Yesterday came suddenly; but it seemed to go on forever. My arm no longer aches; yet the stone hurled as a curse by a young Jewish settler in Hebron struck a more tender target. Not even the bruise remains; but my heart still hurts.

Only two days prior I began a 24-hour journey to the illegally-occupied lands of the West Bank of the Jordan River. It's a long way from Clyde to the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem where we spent our first two nights. Except for the similar terrain of hills and hollows, the regions are a universe apart. The mountains of Western North Carolina may be the world's oldest; but the recorded history of ancient Palestine is among the most intense.

I am here as part of an emergency delegation arranged by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an organization committed to nonviolent intervention in situations of violent conflict. We are soldiers without weapons, save for the power of the Spirit to disarm nations as well as hearts. We claim neither special personal virtue nor public valor, but only this: that our lives have been gripped by the biblical vision of lion and lamb living together in peace (Isaiah 11:6); by God's promised Jubilee, when all "shall sit 'neath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid" (Micah 4:4); by the assurance that one day all tears will be dried, when even death will come undone (Revelation 21:4), when creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:21).

We have been invited to Hebron, south of Jerusalem. Beginning March 29, many cities in the West Bank, including Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus and Jenin, have been invaded and occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The CPT staff of U.S., Canadian and Palestinian citizens was afraid Hebron would be next.

Hebron: Reckoned by some to be the world's oldest continuously-inhabited city. Hebron: Burial place, in the Ibrahimi Mosque, of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah. Hebron: Initial site of King David's throne.

Hebron: Home to 130,000 Palestinians and 400 heavily armed Jewish settlers, the former guarded by a 10-member Palestinian Authority security force, the latter by 2,000+ IDF soldiers. It was in Hebron that a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire in February 1994 with an automatic weapon on the crowd gathered for Friday noon prayers in the Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 and wounding hundreds. Bullet-chipped marble and masonry are still visible. Similar damage, from a 2001 shooting, is visible on the wall of the CPT office facing a Jewish settlement and IDF rooftop post.

The U.S. "war on terrorism" has provided the perfect public relations cover for Israel's incremental measures designed to take full control of the West Bank­measures which are in direct conflict with repeated United Nations resolutions and the Geneva Convention, and subsidized with $10 million per day in U.S. foreign aid.

By the time our direct flight from Toronto landed in Tel Aviv, the threatened invasion of Hebron appeared to have passed. So after a day of training in Jerusalem, our 14-person delegation was split into three groups destined for three cities, including Hebron where my group was assigned.

Tuesday evening our leaders got word of a planned vigil in an East Jerusalem (Arab) neighborhood where a Palestinian family was scheduled for eviction. The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions was seeking assistance in bolstering their opposing presence.

"The police probably won't arrive until 8 a.m., but we need to be ready," was the message from Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Committee. It was agreed that supporters would gather at 6:45 at a familiar location near the affected house and walk together. Which meant our group was up before dawn for the half-hour hike.

Legal wrangling, involving 500-year-old deeds, had come to a head, and the tenants were to be removedone more small act in the larger drama of Israeli annexation. The 2,700-year-old complaint of Isaiah comes to mind as we approached our destination:

"Woe to you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you. . . ." (5:8).

There were a dozen of us initially, some prepared to risk arrest. Then another dozen drifted in, and another, until the street was clogged and the press hovered. Police arrived a little after 8 a.m., surveyed the crowd, then left. No one knew when, or if, they would return. By mid-morning our group decided our presence was no longer needed, and we agreed to continue our journey to Hebron.

Under normal circumstances the 40-kilometer drive would take 35 minutes. But nothing is normal here. We encountered the first military check-point within minutes.

No, we were told, we could not continue on this highway. Why? Security threats. Terrorism. Oddly, no such threats applied to vehicles with Israeli tags and Jewish drivers, which breezed through the road block. This particular road is not among the growing network of Jews-only highways, but the effect is the same.

Our taxi, a boxy-shaped Ford van, turned around and took back roads winding through the countryside and several tiny villages, a scenic but rugged trip over broken, sometimes precipitously narrow pavement along the edges of steep cliffs. Meeting an oncoming vehicle was always a carefully orchestrated maneuver.

After more than an hour the road came to an unnatural end. Massive cubic-yard concrete barricades forced our halt. We would continue on foot. After a quarter of a mile there were more barriers and beyond them more taxis waiting to resume the trip. Thousands of Palestinian workers and merchants endure this daily travail. Whole trucks are unloaded at one barrier, carried by hand or push-cart to the other, then reloaded onto different trucks.

House to house, field to field, even road to road: The everyday acts of humiliation and aggravation mount, the reservoir of bitterness deepens.

Finally, we disembark in a bustling market in downtown Hebron and begin the half-mile walk to the CPT office in the town's Old City. The hike involves crossing a line from one area controlled by the Palestinian Authority to another controlled by the IDF. The latter was under curfew, meaning all citizens are confined to their homes. Such lock-downs are randomly-called and can last for days. It's quite possible for a family to run out of food during such curfews. "Internationals" like ourselves are exempt from this form of collective house-arrest, as are members of Jewish settlements.

Crossing from one zone to the other felt like entry into some twilight zonefrom the crowded, noisy streets to a ghost town where nothing moved except the occasional cat, the wind-generated flapping of tarps stretched across market stall entrances, and the occasional IDF patrol. For three more blocks we walked along the narrow, abandoned streetssome cave-like, with housing built abovepast padlocked shop doors spray-painted with a Star of David and epitaphs like "Arabs are filthy pigs" or merely "This is Israeli land."

Yesterday came suddenly, early, and with naked malice. After settling into our quarters at the CPT office (including a briefing on water conservationall water is used twice before reaching the sewer), we got a rooftop visual tour of the city. An IDF command and fire outpost was perched in camouflage netting on an adjacent roof. Two other encampments were visible blocks away. The fearful racket resulting from their designated mission would become apparent on subsequent nights, once with the coordinating presence of Apache attack helicopters, "Made in America" along with the modified M-16 rifles carried by the IDF.

Later that afternoon we began our "patrol," one of the more common tactics in CPT's mission of offering public presence and being available to intervene in potentially provocative encounters involving soldiers/settlers and Palestinians. As we made our way along one major roadeerily deserted, devoid of traffica rock thrown from behind skipped along the pavement near our feet. I turned to see a young boy, no older than ten years, scurrying to find another stone to toss. Then another, and another. His young arm and inexperienced aim made it immediately obvious that no real threat was imminent. But his sinister grin and apparent delight in this mischief froze me in my tracks. Seconds later I suddenly became aware that one of his insults was coming straight at my head, so I instinctively raised my arm, which absorbed the impact. The collision of stone with flesh is an ancient animus in this part of the world, where rocks are more commonplace than dirt.

A few minutes later our unwanted and unwelcomed presence was reinforced, again by settler children. As the six of us continued our stroll, two preadolescent girls, followed by a slightly-older third, were approaching. The two in front bore facial expressions suggesting intrigue and curiosity, maybe even a cautious smile. But as our paths convergedours on the sidewalk, theirs a few feet out in the empty roadwaythe third girl nonchalantly veered in our direction. Without warning she doused us with the contents of her chocolate milk carton. And I recall hearing giggles from the other two, very much like those I remember from my own daughters' pajama parties of years past.

Physically we were unscathed, but I was left emotionally trembling. A palpable nausea extended downward from my gut into my legs and upward into my chest and shoulders. There is something especially poignant and frightening about the petty violence of children.

Dodging bullets would have been easier.

There is a popular saying here: Stay in the Middle East for a week, and you think you can write a book. Stay for a month, and you think, well, maybe an

Does the conflict here lend itself to simple solutions? No. But fatalism is no less dishonest. Later in this journey I overheard a fragment of a conversation between one of my fellow travelers and a journalist. The latter exclaimed: "Truth? You want truth? There is no truth here. This is the Middle East!" I wanted to butt in and respond: If there's no chance for truth, there's no possibility for a solution. And if there's no solution that makes you a scavenger, earning a living on people's misery!