3 Funerals and an Engagement

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.