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Los Angeles Times, August
31, 1997
NO PEACE OF MIND FOR MODEL OF JEWISH-ARAB COEXISTENCE;
ISRAEL: VILLAGE
FEARS IT WILL BE DOMINATED BY NEW NEIGHBORS--A DEVELOPER AND
A UNION OF
RETIRED ANTI-TERRORIST POLICE.
RICHARD BOUDREAUX, TIMES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NEVE SHALOM, Israel
Clustered on a hilltop with a breathtaking view of the sparse
Ayalon
Valley, they have labored for nearly two decades in solitude. Arabs
and
Jews live together here in equal numbers, neighbors in 32 little
stucco
houses with riotous flower gardens.
To show how it can be done, they share political power, send
their
children to the same grammar school, learn each other's language and
run
weekend encounters for Arab and Jewish high schoolers who trickle in
from
outside.
While their ideal of coexistence is not widely shared in Israel,
these
idealists have at least been left alone to pursue it. So remote that
the
nearest settlement is barely visible down below, their village has
always
felt more ignored than threatened. Until now.
Two outsiders--a wealthy Jewish developer and a union of retired
Israeli
anti-terrorist police officers--have acquired adjacent land and
applied for
permits to build suburban-style villas. Both have powerful
backers and
tentative approval from government agencies. If either is
allowed to go
ahead, the village's carefully engineered utopia could be
swept away by a
tide of newcomers, its leaders say.
"For them, it's a question of location, here or somewhere else,"
Ahmad
Hijazi, the village's top elected official, said as he pointed to a
framed
aerial photograph that dominates his tiny office. "For us, it's a
question
of survival."
The encroachment has diverted Hijazi and his band of pioneers from
a
minuscule but one-of-a-kind mission to pacify the Middle East and
bogged
them down in something mundane--a costly string of battles before
Israeli
courts and planning boards.
While the arguments are mainly technical, the bigger issue is whether
a
community promoting Arab-Jewish equality can muster enough political
clout
to safeguard its place in an Israel that is often accused
of
discriminating against Arab minorities and cannot find peace with
Arab
neighbors.
For a small segment of Israeli society--the relative few who have
been
drawn to the hilltop--the isolation and tolerant atmosphere here
have
changed outlooks and even lives. The village's full name is Neve Shalom
/
Wahat al-Salam, Hebrew and Arabic for "oasis of peace."
Straddling a line between Israel and its occupied territories in the
West
Bank, Neve Shalom was founded as a secular village by a Dominican
priest on
100 acres leased from a Roman Catholic monastery. Since the
arrival of Jews
and Arabs in 1978, it has expanded slowly, using a
screening process for
newcomers that analyzes handwriting, among other
things, to test character.
Neve Shalom now has 140 residents. Most adults commute to jobs
elsewhere
in highly segregated Israel, returning to a place with no
national flag, no
Arab quarter, no Jewish quarter. A white-domed House of
Silence is the only
place of worship, open to anyone who prays quietly.
Over the years, 20,000 teenage Jews and Arab citizens of Israel
have
passed through mixed encounters at the village's School for Peace.
The
school has also trained 1,500 young counselors to work with
other
Arab-Jewish groups, feeding Israel's small but active peace movement.
"I was shocked when I first came," said Hijazi, who attended a
weekend
encounter here at age 17 and returned to teach. "The message I had
heard
everywhere was that Arabs were inferior. Here I found an environment
where
we could question everything, make changes in this small place and ask
why
things cannot be different elsewhere."
Hijazi, a 30-year-old sociologist, heads Neve Shalom's governing
council
of two Arabs and two Jews and is believed to be the only Arab
leader of a
mixed Israeli community. He wants to expand Neve Shalom to
make room for 200
families on a waiting list and for a long-planned
university that will teach
conflict resolution.
But the village, which got its government-installed water system just
two
years ago and runs mainly on donations from Jews abroad, has been
rebuffed
for more than a decade by Israel's Land Authority in repeated
efforts to
acquire adjacent property from the state.
Villagers have watched uneasily as the land around them has become
more
and more coveted by rival applicants--people wanting to escape
urban
crowding but remain close to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Unease turned
to
alarm in Neve Shalom a few years ago when the retired officers, a
group
not known for pacifist views, were given the next hilltop to
the
southwest.
A court challenge kept this Israeli "Cop Land" from getting a
building
permit. But the effort has just been revived with backing from the
Land
Authority and Ariel Sharon, the hard-line Israeli minister of
national
infrastructure.
A second threat arose when Rafi Tal, a private developer, bought a
stretch
of the valley just north of Neve Shalom and won a regional
planning board's
approval last year to build 140 villas for Jews only.
Both projects await the go-ahead from higher planning bodies in
Jerusalem.
Neve Shalom's leaders say they could tolerate either set of neighbors
if
not for one catch: An ordinance meant to encourage settlement of
Israel's
remote areas bans the building of new communities here on the
central coastal
plain; it allows only for expansion of existing ones.
That means any new
neighbors of Neve Shalom must be joined under the same
local government and
could easily dominate it.
"One meeting, one vote, would be enough to destroy everything," said
Nava
Sonnenschein, an early settler who runs the School for Peace. "Peace
and
coexistence are so unrealistic in this country. To teach those things,
you
need a reality like this to show that real people can achieve them."
Meir Viezel, a kibbutz farmer who governs a region of 54
villages
including Neve Shalom, is actively supporting the developer over
the
villagers' objection. "How can I go to someone who has paid $ 10
million
for a piece of land and tell him he cannot build on it?" Viezel said.
But Viezel has promised to lobby for a waiver so the two communities
can
coexist under separate local rule.
Tal said that's fine with him too, because he could charge more for
his
villas if the buyers "don't have to live with Arabs."
The Interior Ministry has been reluctant in the past to grant
such
waivers, however, and, in the absence of one, Neve Shalom's leaders
are
fighting the proposed villas at every stage.
"They got their land practically free, and they don't want anyone
else
near them," Tal complained after the villagers turned down
several
compromises, including a financial stake in his project. "Do they
have a
monopoly on peace?"
Neve Shalom never hears such harsh words from Israeli leaders, but
it
doesn't hear much cheering either. The best it has done is a promise
from
Shimon Peres, who never came when he was prime minister, to visit
when
school reopens Monday--"to show that we're not just 32 crazy families,"
a
village official said.
But their appeals to conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and
members of his Cabinet to help remain unanswered. A spokesman,
David
Bar-Illan, said the prime minister is "very sympathetic" but
generally
"reluctant to go over the heads of the planning boards."
"I doubt there's an explicit policy against Neve Shalom," said
David
Newman, professor of political geography at Israel's
Ben-Gurion
University. "But when you're fighting over land for new
communities,
access to government ministers is very critical, and Neve Shalom
doesn't
have that. It's too far left of the mainstream."