By Kathleen Kern

When I saw the children of Tuba and Maghayir al-Abeed villages racing downhill, screaming, my coworker assured me, “It’s a really steep hill and they like to scream when they run down it.”

A couple of weeks earlier, Israeli soldiers escorting the children to school in Tuwani had stood by while Israeli settlers from the outpost of Havat Ma’on had charged the group. They stole two of the children’s backpacks and caused some to fall and suffer minor injuries.

Settlers in the southern Hebron district have been trying to drive the people in Tuwani and surrounding Palestinian villages off their land for the last 20 years, aided by the Israeli military, which wants the land for training exercises.

In addition to assaulting children as they walk to school, settlers have attacked shepherds in their fields, burned the villagers’ crops and spread poison that killed both domestic animals and wildlife on grazing lands.

Shortly after workers with Christian Peacemaker Teams and members of the Italian peace group Operation Dove began walking to school with the children in 2004, settlers attacked the international accompaniers twice, putting two in the hospital.

Eventually, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) ordered the Israeli military to begin escorting the children. CPTers and Doves now watch from a distance at both ends of the route. When the soldiers and children pass out of sight at one end, the team members text message team members at the other end, who watch for the children and give them water when they arrive. The children and their military escort are out of sight for only five minutes. But it was during those five minutes that settlers committed their most recent attack on the children.

Despite the region’s sobering recent history, I spent a charmed week in Tuwani last month. The soldiers in the escort engaged in friendly banter with the children and even shared food with them. A record rainfall had occurred over the winter, so multicolor “lilies of the field” were abundant in the green, rocky hills.

Sitting quietly for hours, observing shepherds grazing their flocks, donkeys plodding along with provisions and children running gracefully across the stones fed my spirit in a pro-found way.

But the people of Tuwani, more than the biblical landscape, made me love the place after only one week: the children helping me with Arabic, the old woman who never let me pass her door without offering me food — and, most of all, the villagers’ commitment to nonviolent resistance against those who treat them with hatred and contempt.

Shortly before I arrived, a Tuwani shepherd had struck a settler after enduring three days of physical and verbal threats while he was in his fields. We went to his house after his release from an Israeli jail — usually a festive affair where people feast and pass around chocolates. The leader of the village, however, mandated a different sort of event.

During the brief time in the evening when a diesel generator provides electricity for the village, he showed a video documenting the nonviolent actions of Palestinians in the town of Bil’in against the wall the Israeli government is building that will cut the villagers off from their fields.

I wrote in a previous column that I had given up hope for a just and peaceful resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Al-Tuwani has made me wonder whether that judgment may have been premature.