CPTnet
22 March 2008
AT-TUWANI: Villagers and CPT delegation replace Tom Fox's olive tree

by S. Roy Kaufman

[Note: Kaufman was a member of the 4-17 March 2008 CPT delegation to Israel/Palestine. According to Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and numerous U.N. resolutions, all settlements in the Occupied Territories illegal.]


On 8 March 2008, our second day in the Hebron district, our Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) delegation visited the rural Palestinian village of At-Tuwani, near a string of Israeli settlements. Our drivers were reluctant to cross the Israeli access road separating At-Tuwani from the settlements, so we walked up the gravel road into the village, pausing to enjoy the bucolic scene of olive trees, shepherds, and spring flowers.
One of the village leaders, our host for the day, met us in the village and took us toward the wooded hilltop of Hill 833, a settlement outpost illegal even under Israeli law. At this place on the edge of At-Tuwani, the villagers had planted an olive tree in memory of Tom Fox.

Tom Fox was abducted in 2005, along with three other CPTers in Baghdad, and subsequently killed by his captors in March 2006. He had previously served with CPT in At-Tuwani, and the villagers wanted to recognize this courageous peacemaker's life. Unfortunately, others, presumably settlers, had destroyed the tree.

On Saturday, 8 March, nearly two years to the day that Tom Fox's body had been discovered in Baghdad, the villagers of At-Tuwani wanted to replant another olive tree in his memory. Our delegation watched as our host and his three year old son made a hole for the new tree. Then he carefully situated the tree in the hole, poured in water we had brought from the cistern, and, with our help, refilled the hole with fertile reddish soil.

The planting was not only an act of remembrance for a fallen peacemaker. It was also a declaration of a peaceful but determined intention by the villagers of At-Tuwani. With this act, they declared their intention to stay where their families had lived for hundreds of years, engaged in subsistence farming, raising their own food, and tending the flocks of sheep and goats that are the mainstay of their economic life.

In the face of persistent harassment by their Israeli settlers, the villagers of At-Tuwani are determined to maintain their way of life. "We only want to live in peace with all our neighbors," said our host, who is committed to responding nonviolently to all the attacks the people in his village experience, including an attack on his own mother as she was tending the sheep.

Following the planting, our delegation had its daily worship around the olive tree, adding our own prayers of thanks for the life of Tom Fox and for the new life of this tree and the continuing life of this besieged rural community.