On Monday morning I stood on a Palestinian hillside with tears in my eyes. Each time I have come to this land I have wept.
I wept in a house in Beit Sahour, burnt out after Israeli tank shelling. A few weeks after the siege of Jenin I wept at a mural on a school wall that said, ‘Don’t cry. Be happy.’ I wept in Nablus after the Israeli soldiers blew up an apartment block, as I watched people fleeing from the scene with their fear turning to anger.
Why did I weep this time? What dramatic event triggered my tears? Only a group of children walking to school. These Palestinian kids live in Tuba, near where Israeli settlers have built the illegal settlement of Ma’on. Because the settlers were hassling the kids the villagers asked a couple of peace groups to accompany them to school. After young settlers twice attacked our people the soldiers stopped us walking with the kids to and from school.
There are sev eral different routes that the children could take. The shortest takes about twenty minutes and goes between the settlement and the settlement outpost; it is where there is most likely to be trouble from the settlers. The longest takes them some distance from the settlement but takes an hour and a half or so to walk. There are also routes intermediate in terms of both distance and potential danger.
Thanks to international publicity, Israeli soldiers and police now accompany the children to school. So I watched five kids stumbling on the muddy path through the wind and pouring rain on a forty-minute walk to school. Three Israeli jeeps drove in front of and behind them; the soldiers and police were warm and dry inside the vehicles.
I have two questions. Why can’t the Israeli authorities arrange for the kids’ father drive them to school in safety on the shortest route? And when will I be able to come to this land and not weep?