Haaretz
Tishrei 30, 5765
Reclining on a couch against a mound of pillows,
her swollen leg elevated and her broken arm placed strategically by her
side, Kim Lamberty can admit she's seen better days. Though the
44-year-old peace activist is now able to walk and most of the bruises
have since faded from her face and body, it's been, she says, a difficult
month.
More than two weeks have passed since settlers brutally
attacked Lamberty while she and another activist accompanied Palestinian
children from Tuba, in the Hebron Hills area, to their elementary school
in a nearby village. But recuperating this week in the Quaker house on
Jerusalem's Mount of Olives, she doesn't look the least bit tired or
deterred. "I knew the risks of being here," she says simply.
As a
member of the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), Lamberty, an American from
Washington D.C., firmly believes in the importance of creating an
international presence in the West Bank. "I thought that [with such a
presence] settlers would be less likely to act violently," she says,
motioning to her bandaged knee, "which may or may not be
true."
"The attackers wanted to intimidate us, frighten us and
force us into leaving, but it won't happen, because if they escalate the
violence," she warned, "we'll escalate the nonviolence."
CPT is an
international pacifist organization with some 200 active members stationed
around the world. They are based in Baghdad, Colombia and Canada, where
the organization works protecting the rights of the First Nation people.
In the past, CPT has worked with indigenous populations in Central America
and they recently closed a project aimed at protecting illegal Mexican
border crossers from police violence. They've maintained a presence in the
West Bank since 1995 and their numbers fluctuate because of the short
three-month tourist visa each member is given. The group currently has
nine volunteers in the West Bank.
For members of CPT, all of whom
are Christians who believe firmly in the importance the gospel's pacifism,
reducing nonviolence is something of a religious mandate. They spend their
days accompanying Palestinian school children, surveying army checkpoints
and walking the streets donning their organization's bright hats so as not
to be confused with settlers.
"We're not unbiased," explains CPT
member Diane Jenzen, a Mennonite from Canada, who adds, though, that
members of the organization have ridden on Jerusalem buses to deter
suicide bombers as well as stood in the way of a Palestinian who tried to
stab a soldier.
The volunteers begin each day with a half-hour
prayer and because a number of denominations are represented, the prayer
can include anything from Quaker silence to Catholic liturgy. "I asked
myself, `Am I a Christian or aren't I?'" says Lamberty, who was raised
Protestant and converted to Catholicism in 1990. "And if I really am a
Christian, I should be willing to take risks for the sake of justice and
peace. I need to speak with my life, because that's all I
have."
Lamberty isn't the first member of CPT to be the object of
violence, but the attack against her and fellow activist Chris Brown was
the most severe in the organization's history. Still, it's the danger that
the Christian activists are exposed to that is part and parcel of their
religious experience.
"Now is the time to risk everything for our
belief that Jesus is the way for peace," theologian Ron Sider announced in
1984 at the Mennonite World Conference in Strasbourg, France, in a speech
that would become the inspiration for CPT.
"We must be prepared to
die by the thousands," he continued. "Those who believed in peace through
the sword have not hesitated to die. Proudly, courageously, they gave
their lives. Again and again, they sacrificed bright futures to the tragic
illusion that one more righteous crusade would bring peace in their time,
and they laid down their lives by the millions... Unless we are ready to
die developing new nonviolent attempts to reduce conflict, we should
confess that we never really meant that the cross was an alternative to
the sword."
At the end of the three-month visa allotment,
activists like Cal Carpenter - an Episcopalian member of CPT from
Minnesota who's been here on-and-off for a year - return home to spread
word of their experiences in the West Bank. They hope to raise political
awareness within their church community so that nonviolence becomes more
than just a religious ideal. They'd like to counteract the large and vocal
Christian Zionist movement in the U.S., though activists admit their
following pales in comparison to that of TV evangelist Pat
Robertson.
In the meantime, though, Lamberty will return to Hebron,
where she'll do the office work no one else wants to do. She'd rather
patrol the streets or accompany Palestinian school children, but the cane
she now uses makes the surrounding hills rather unnavigable. Still, she
finds comfort in the memory of those few days spent in Tiwani. "If
somebody's life was made easier or less humiliating because of something
that I did," she said, "then I'll feel good."