It's been a while since the term PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) attained a kind of idiomatic universality. But now I think it's important to recognize that--where traumatic stresses and the disorders resulting from them are concerned--there is something that may be even worse than PTSD; and that is CTSD: Current Traumatic Stress Disorder. The kind that a person being scarred and rescarred by perpetual violence can't leave behind. Can't leave behind because it never stops. The kind where--tragically--a victim doesn't have an opportunity to reach the point where relentless ongoing stress--deliberately applied--can be left behind so that he, she, or they can enter into a "post traumatic" phase, where presumably there is a better chance for recovery and healing.
So this report is about CTSD, especially as it applies to the beleaguered, careworn men, women, and children of At-Tuwani who, in the face of unrelenting subtractive too often violent domination, are struggling from one day to the next to hang on to their way of life and the surviving dignity they amazingly still are able to muster. At-Tuwani is a small and ancient Palestinian village situated too close for comfort to Ma'on, one of the militant violently acquisitive Israeli settlements in the Yatta hills southeast of Hebron.
Ma'on was suddenly established on a nearby hilltop by Israeli squatters in 1982. Since then the people of At-Tuwani have been the victims of continuous physical intimidation and the equally unrelenting theft of their agricultural holdings: acreage made rich by the patient labor of the local farmers, who have been diligently carving their plots out of the rocky soil surrounding the village for at least a thousand years. The more than a generation of repression, suppression, and oppression against the people of the village has been carried out by confidently smirking, swaggering, and often snarling settlers who know that they can count on, if not the connivance of the Israeli army stationed in the area, then at least its eventual passive acquiescence.
I first wrote about the gradual reduction of At-Tuwani in the second "From The Inside Looking Out" report that I filed from Palestine. Here is an extract from that July 10, 2002 account.
----------"Why do you look so angry?" one of our small group asked an Uzi toting security guard. The grim settler had just led an Israeli Army patrol up to our little group of CPT and Quaker fact finders, which had been waiting expectantly and hopefully in a field outside the Palestinian village of At Tuwani for someone in authority to answer our call for help. We had gotten in touch with local police on a cell phone a half hour before in order to get help for villagers helpless to deal with mooning Israeli kids from the nearby settlement of Ma'on. Before that the brats had been bathing brazenly and nakedly in what had been a [Palestinian] well but which lately had been confiscated and put under settler lock and key.
The Police told us it would send the Army. But when the troopers arrived, escorted by that scowling Ma'on security guard, it was clear that they were there on Ma'on's behalf, not At-Tuwani's.
Our complaint had no constructive effect on either the security guard, which was no surprise, nor the commander of the soldiers, which really was not a surprise either, although we had hoped he might try to rein in the security guard a bit. Instead he clearly was concerned with making as few waves as possible for the settlers--not the villagers.
The security guard went so far as to tell us that we CPT and Quaker visitors had no right to be where we were because the land we were in was Area C--the notorious military security zone, which many people do not know constitutes about 60% of the West Bank and where the Israel military is a law unto itself. So from now on, the security guard yelled, we had to get permission from authorities in Ma'on to visit the area. The Army commander did not contradict.
That's when the security guard was asked, "Why do you look so angry?"
"I was born angry!!!" he literally snarled.
----------Confiscation of At-Tuwani land began in 1982 about two years after Ma'on was established not more than three quarters of a mile away from the village. The area, where we stood during the encounter described above, along with its acre or so of olive trees, has long since been confiscated; and the ring of confiscated land around the settlement continues to expand at the rate of from 20 to 25 acres a year. That may not seem to be very much acreage, for instance, to an American or Canadian; but for the village's five families (numbered at about 150-200 children, women, and men) the amount of cultivatable soil that is now out of their reach behind settlement fences adds up to about 375 acres.
In Palestine that's a lot.
And, oh, by the way, earlier this year, settlers poisoned one of the village's two drinking water wells by throwing dead chickens into it.
Confiscation, however, has been only one dingy facet of the villagers' continuing--not just travail but--terrifying peril. Along with the land thefts, settlers, starting twenty years ago, began a relentless campaign of physical attacks on the villagers (including children) ranging from beatings to deliberate close up shootings. The "including children" is what brought CPT back to At-Tuwani, more or less to stay a couple of months ago.
The background of CPT's return is this: about four years ago, settlers began a stepped up campaign of not only menacing but actually attacking youngsters from a near by village as they walked to and from the area's primary school, located in At-Tuwani. The shortest route for the kids (2 kilometers) is a rocky hilly road that skirts the settlement. The hilliness is significant, because settlers hiding in nearby trees would wait there undetected until the kids got close enough that it was difficult for them to be able to dash safely away.
This year there are only five pupils who must brave the settlers' terrifying potential gauntlet each day. But when school began in September, the situation became so bad for them that CPT and Italian partners from a similar faith based nonviolent organization, Operation Dove, were asked to establish a constant presence in the village. Which the internationals did, and then promptly began to accompany the five kids as they walked fearfully to school in the morning and then back to their home village-just as fearfully--at noon.
Ma'on's settlers, to say the least, were not pleased. Not long after the accompaniments began, two CPTers were rushed to a hospital after being attacked by settler youths dressed in black and whose faces were hidden by black scarves. Dashing from their tree cover, swinging bats and chains, the settlement thugs were not quick enough to reach the fleeing children, but they did catch up to the internationals who got between them and the attackers.
The young Black Shirts, who could very well have been some of the same mooning brats I encountered from afar back in 2002, but who are now older, bigger, stronger and more frighteningly brazen, had plenty of time to flail and beat the CPTers to the ground. Police and soldiers in answer to CPT's calls for help did not arrive on scene for thirty minutes. That was more than enough time for the settlement's proto-Ku Kluxers to break one CPTer's arm and bruise her knee badly, while the other CPTer's lung was punctured by one of his breaking ribs. (After stays in hospitals both returned to their work in At-Tuwani and elsewhere in the West Bank.)
That dangerous episode, however, was not the end of serious injuries. A few days later another CPTer and an Amnesty International observer were battered by more bat, chain, and slingshot wielding masked neo-Bundists. However, an Operation Dove accompanier was injured so severely in the attack that he is still recovering.
Happily, however, no child has been hurt since the accompaniments began.
Partly as a result of complaints and inquiries filed with Israel from around the world, Israeli military occupation authorities agreed to provide a police or military escort for the children during their frightening walk to and from school. But not along that short route skirting the settlement. They must follow one, which is several kilometers longer, and with the proviso that the army or the police do the accompanying not CPT, Operation Dove, or other internationals.
However, team members are still stationed in At-Tuwani, to--among several tasks--anxiously monitor each day (from a hilltop about 400 yards away) the slow progress on foot of those five kids and their military escort (riding securely in an Israeli army jeep and an Israeli police vehicle) to and from school each day. I say "anxiously monitor," because settler toughs still often come down from their trees to line the route in order to try to frighten the kids (or worse), while their Israeli armed escort, sometimes slow to react, leads its charges diffidently onward.
CTSD!