March 26, 2009 at 8:28 pm (Activism, Associate Post, Israel, Palestine, Settler Violence)
By Khalid Amayreh
AL-KHALIL, West Bank — Joy Ellison came from Portland, Oregon, US, last year to promote non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Eventually, she ended up at the small Palestinian hamlet of At-Tuwani in the southern Al-Khalil (Hebron) hills where she, along with a number of mainly North American peace activists known as the Christian Peace-Making Teams (CPT), are now living.
“I decided that I am not going to be less persevering and less resilient than the people here,” Ellison told IslamOnline.net.
Her main daily mission is to escort Palestinian children who can’t go to school and return home school unless accompanied by an Israeli army patrol to protect them from fanatical Jewish settlers.
Still on several occasions the settlers, many of them mature, western-educated immigrants from North America, physically assaulted the children with rocks and sharp objects.
“The settlers routinely attack the kids, chase them, steal their backpacks and shout obscenities and blaspheme at them,” asserted Ellison.
“Sometime they steal livestock animals, poison the wells and kill donkeys. They also place poison in the grazing areas to kill Palestinian sheep.
“The army does virtually nothing about it. The settlers simply do the dirty work for the army and for the Israeli state.”
Mohammed Al-Adara, one of the local villagers, agrees.
“You see the army and the settlers are two sides of the same coin,” he told IOL.
“The army is not authorized to arrest settlers even if they are seen shooting Palestinians.
Law of Jungle
Al-Adara sees the settlers’ harassment and attacks as part of a larger scheme.
“The main reason for the settler presence here is to torment the local Palestinians in order to force them to leave so that the settlers would take over their land.”
Jim, another peace volunteer from New York, shares the same conviction.
“I think these people will just do anything, commit any crime to drive the Palestinians from the land. It is just sheer criminality,” he told IOL.
“In addition, what these settlers do is decidedly against international law and in many instances against the Israeli law.”
Jim blames the Israeli army and police for the “law of the jungle” in the occupied Palestinian territories, especially in outlaying areas where Palestinians and Jewish settlers live next to each other.
“For the slightest misdemeanor, the Israeli army and other security forces arrest and beat Palestinians,” says the New Yorker.
“But they do nothing when the settlers commit real crimes against innocent Palestinians.”
CPT activities are not confined to escorting Palestinian school children and accompanying shepherds and farmers in areas adjacent to Jewish settlements.
They monitor treatment of Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints and roadblocks.
They also join Israeli and Palestinian peace activists in replanting olive groves destroyed by Jewish settlers and take part in peaceful protests against Israel’s gigantic separation wall being erected through the occupied West Bank.
Under the pretext of building the wall for security reasons, Israel has arrogated large swathes of Palestinian farmland.
In a landmark ruling in 2004, the Hague-based International Court of Justice branded the wall “absolutely illegal” and “incompatible with international law.”
Resistance
Ellison says that non-violent resistance to the settlers, considered among the most fanatical and brutal of Jewish settlers anywhere, has not been in vain.
“We use media, videos to document their attacks. We also go to courts as witnesses,” she explains.
“So we have been successful. We gained access to land previously declared off-limit to the local. This has infuriated the settlers, prompting them to physically attack our members,” added the American peace activist.
The CPT’s daring, non-violent activism has not been cost-free.
In September 2004, settlers attacked team members Chris Brown and Kim Lamberty as they accompanied Palestinian kids to school in al-Tuwani.
The children, from the nearby village of Tuba, have repeatedly experienced harassment from settlers in the past.
According to the CPT account, five settlers, dressed in black and wearing masks, attacked Brown and Lamberty with a chain and bat.
The children escaped injury by running back to their homes.
The settlers pushed Brown to the ground, whipped him with a chain and kicked him in the chest.
Hospital reports stated that he sustained broken ribs, a punctured lung for which he required surgery and a contusion to his temple.
The settlers also kicked Lamberty in the legs and as a result she couldn’t walk and she had a broken arm.
They also stole her waist-pack which held her passport, money and cell phone.
None of the settlers was arrested, let alone prosecuted.
The Israeli army claimed there was no proof that the attackers were settlers since they were masked.
However, harassment and physical assaults have failed to scare away Ellison and the other Christian peace activists.
“We have to keep the non-violent resistance, it has become a way of life.”
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