Reflection From the Desert II

Reflection From the Desert
On September 29, 2004, along with a colleague, I was attacked and brutally beaten by Israeli settlers while walking Palestinian children to school in the West Bank village of at-Tuwani. Using sticks, chains, and their boots, these Israeli extremists severely injured my knee, broke my elbow, punctured my colleague´s lung, and inflicted cuts and bruises on our faces and hands.

I could write a whole article about the politics behind what happened that morning, about the extremism that permits a gang of Israeli settler men to target school children and their escorts with impunity, about my own government´s support of a failed policy. But that is not this article. This article is a reflection on my spiritual journey subsequent to the attack.

Getting beat up so badly in Palestine may have been the most profound spiritual event of my life, and my hope is that my reflections will help all of us to think a bit about the spirituality of trauma and forgiveness.

In those moments right after the attack I was the most vulnerable I have ever been in my entire life. I was bleeding, scared, and could not walk. The first thing that happened was that my colleague made his way over to where I was lying on the ground, and we prayed for the attackers. It was his idea, and when I think of it now I am amazed that either of us was up for it emotionally. He could barely breathe and I could not stand up. I remember feeling irritated about the obligation of having to pray for those who had left me in this condition. But when I look back on it now I think that offering of prayer was a key to the process of letting go and forgiving later. Also, in a moment when we felt alone and abandoned, prayer focused us on the presence of God, who never abandons us.

I am certain that God never abandons us; it is we who abandon God. I have reflected a lot on that word "abandonment," because in the Latin it is the root for "desert," (i.e. to desert someone) and desert has symbolic meaning for Christians. And the attack took place in the desert. And because there is reference to abandonment in the Passion.

We abandon God, over and over. We act as though God does not exist, meaning that we must control what happens because we do not trust God. So in that sense God is always in the desert, always abandoned. In Christian spirituality, the desert is a symbol for abandonment of self, of ego, of "attachments" as Ignatius would say, and of control, and turning ourselves over to the will of God, which by definition means service of others.

I think of being in the desert as bringing the interior self, who is one with the will of God, to the surface, to become that person on the outside that we all are in our deepest interior selves. This can happen only through abandonment of that exterior self, and abandonment can only happen through prayer. This prayer that leads to liberation from our attachments is the desert. But really, just as God is always in the desert, so must the person of faith be always in the desert, always in that prayer of abandonment of self in order to attach to God. The minute we leave it, all our old desires, attachments, and impulses to try and control everyone else come back.

We do not trust God--we think we are in control--and therefore we do not trust each other. Instead of trust, it seems to me that we spend our time trying to get everyone else to be different than who they really are, and trying to get them to do our will. Just as we are afraid to abandon our self and allow God to work in us and become us, we are afraid to trust God to do the same in others.

For reasons that I cannot explain, I walked (well, actually, was carried) away from the attack with a much more profound trust in God. Perhaps it was because I went through what most would describe as their worst nightmare. I could have been killed, and had the attackers wanted to kill us they would have. I think we order our lives around a lot of fear--fear of death, of pain, of suffering, of not being in control, of something happening to our children, of not being valuable or valued. Most especially the latter. So instead of trying to reach for what God calls us to be doing, we make our decisions based on that fear. And I have been liberated from much of my fear. I imagine that it does not take getting beat up to get to this place. I think that is what it took for me.

In the aftermath of the attack, I had to let go of control over my life, because I certainly was not in control in that moment. I know that I cannot control whether I live or whether I die, that life is short, and that all I have that matters is my time. At the end of my life, whenever that is, I know that all that will seem important is that I loved--gave myself away--without counting the cost. And that is what we were doing that morning.

Someone told me shortly after the attack that I "had" to forgive the attackers. I do not know if this was helpful or not. I know I resented anyone telling me I "had" to. But I also think that this, in combination with my Catholic faith and its emphasis on forgiveness, got me thinking about forgiveness really quickly. I think if I were not Catholic, meaning that if forgiveness was not deeply ingrained in who I am and what I accept as the truth, then I probably would have been angry instead of accepting of the early advice to forgive. And I think that if we do not forgive, then the offense, whatever it is, takes us over and prevents us from moving forward with our lives. The offense, or the offender, is in control of us, instead of God. So I wanted to forgive.

I had no idea what forgiveness looked like in a situation like this. I felt I understood what it meant to forgive (or not to) in personal relationships, with people I know well, or in a work situation. But I had never experienced the need to forgive people whom I had never met and could not identify, and who had committed a crime against me. So as a first step I decided to reflect on my feelings toward and about the attackers.

When I probed my deepest feelings, I realized that I never felt any anger toward them. I wanted them (and still do) caught and prosecuted, not out of a desire for revenge, but because I feel that it would deter other Israeli settlers from equally violent actions. I tried hard, for as long as it seemed to make sense, to get the US Embassy to pressure the Israelis to continue to investigate. In the end, I was told they had no leads, because we could not identify the attackers.

I think that the reason I have not felt anger or desire for revenge is that I have been able to understand the attackers as victims. Jews have been systematically murdered for centuries, and the violent actions of settlers on the West Bank is happening as a result of their trauma. So I could, in a sense, empathize and identify with them.

I do not know if all of this adds up to forgiveness. When I experience forgiveness in personal relationships, I experience it as love. I do not feel love for the attackers. I feel compassion, though, and empathy, and I wonder if compassion and empathy are the same thing as love when it comes to a person one does not know. I want them to accept the responsibility and consequences for what they did, but I do not want them harmed or destroyed emotionally or physically. I hope it is enough.

I returned to at-Tuwani nearly 6 months after the attack, to continue the work of accompaniment, to ensure that Palestinian children are able to get to school unharmed, and that Palestinian shepherds are able to graze their sheep unhindered, and that Palestinian farmers are able to plant and plow without the constant threat of violence from the nearby settlement. For me, it was important to return to at-Tuwani that first time, for closure, and because I needed to know that the attack, and the attackers, had not taken control of my life. I was still me, still able to do the same work, still good at it. The night before I returned to at-Tuwani I had a dream in which I felt embraced by God. I knew then that everything was okay, that no matter what happened, God would never abandon me.

Human Rights Accompaniment, Part 2

See Part 1 before reading this.

Just as we were leaving the last village--the one with all the applause--someone handed us a packet of pictures and said it was proof that they were fumigating in the area. Crop fumigations are part of US drug policy and are US funded to eradicate coca. They do flyovers spraying this toxic chemical which kills everything, including legal crops, and makes people sick. The only thing is, everyone agrees that there is no coca in this area. It is a drug corridor, meaning that coca is transported through there from the mountains to the ocean, but it is not grown there, so why the crop fumigations?

In the famous meeting with officials (more about that below) they vehemently denied the fumigations. But we showed the photos to some other officials, and they said, yep, it looks like fumigations. They killed avacado trees, which is the main cash crop of the region. The officials who denied the fumigations said the trees had been infected with a fungus, and later we learned that, in fact, they are now fumigating with a fungus. So nobody lied. Presumably the military killed the avocado trees in order to target the guerrilla, who are active in the area, and probably own some of the avocado plantations. But by doing so they also target small subsistence farmers.

The meeting came as a surprise to everyone involved. The group of lawyers had invited a small group of civil and military functionaries from the region, and when we got there, about 50 had shown up. They brought with them two truckloads of campesinos to contradict the complaints we were about to present. The lasted all day, and became a shouting match at times, and at times I was afraid it was going to get violent. When we met separately with the campesinos planted by the government, they did not contradict anything we had to present. Rather, they came to make statements that the guerrilla do bad things, too. Apparently the miltary had told them that we were there to denounce the military on behalf of the guerrilla!

It seemed to us that the authorities were doing everything possible to prevent the group from presenting and pursuing the complaints. One of the main points of contention at the meeting (aside from fumigations) was over the presence of paramilitary in the region. All of the civil and military authorities in the room flatly denied the presence of paramilitaries. However, the Defensor de Pueblo, the government authority vested with human rights protection, confirmed to us privately that they know paras are present, despite the famous demobilization program.

And, we know better. We have heard too many horrific reports of paramilitary activity from other communities in the region. People talk about massacres when paramilitaries cut people up alive with chainsaws and use their heads as soccer balls. Your tax dollars at work, because it is widely understood that paramilitaries act on behalf of the Colombian military.

Human Rights Accompaniment, Part 1

I just returned from a 10-day trip accompanying a group of human rights lawyers from Bogota into a very high conflict region up north, called Montes de Maria. The area we traveled to had been experiencing open combat between the guerilla and government troops just days before we went. Both guerilla and paramilitary are present in the area, each holding part of the territory, though the government troops deny the presence of the paras (more about that in part 2). The area is littered with antipersonnel mines placed by the guerilla, and there are many reports of deaths and maimings. There are also widespread human rights violations on the part of government troops and paras.

Basically the campesinos (small subsistence farmers) are caught between all armed groups, are being pressured from all sides, and say they just want to be left in peace. The message I heard over and again from them is that this is not their war, and they are determined to stay on their land and preserve their way of life and their culture. The purpose of the accompaniment was to provide an international presence with the delegation, which Colombians feel gives it some protection. In other words, with us there, the lawyers were less likely to be subjected to violence or to be prevented from going.

I have lots of stories to tell, but here is a brief summary of what we did. The lawyers were traveling to the region to hold meetings telling the campesino communities what their rights under the law actually are, and to collect complaints of human rights violations perpetrated by government troops. They collected the complaints in writing, created a document, and submitted it to the appropriate authorities and legal processes.

To sum up, they found three classes of human rights violations in every single community and on a large scale. They are: blockades of food and medicine, prevention of travel along the roads, and massive and arbitrary detentions without due process. The military is preventing food and medicine from moving between communities because they claim that the campesinos are feeding the guerrilla, and the military is also preventing them from moving freely because they claim that they are aiding the guerrilla. To accomplish this the military has set up road blocks and check points, which we had to go through and so I can vouch that they exist.

There was one set up in the middle of town, placing the residents at risk of being caught in the middle of armed combat. We got detained at them but ultimately were let through. Detentions take place because some paramilitary informant will claim that some campesino is guerrilla, and then they get arrested and held, sometimes for years, without trial. According to government statistics 80 percent are eventually released for lack of evidence.

On our way in to one of the communities we got stopped at a road block where there had been fighting the day before. It was about 5 in the afternoon, and was going to be dark by 6, when it is dangerous to be on the roads due to guerrilla presence. The military held us for 45 minutes, so we ended up traveling the last 45 minutes in the dark on some of the worst roads I have ever seen, rivaling even those in Haiti.

It may have been one of the most dangerous things I have ever done. In addition to the bad roads, the darkness, the jungle, and the presence of armed groups, I was sitting on the passenger side of a jeep with no front door. It was a knuckle-whitening experience. But when we got there, we were greeted by 5000 campesinos lining the road, applauding ing wildly. They had come from all over the region, and had been waiting for us for hours. This was the first visit of its kind to this region. If I did not know before, I knew then how important our mission was to the communities, because it would allow them to file formal complaints against their abusers.

We visited four seperate campesino communities, doing the same thing in each one. Each meeting had representatives from several campesino communities present. At the end of the presentations by the lawyers, people could submit their complaints in writing. Every community insisted on some kind of cultural presentation at the end of the meetings. They were determined to let us know the value of their cultural heritage and their desire to preserve it. We heard over and over that this is not their war, but they feel they are bearing the brunt of the punishment for it.

They also said that they feel abandoned by the government. The roads are not passable, they have no electricity, running water, schools or health care. And unlike Haiti, Colombia is a fairly developed country. The campesinos feel that the government is doing it on purpose, in order to force them off the land.

I asked a lot of different people why there was fighting over this land. We know it is a drug corridor--meaning that although no coca is grown there, it is a corridor between the river and the ocean where drugs are shipped, and all sides seem to profit from control of the corridor. We also know that it is rich agricultural land. There is speculation that there is mineral wealth underneath, but we have no proof. One of the lawyers in our delegation told me that the president of Colombia (Uribe) is buying up parcels of land in this area--through intermediaries-- in order to profit from future large transnational corporations who want to locate there. Obviously, I have no way of verifying that.

Colombia is the second or third largest recipient of US aid, and 80 percent of that is military aid. So our tax dollars are going to fund human rights abuses against small subsistence farmers, most of whom are either Afro-Colombian or indigenous. I felt that this was a very important accompaniment, and I felt that we were right where we were supposed to be, which is making it possible for the most marginalized groups in this country to raise their voice against abuse that is financed by my own country.