Fundraising by Franz (Beppe)

Over here, in the Lagorai mountain range in Trentino, "it's a Palestine" in dialect means a really fertile, fantastic place. I discovered on going there that it really is. A magical land with which peasants and shepherds have such a strong bond that they draw strength from it for an amazing peaceful will to live among boundless hills on which anything can flourish. Sometimes I felt as if I were living right in a crib, too bad it is an occupied crib. For a long time, in fact, without borders only the starry sky has remained. With the occupation, the daily life of these families is made up of house and village demolitions, arrests and violent assaults by soldiers and settlers, armed with machine guns and iron bars, even on children, who are often tried to prevent them from going to school if they have to pass by colonies or outposts to get there.

Volunteers from Operation Dove, the Nonviolent Peace Corps of the Pope John XXIII Community, have been working alongside these children, farmers and pastoralists for more than two decades to try to mitigate and denounce the violence they suffer, accompanying them on their lands, to work or to school, continuing to produce documentation of the abuse, with photos and videos, in the hills south of Al Khalil/Hebron and particularly in the village of At-Tuwani.

Nonviolent interposition work, the continuity of which is essential for which I ask you to contribute as much as you can. Recently, the situation has worsened further: the settlers have been legitimized to use the weapons they have received and, in a wave of extreme violence, they act in a climate of substantial impunity, whereby the international presence is the last guarantee of some form of security to defend those who simply want to live on their land.

That is why it is necessary to support the nonviolent resistance of Youth of Sumud and the Palestinian people. SUMUD. An Arabic word that means perseverance, steadfastness in a life of nonviolent but active, living, vital resistance. An individual and collective value that generates contagious brotherhood and is nourished by patience and a life anchored to the land, like the vines and olive trees with deep roots, which grow back despite being cut down several times by settlers, and persevere in their will to live. Exist to resist.

Standing with them therefore means rejecting the practices of confinements that humiliate, mortify, divide rich and poor worlds, create deportations and conditions of radical precarity. Standing with those who want to emancipate themselves from all this helps us to have confidence that it is possible to change this fate.

Thank you!

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