower faces. They threw Chris and Kim to the ground and beat them with a baseball bat, metal chains, and rocks. At the end of the attack, the five just walked away, seemingly fearless of reprisals from their victims or the residents of their nearby settlement or the Israeli military patrols. Chris was left with a collapsed lung and contusions to his temple. Kim's knee and left arm were broken. The men took her waist-pack with money, cellphone and passport. Chris and Kim were both taken by ambulance to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheba, Israel. All the children escaped without harm.

In telling this story, I imagine the reactions that can rise up in people's minds, tricking us into creating permission for such incidents. Such as, "It's a war," "There are acts of violence on both sides," and "What were those crazy peace activists doing there anyway?" "What about those kidnappers in Iraq?" "What does that have to do with me?" "If Palestinians wouldn't go around blowing up Israelis, none of this would happen." "Some people are just plain bad but there isn't anything deeper going on than that."

But there is something much deeper going on here. And we should at least pause to allow it to sink in that civilian, third-party peaceworkers, who do not work for/against Israelis/Palestinians but in solidarity with nonviolence, walking with farmers' children from their homes to school, are being beaten and left for dead. We need to ask ourselves different questions than those that continue to divide and lead us to despair or indifference: What is it in this world at this time that allows these incidents to not just occur as isolated events but to grow into patterns and routine? Is this truly the world we want to not simply tolerate but also support? To raise our children? Why is it happening and what needs to change to make the suffering stop?

CPT has taken its stand. As long as the children wish to go to school, they will walk beside them. And together, the children and accompaniers will demonstrate for all of us the courage and strength of a nonviolent resistance to those that would prefer to see us dead. It is a different image of hero than the headbanded martyr holding his Kalashnikov or the uniformed soldier with his M-16 rifle, both waving their respective flags and willing to die to protect the ones they love. In the end, this alternative response to my searching questions holds hope for all sides and all children, regardless of leadership, borders and faith.

Jennifer Kuiper, originally from Oakland, Calif., currently serves as a volunteer with Holy Land Trust, a not-for-profit organization based in Bethlehem that works to strengthen Palestinian communities and to develop nonviolent initiatives for justice and peace.