There is a distant rumble and it is not a bomb
the rhythmic beat is not small arms fire
it is thunder and the first rains
to wash away blood and dust
an Iftar for the earth after a six months fast
drink deep
this year we need
new life
urgently
So I've just 3 days of travel getting from Tuwani to Baghdad. On route I've bumped into various friends (including finally meeting the elusive Azzam, the "capitalist dad" and only non-blogging member of the Jarrar family) and I've been on tender hooks worrying about Jenny facing attacks from Israeli settlers.
In Iraq the controversy continues over Saddam's trial and the referendum results. The violence also continues. This morning I got a call from a very close friend in great distress as there had been an explosion at his younger sister's school in Mansour. The scale of violence in Iraq today is so vast that this incident, which in any other country might have been headline news for days, didn't warrent a single dedicated news article focusing on it, only a few lines reporting that a mortar killed two a child and wounded four others. Thankfully his sister was ok. Rumours at the scene were that it was an American missile. Either way the school was probably not the target but an unfortunate miss.
Last night, as I was in Baghdad airport, Jenny had just texted me that 6 busloads of settlers drove through their village and that the settler's security guard had threatened that they were coming to hurt them and the villagers. The Israeli army and police said the situation was too dangerous for them to intervene, and so they were going to abandoning CPT and the Palestinians to the mercy of the settlers. I spent most of the night praying for them in the military chapel in Camp Striker, Baghdad airpot (a very unusal habitat!) and, hamdulillah, I learnt this morning that the attack was averted, or at least delayed. Jenny and team did a phenomenal job putting pressure on the Israelis (with dozens of internationals and Israeli activists phoning army officers) and so they finally turned up. However the IDF has refused to continue escorting children from the neighouring village of Tuba who have to pass close by the settlement in order to get to school in Tuwani. This violates a system established by order of the Knesset last year after CPTers were severely beaten by settlers while escorting the children, highlighting the issue in the international media. The upside of these new threats of violence is that once again both the Israeli and international media are taking an interest, and this may force the Israeli government to curb the settlers and ease the restrictions on the villagers.
Two final things (a lots's been happening today)...
Firstly many mutual friends have been asking after Joe Carr. He is recovering in Ramallah hospital after suffering a ruptured spleen. I was with him on Friday at the demonstration against the Apertheid Wall in Bil'in. Here is his report of trying to protect Palestinian childrenfrom rubber bullets and subsequently being grabbed and used as a human shield by an Israeli soldier and hence being hit in the ribs by a rock. I travelled to Ramallah hospital with him in a Red Cresent ambulance and as he lay there it was clear that for Joe, who saw his friends Rachel and Tom killed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003, to suffer this injury in the struggle for Palestinian rights was a very minor thing. We differ significantly in our politics and ethics, but Joe's courage and committment continuously inspire me.
Secondly it turns out that Kirsten Dunst will be playing Marla in the film about her life being produced by Marc Platt for MTV films. I wish that she was around to see it.
So my life continues to be surreal. Lets start with the good (wonderful) news. Last night, as she sat shivering on a rock on a windy hillside shortly after sunset above the village of Tuwani in the southernmost part of the West Bank, I got down on one knee amidst the thorny shrubs and asked Jenny for her hand in marriage... remarkably she said YES immediately!
My cunning proposal plans had been slightly scuppered by the fact that I'd twisted my ankle the previous day and so had not been able to go on the hike into the wilderness that I'd planned to find the perfect romantic spot. Then she was exhausted, having been out walking the hills all day while I was recuperating, and so only very begrudingly agreed to wander with me just outside the village, and we missed sunset. Finally, in spite of all my subterfuge over the previous week as I got the ring designed in Jerusalem and asked her parents for their blessing, she'd somehow figured out my intentions from the most circumstantial evidence - huh, women's intuition! Anyway, although the proposal wasn't the grand cinematic gesture that I'd envisaged, it was certainly memorable in a quirky way and she seemed happy enough which is the important thing.
Typically for us, our personal moment of joy rapidly became tangled up with bigger and less happy events. About an hour after coming back down the hill, having used the last of our phone credits to inform our families, we heard the tragic news that 3 Israeli settlers had been shot earlier that day about 50 miles north of us. One of them, a 14yr old boy, came from Ma'on, the settlement just opposite our dear Tuwani, and the two women came from Carmel, the next settlement about two miles to the east. Our immediate reaction, along with sadness for the murders, was fear that there would be a very violent reaction from the settlers, perhaps even that night. The reason Jenny and others are living in Tuwani is because an international presence can sometimes deter, and at the very least document, settler attacks. In fact we'd been woken that morning by a hysterical shepherd from a nearby village who was attacked by 3 Ma'on settlers at about 6.30am, they stabbed one of his goats to death and seriously stoned a sheep (it later died).
Thankfully nothing happened last night. In the morning at 9am settlers from all across the West Bank gathered for the 3 funerals which took place at the Synagogue at Susiya, a settlement to the West (part of the chain of settlements and outposts, including Ma'on, on the hilltops across the South Hebron Hills, designed to control area and eventually annex it to Israel). The whole village watched in terror as perhaps a thousand settlers gathered on the settler bypass road near the entrance to Ma'on and drove slowly (we counted more than 150 cars, vans and buses) to Susiya, passing right below Tuwani. We gazed up into the thickly wooded hill towering above Tuwani in which an extremist outpost settlement is based and from which masked settlers often emerge (on 4 occasions in the last year they have seriously beaten up our international observers, not to mention the many occasions of violence against Palestinians). Thankfully the Israeli Army and Police had positioned themselves on the road at either entrance to the village and for once the villagers were pleased by their presence (which is often a harassment, as happened two nights ago when the army spent most of the evening surveiling the village with an infra-red camera). An attack, however, is unlikely to happen today, but perhaps tomorrow (on Succoth, a Jewish holiday, as settlers will not be working it is more likely that they will attack) or in a few days time when the army and police are not around.
I'm very worried for my fiance's safety, and was sorely tempted to stay with her, but she insisted that she could look after herself and that I must attend to my responsibilities in Iraq (I fly back on Wednesday) so I agreed eventually to entrust Jenny to her own good sense and to God's protection. I made my way back to Jerusalem after the funerals, a process which took 4 hours and required 6 changes of bus and clambering over numerous roadblocks because Israel has closed off most of the main roads in the southern West Bank - part of the collective punishment veiled as "security" in response to the 3 murders. Settlers leaving the funreal at about the same time as me would have been in Jerusalem after just 30mins on the US-funded settler bypass roads.
Before sunrise on Tuesday, 20 Palestinians (including 8 children, a 77 grandmother and two disabled men) piled into a delapitated bus in Baghdad and travelled the perilous Anbar road past Ramadi and Rutba (risking attack from Americans, terrorists, Iraqi security forces and criminal gangs) to the Syrian border town of Al-Waleed. They were accompanied by 3 friends from Christian Peacemaker Teams and an Iraqi peace activist from Najaf, part of the sister group Muslim Peacemaker Teams.
Everyone in Iraq is suffering these days, but the Palestinian community, most of whom have been born here (their families having fled Palestine in 1948), are among the lowest of the low. They do not have Iraqi citizenship and have to extend their residency permits (a complex process) every single month. Because Saddam exploited the Palestinian cause to try and gain prominence in the Arab world, Palestinians are often (incorrectly) viewed as having supported and benefited from his regime and as a result are persecuted. In fact Saddam did very little for the 23,000 Palestinians in Iraq. In addition, as a result of fears of foreign jihadists, any non-Iraqi Arabs are view with suspicion. There is no evidence that any of the Palestinian community in Iraq has been involved in terrorist activities, but none the less they are frequently harrassed and detained. Things have got so bad that Iraqi security forces have been turning up at the Palestinian ghetto in Baladiat (Baghdad) almost every evening. This is the reason that Palestinians are beginning to take the ultimate step of leaving their homes once again in search of a genuine place of refugee.
One of the Palestinians said: "By our action we want to make the UN aware of our situation and to be registered as refugees with UNRWA which provides assistance to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza and other Arab nations but not in Iraq." I've been doing my best to alert people in the UN to the situation, and they are taking it seriously, however the decision on permitting them to enter Syria rest with the government.
For updates see the CPT_Iraq Yahoo Group. Their plight has been covered in the Canadian Globe and Mail (although this article exaggerates the support Palestinians recieved from the former regime).
So, for the first time, I'm actually out in the Middle East during Ramadan. Shia Muslims begin fasting today, while their Sunni cousins began yesterday (the lag is a result of slightly different methodologies in judging the beginning of the lunar month). I began fasting yesterday with the Sunnis and intend to carry on through to the end of the Shia period, so as to be in equal solidarity with both sects. I'm currently just doing the solids component of the fast between dawn and dusk and am drinking water through the day (I'm ill at the moment and getting dehydrated in this climate didn't seem wise), but may cut out water as well when I'm feeling better.
One of the things I appreciate about Ramadan, like so many aspects of Islamic devotion, is that it provides a connection with the natural world in an age when many of us live in cities and spend almost all of our waking hours indoors chained to a computer. In an age when few of us have time or inclination to study the sky, ever Muslim around the world pays careful attention to the phases of the moon, as the physical sighting of the new moon heralds the start of fasting. In an age when we often sleep in late in our environmentally-sealed houses and stay up late burning trillions of watts of electric light, those observing Ramadan wake up before sun rise for their first meal and know to the minute ever day when the sun sets behind the horizon - the time for iftar, the breaking of the fast. In an age of snack food and instant gratification, it is phenomenal seeing a whole nation choosing not to pass anything through their lips during the hours of daylight.
On Monday, unconnected to Ramadan, there was an eclipse of the sun. Even though it was not visible here in Iraq, all my observant Muslim friends were aware it was happening and made additional prayers at that time, in recognition of the majesty of the created universe. I am usually total ignorant of my geographical orientation, but Muslims must know this in order to be able to pray facing Mecca (in my office it seems that this about a 40 degree angle facing into the left hand corner).
To mark the beginning of Ramadan I emailed everyone in the office and invited them to meet at midday for an interfaith prayer meeting to intercede for the victims of the conflict and pray for peace in Iraq. I was amazed that about 20 people showed up and we had a wonderful time of prayer. I distributed news clippings of recent incidents and invited people to pray about them. By and large Islamic prayer - at least in group settings - is litugical, and therefore I think most of those present were unfamiliar with this model of group intercession, none the less they seemed to get the hang of it. Prayers were a mixture of english and arabic, and one lady began weeping as she called for God's mercy for the children of Iraq.
I started the meeting by reading the famous prayer of St.Francis "Lord make me an instrument of your peace..." and then recalling that Iraq is a holy land of prophets and martyrs, that the Tigris river flowing a few feet away from us (sadly hidden behind concrete blast walls) used to run through the Garden of Eden, and it was along this river that Ibrahim lead his family on the first ever pilgrimage in response to God's call. I received a wonderful email from one of the Iraqis present who wrote: "When you said your prayer at the beginning, I thought of my dearest friend who was assassinated few months ago, and ... and I said this prayer is for him, the words were so moving made me feel so near to GOD."
