My dear friends,

As I return to Masafer-Yatta in the West Bank, I would gratefully welcome your help towards the cost of travel, and towards helping families replace blankets, food, cars, schoolbooks, livestock and animal feed destroyed and stolen by settlers, as well as to pay for medical care when they are assaulted  in their homes and fields.  

These families, including small children and the elderly, are facing increasingly frequent and violent assaults on their homes, livestock, property, and bodies by Israeli settlers and soldiers, and they need our solidarity as they struggle to remain in their homes and villages. 

Operation Dove has kindly offered to have me volunteer with them again, and I will be overjoyed to see friends in the villages that have become so dear to me over the 15 years I have been visiting them.  Operation Dove marked 20 years of  unarmed nonviolent international accompaniment in Masafer-Yatta this year, and the chance to support the ongoing nonviolent struggle of residents to remain on their lands remains a privilege and a precious gift, and also, given the level of US taxpayer funding of Israel, a responsibility.  

As Israel commits genocide in Gaza, it has also escalated attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.  Having lived their entire lives under a violent apartheid system of occupation, families there, including my friends in Masafer-Yatta, face an unprecedented escalation of  violent attacks by Israeli settlers, acting  with complete impunity and the support of the Israeli military, with the goal of seizing all of the Palestinian land. 

These Palestinian families are suffering now in ways that most of us cannot imagine, and they are trying desperately to let the world know what is happening to them.  They have been nonviolently resisting Israel’s attempts to seize their lands for years and years, and they need our solidarity now. 

In the past year Israel has killed 748 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 164 children, and injured more than 6250.  13 entire villages have been erased – their residents driven from their homes, schools, mosques and pastures by life-threatening  settler violence.  Israeli armed forces have demolished or stolen at least 1768 structures, leaving 4555 Palestinians without shelter. 

The UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports at least 1423 incidents of settler violence in the West Bank.  That’s an average of four attacks a day, committed by armed Israeli settlers against a population about half that of Wisconsin, living in an area about twice the size of greater Madison.  Israel has distributed more than 120,000 firearms to West Bank settlers, and the most violent and extreme settlers continue to receive funding from well-organized non-profits funded in the United States. Multiple settlers and settler organizations have been sanctioned by European countries and the US, but these sanctions are not enforced, and the frequency and seriousness of settler attacks is rising unabated. 

The goal of this settler violence is the wholesale theft of Palestinian land, and this is especially evident in Masafer-Yatta. Settlers have stolen acres and acres of privately owned Palestinian agricultural land. They have slashed, burned and uprooted olive groves, fruit trees and vegetable gardens.  They have burned crops and barns and stolen, poisoned and slaughtered the sheep and goats of Palestinian shepherds, and they have attacked and beaten those shepherds as they tried to protect their flocks on their own land.  

Settlers have attacked people in their cars, and then returned to steal  the donkeys that serve as a desperate alternative means of transportation. They have made it impossible to walk safely from one village to another, preventing women from accessing health care, and children from reaching their schools. They have destroyed solar and wind installations, poisoned wells and broken up water pipes.  They have come in the night and attacked people in their homes so often and so viciously that some families now take their blankets and children out into the rocky hills at night because their own homes are too vulnerable for rest.  My  Palestinian friends no longer allow themselves to sleep while their villages are dark.  

In the past 12 months my country has provided Israel with $17.9 billion in military aid.  We have sent 50,000 tons of military equipment and our congress has approved the sale of an additional $20 billion in weaponry.  

For 12 months,  many of us have been doing all we can to turn back this tide and demand that our country force a ceasefire by refusing to supply weaponry to be used against civilians and aid workers.   We’ve written letters and made phone calls and signed petitions.  We’ve read and listened and studied and talked to our neighbors and co-workers.  We’ve visited state capitals and congressional offices and begged and begged our elected officials to stand up for civilian lives and we are not there yet.  We’ve held bake sales and art auctions and every imaginable benefit for emergency aid, only to see Israel block the aid at the border, minutes away from people who are eating animal feed and weeds to stay alive.  We have cried every single day for a year, and still the images and suffering that drive us to tears keep coming – and our tax dollars keep funding them. 

My brilliant friend Kathy Kelly said recently that we have a right not to kill people.  These eight words make more sense to me than any of the thousands and thousands words we have heard and read and written and spoken in the last year.  We have a right, as citizens and as civilians, not to fund death and fear and suffering.  Not to have taxes drawn from our own labor used to fund genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Not to terrify families in the night in their own homes and drive them from their lands.  

So in this dark time, when we absolutely have to find creative nonviolent ways of exercising that right, I believe that spending some time in these villages, with people who are asking the world to come to them, witness their struggle for survival, and help them tell the world before it is too late, is one path to that human right not to kill.  

I know that I am perpetually asking for your help, and I am  grateful to you for putting up with that, and allowing me to share the anguish I feel for the people of Masafer-Yatta. I became connected to these families somewhat randomly, by volunteering in their villages, and being welcomed into their homes and lives, 15 years ago. Now I struggle daily with what  my friendship and solidarity should look like in this unbearable time,  and I am deeply indebted to you for helping me to keep figuring that out, and for supporting unarmed nonviolent accompaniment.  

I hope you will hold these people in your mind in the days and months to come, and not allow their suffering to become invisible. 

Thanks and love,
Cassandra

• You can make a tax deductible donation to Palestine Partners at https://tiny.one/DonatePalestinePartners, or mail a check made out to Cassandra Dixon or Palestine Partners to:

• You can also Venmo @Cassandra-Dixon-11 (608-445-0357), or
• Use or share this GoFundMe at https://tinyurl.com/CassandraInMasaferYatta

Thank You!!!

Mary House of Hospitality · 3579 County Road G · Wisconsin Dells, WI 53965 · USA