As I mentioned in a previous entry, I am on team with CPT in At-Tuwani during the summer camp that the village has hosted for the past 8 years for children from the south Hebron hills region. Children from several neighbouring villages are coming to the camp in At-Tuwani, which is lasting for two weeks this year.
When CPT first opened a project in the village of At-Tuwani (partnering with and Italian peace organization, Operation Dove) one of the tasks that we were asked to do was to accompany Palestinian children from a neighbouring village to and from school in At-Tuwani. The elementary school aged children needed accompaniment because Israeli settlers would attack them on roads/paths that they took to and from school. Some of you may remember that when we began doing the accompaniment of the children we also experienced first hand the violence of the Israeli settlers that live in the area with several international volunteers injured and hospitalized after settler attacks.
Israeli peace groups pressured the Israeli government to protect the Palestinian children on their journey and for the past 5 years the Israeli military was ordered to accompany the children to and from school. CPTers and the Doves were asked by the parents of the children to monitor this escort and we have noted many instances of when the Israeli military failed in their task of getting the children to and from school safely and on-time. Here is a report about the military accompaniment during a previous school year.
The Mayor of At-Tuwani coordinated with the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military for the children to also receive accompaniment to At-Tuwani for the summer camp. Last year there were many problems with this accompaniment and this year the team decided to monitor the accompaniment more closely, which includes being present with the children at their home village.
One morning this past week my teammate Jessica and I walked with the children from their small cave village of Tuba to the location where they meet the Israeli soldiers who accompany them to At-Tuwani. There didn't seem to be any problems with the accompaniment this morning and so Jessica and I returned to Tuba to begin the second part of our day - accompanying shepherds grazing their flocks of sheep.
As we got back to Tuba we noticed an Israeli settler vehicle on a hilltop close to the valley where the shepherds often graze their sheep. After confirming with family members that the shepherds were in fact in that area, Jessica and I took off as fast as we could to reach the shepherds. By the time that we got to them, an Israeli military jeep had arrived and one of the two shepherds (boys aged around 16years) was being detained.
A month ago both of these shepherds had been arrested and told that if they were caught on any of the hills near the Israeli settlement of Ma'on that they would be jailed. However the hills around Tuba (some of them close to Ma'on) are private Palestinian land on which their families have grazed their flocks for decades if not centuries. The sheep need to eat and there is no money to buy food to feed them, so the shepherds continue to go out on the hills.
Soon after we got to the area where the soldiers were detaining the shepherd, Jessica noted that the military jeep had the same number as the one who had accompanied the children to summer camp in At-Tuwani. Jessica went up and asked the soldiers why they accompanied the children to summer camp but then came out to harasses the brothers of those same children?
After some time the Israeli police arrived (and an Israeli settler had lengthy conversations with both the soldiers and the police), and the shepherd was told to come the next day to the Israeli police station. Thankfully at the Israeli police station in Hebron the shepherd boy was not arrested. But is was for him a long and expensive journey to come from Tuba at the whim of the Israeli police.
Palestinians have the right to both an education and to access their land, and the Israeli military is responsible for protecting those rights. It is not acceptable to work on protecting the access to education without also working on protecting all the other rights of the Palestinians living in the region. The irony in all of this is that a most obvious and easy path to protecting the rights of Palestinians living in the region would be to stop Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and stop settlement expansion.
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