CPT "We Know CPT. We Trust Them"

“We know CPT. We trust them.”
Lorin Peters
2011 Jan 13

In 1929, during the British Mandate, over half of the Zionists who had moved into the Old City of Hebron were massacred. Very few of the Palestinian Jews were harmed (a Palestinian Jewish community existed in Hebron for many centuries before the Zionists arrived). After Israel occupied all of the West Bank, in 1967, radical Zionists built four settlements on the rooftops, literally, of Palestinian homes and shops inside the city. In 1994, a settler, Baruch Goldstein, shot and killed 29 Muslims inside the Mosque at the Tomb of Abraham, one the holiest sites in Islam.

In desperation, the city asked CPT to establish a team as part of their very conservative Muslim community. We spend time visiting Palestinian families and listening to their stories. An elderly Muslim couple live around the corner from us in a home with a Star of David carved into the keystone of its archway.

When we visited, this couple told us that, for years, at the end of Sabbath, settlers often come, uninvited, inside their home. The settlers search the house, and frighten them. The couple offer coffee to their uninvited “guests” (such is Arab hospitality). When Rabbi Moshe Levinger, an American and the leader of the settler movement, comes, he accepts their coffee (at this point, our translator looked very confused and confessed, “This makes no sense to me”). So we have sat outside their home at the end of every Sabbath, for five years. And the Israeli officers guarding the settlers have quietly told the settlers to not enter their home.

But this past summer, when I, along with several other internationals, was watching their home (we do not normally work without other CPT-trained teammates, but we have recently been stretched very thin) the officers suddenly allowed the settlers to enter. I was quite frightened (we have been spit on or stoned by settlers on many occasions), but even more frightened for the elderly couple. So I walked in with the settlers, past the soldiers guarding them. But none of my international companions came in. Thankfully, the settlers stayed in the courtyard and did not enter the couple’s living quarters.

Afterwards, I asked the internationals why didn’t they come with me . They said they tried to, but the soldiers would not admit them. When they asked why the soldiers let me in, they said, “We know CPT. We trust them.”