Fundraising by Lello

"The hell of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is the one that is already here, the hell that we inhabit every day, that we form by being together. Two ways are there not to suffer from it. The first succeeds easily for many: accepting hell and becoming part of it to the point of no longer seeing it. The second is risky and demands continuous attention and deepening: to seek and know how to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and to make it last, and to give it space."

Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities

Taking part in, or simply supporting the project of Operation Dove, the Nonviolent Peace Corps of the Pope John XXIII Community in the West Bank, is not about finding a solution to an unsolved problem.

We are not talking here in terms of goals, of objectives to be achieved by certain means and in certain time frames.

The oppression of the Palestinian people has been going on for more than seven decades, and the events since October 7 further exacerbate a situation that has become increasingly untenable.

While genocide at the hands of the Israeli army continues in Gaza, violence and injustice against Palestinian civilians increases in the West Bank, and hope for change grows dimmer and dimmer.

Yet, there are those who resist; those who, in the midst of this hatred and destruction, have chosen to fight through nonviolence and the everydayness of life, against those who would like to extinguish life.

For more than two decades, the Palestinian shepherds of the Masafer Yatta villages have decided to stop the chain of violence, and to each unjust arrest, for grazing on their own land, they respond by turning up to graze again the next day, and the day after that; to each demolition, they pitch a tent and prepare to rebuild their homes; after the displacement of a village, they organize to try to repopulate it: this is Sumud, a word untranslatable in our language, which indicates resistance/resilience inextricably linked to the land and the practices of inhabiting one's land.

Every action against life is answered by the stubborn reassertion of it, through its enactment, its daily continuation.

We volunteers of Operation Dove do not bring a solution to the oppression of the Palestinian people; but we have seen, in the midst of hell, what hell is not, and we want to help make it last, we want to give it space; and we do this by putting ourselves alongside Palestinians, by sharing life under occupation, by accompanying them to pasture, by lunching at the same canteen, by proximity to those who have just suffered violence or arrest, by playing soccer in the evening in front of an Israeli outpost.

Peace, nonviolence, too often becomes identified with goals, objectives.

These Palestinian pastors, on the other hand, make it a practice of life; life that is affirmed by its mere existence.

And perhaps this is precisely the basis for true peace.

For all this, I ask you to support Operation Dove with me.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart!