Yes, friends, we need to do a little “preaching to the choir.” Many of you are already convinced that CPT is doing good work. As we celebrate twenty-five years of disciplined, nonviolent peacemaking, we face the challenge of ensuring the financial foundation to go forward for the next twenty-five years.
CPT continues to have a large chorus of strong and faithful contributors. With gratitude, we look to you for the sustained melody of funds needed to support accompaniment of local peacemakers in Colombia, Iraq, Palestine, First Nations, and elsewhere as they wage nonviolent direct action against systems of violence and oppression.
In December and January individual donations dropped $70,000 (U.S.): 7% of our annual budget. How might you be able to help CPT make up the shortfall and advance into the next quarter century?
Make an anniversary donation today for $25, $250, $2500 or more! This spring, a generous donor will match your gift up to $5000!
Around 10:50 a.m. on 21 April 2011, during the Jewish
festival of Passover, CPTers received a call saying that Israeli soldiers had
invaded the premises of Bin Tarek School. Between 600-700 boys, aged fifteen
through eighteen attend the school.
CPTers went immediately to the building, and saw a group of
six Israeli soldiers at a street corner near the school.
School staff welcomed the CPTers and members of TIPH
(Temporary International Presence in Hebron), who arrived at the same
time. The Head teacher
played a video from a camera on a TV screen that showed soldiers in the
school playground. He also had on his desk two spent percussion
grenades and a
heavy chain that soldiers had cut.
Pray for the Palestinian residents of the Old City of
Hebron. Thousands are regularly locked behind gates for days at a time by
Israeli authorities whenever Jews want to visit the city on their holy days.
Halabja Day of Remembrance
Halabja is the site of the 1988 chemical bombings by Saddam Hussein in which
5000 people died in a few minutes.
Thiessen, Van Hooogstraten, and Firla made a trip to the monument and
cemetery in Halabja to prepare for the delegation on the day before Halabja’s
annual 16 March Remembrance Day.
The organizers of the Suleimaniya demonstrations asked the team to speak
about
this tragedy from the stage on the day of remembrance. Team members
stood
together on the stage while Obed-Naar read a statement confessing that
they and
many from their countries had not paid attention to the tragedy when it
happened. She read, “And we carry your voice. We carry all the voices
we have heard
over these last four weeks in this Freedom Square. We carry your voices
out over the artificial borders that
have been imposed on the Kurdish people. We carry your cries for
freedom and justice to the ears of
all who will listen. We hear you
and you are not alone.” TV news
crews filmed the speech, and the team received many comments in later
days
about this contribution.
On Monday 11 April, the four of us from the CPT short-term
delegation accompanied the CPT Iraq team to the central square in Suleimaniya
to meet the demonstrators and the people organizing the demonstrations.
As soon as we entered the square, we were surrounded by twenty-thirty
men of different ages. One of them started asking CPTer Michele Naar Obed, "Have
CPT done the report that you were talking about? What are you doing to tell the
world about what's happening here?"
Recently I realized I had not
spoken with Israeli Jews very much throughout my three years in Hebron,
Palestine. I decided that in the
spirit of nonviolent living, it was time for me to know soldiers more
personally and hear their stories.
My first year in 2008 I thought of all the soldiers as coming from the
same mold, but now, eight stints later, each uniformed young man and
woman equipped with an M-16 has a name: Nadeem, Udi, Michael, Alex ,
Mya, etc.
