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This story was published in
A-section on Sunday, April 28, 2002.
Arabs, Israelis forge haven of
coexistence
By
Deirdre Shesgreen
Post-Dispatch
Washington Bureau
NEVE SHALOM/WAHAT AL-SALAM, Israel - "OASIS OF
PEACE"
A broad grin crossed Lior Shalem's boyish face
as he drove up the long, winding road leading into this picturesque
village and made a turn toward the plot of land where his house will
be built.
Here, he and his wife will have Jewish and Arab
neighbors. They will hear Arabic on the street as much as Hebrew.
And his 14-month-old daughter will go to school with Jewish and Arab
children.
Fed by suicide attacks in Jerusalem and military
attacks in the West Bank, the mistrust and hatred between Jews and
Arabs have never seemed greater in this region. But for Shalem's
family, there is no better time to move to a town where coexistence
is the ruling principle.
"There is no other possibility,"
said Shalem, 38, a Jewish architect, referring to his family's
decision to move here.
The village is known by both its
Hebrew and Arabic names, which mean "Oasis of Peace." It is home to
40 families, 20 of them Jewish and 20 Arab. Ten more families,
including Shalem's, are building houses.
Nestled on a hilltop
about halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, this community is a
refuge from the tension and violence that have gripped this
region.
But even here, the political and military clashes are
taking their toll, creating small tensions among residents and
raising new doubts about the future.
"We have conflict," said
Abdessalam Najjar, the community's development director and one of
the town's original Arab residents. "Everything happening outside
influences our life inside."
Breaking down
walls
Founded in the early 1970s by Father Bruno
Hussar, a Dominican priest, the village has one main circular
street, with a few little offshoots, and is centered around a guest
house and the village's main office building. Although it's grown
over the last 30 years from a few lone families to the current 40,
the village, dotted with eucalyptus trees and rose bushes, still has
a tranquil feel.
Some residents, such as the teachers and
town administrators, work in the village, while others commute to
jobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Although there are plenty of other
cities where Arabs and Jews live together, Neve Shalom is the only
place here where they choose to do so with the goal of equality and
coexistence.
All those who live here came with the view,
expressed by the village founder's philosophy, that they can break
down walls of mistrust and hostility by living side-by-side and
building mutual respect.
The place where those principles are
most on display is the school, where children are taught in Hebrew
and Arabic and learn about the histories of both people. About 300
children attend the school, with about 90 percent coming from
surrounding Arab and Jewish towns.
On Independence Day, the
children spent the first hour of classes together, then separated to
learn about their culture's history of that day as well as that of
their neighbors. At the end of the day, the teachers put big sheets
of paper on the ground and told the children to draw war. The
resulting pictures included soldiers, tanks and guns, said Diana
Shalufe-Rizek, an Arab co-principal at the school. The teachers then
asked the children to draw peace, without giving them new paper.
Some crossed out their pictures or tried to draw over them, while
others just gave up, she said.
The point of the lesson was
clear: "It's hard to make peace from war," said
Shalufe-Rizek.
Current events are testing the founding
principles of the village.
The most recent friction occurred
last month, when Arabs living in Israel organized a strike to show
their solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza.
The Palestinians in Neve Shalom decided to join by
closing the school for a day, giving little notice to the Jewish
families.
"They felt very angry," Najjar recalled. "The
Jewish parents said this was a very violent action."
The
Palestinians were taken aback because they considered it a
nonviolent show of support for their people.
But such
incidents seem to be the exception, not the rule. Mostly, residents
say, the conflict has brought a new unity and a resolve to prove
that coexistence can work.
Until the beginning of the
violence in the fall of 2000, "there was a feeling that it was just
a matter of time" before peace was achieved, said Howard Shippen, a
British-born Israeli who lives here with his wife, Dorit, and their
three children.
But suddenly, the violence "exposed the bluff
of coexistence," Shippen said. It was seen within the village as a
direct challenge to their beliefs.
"We were sort of under
pressure to show that what we're representing is not phony, it's
something real," Shippen said.
And when the Israeli army
moved into the West Bank, the military action "mobilized" the
village to look for things they could do together to address the
situation, said Bob Mark, a Jewish teacher at the primary school
here.
Two weeks ago, they began a humanitarian relief project
to bring doctors and food into West Bank towns that have suffered as
a result of the military incursions.
"This activity together
helped us feel that we are on the same side," said Dorit
Shippen.
It also sent a message to others outside this small
haven.
"We wanted to tell the other peace supporters not to
lose hope," said Najjar. "We decided we should put aside diversity
and be united ... to face the nonpeaceful dynamics
outside."
No fireworks
Even during the
celebration of Israel's Independence Day this month, when one might
expect that recollections of the country's 1948 war would bring
strife to the surface, there was relative harmony.
What
Israelis know as the War of Independence, Palestinians know as
"Al-Naqba," or "the Catastrophe."
So unlike most of the rest
of Israel, Independence Day in Neve Shalom wasn't the scene of
barbecues, fireworks or family celebrations.
"We cannot
celebrate our independence," said Dorit Shippen. "We're not
happy."
Some families, Arab and Jewish alike, marked the day
by visiting Palestinian towns destroyed in the 1948 war and erecting
plaques detailing their histories. Others simply stayed
home.
The day before, Memorial Day, when Israelis remember
the soldiers killed in the 1948 war, the Jewish families here held a
quiet ceremony at the grave of Tom Kitain, a young man who lived
here with his parents and was killed in a helicopter crash in 1997
when his unit was moving into Lebanon.
Kitain's death was the
source of an earlier village rift. After the helicopter crash five
years ago, Kitain's family wanted to build a memorial for
him.
The Palestinians objected to commemorating the death of
a soldier sent to kill their people, recalled Najjar. "The Jews
said, 'Did we lose the right to memorialize our sons just because we
came to live with Palestinians?'" he said.
In the end, a
small plaque was erected in Kitain's memory, across from the village
basketball court.
Differing
solutions
In talking about the current conflict, it
is clear that residents share a common view: Arabs and Israelis
alike condemn the suicide bombings by Palestinians. And they both
adamantly opposed Israel's recent military incursions into the West
Bank.
"The crime is very obviously the occupation," said
Mark, the Jewish teacher.
He dismissed the notion, widely
held by other Jewish Israelis, that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
is at fault for the collapse of the peace process because he did not
accept the proposal that then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered him
at Camp David in 2000.
"The negotiations until today have
been conducted with one person holding all the cards, and the other
with none," Mark said, adding that it was a "myth" that Barak
offered Arafat a sweet deal.
If there is any political
disagreement in Neve Shalom, it's over the nature of the solution,
said Ranek Rizek, an Arab who has lived here with his wife, the
school's co-principal, since 1984. Many of the Palestinian families
believe there should be one state, with two parliaments, but a
complete sharing of the land.
"The best thing is not to cut
the land again," he said. "The two-state solution is not possible,"
unless it's a temporary step on the way to broader
cooperation.
But some of the Israelis are leery that such a
plan would work.
For example, Mark said he thinks the
"short-term" solution is for Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967
borders and create two states. In the long term, he doesn't talk
about one state, but about broader cooperation, such as what is
happening with the European Union.
In the current climate,
both scenarios seem far-fetched, or at least a long way off. But
residents here have not given up hope for peace within the village
or outside it.
"We are not fighting," Najjar said. "We are
learning how to live together."
And, he noted, at least some
others must still have faith. The waiting list to move here is over
300 names long, with only 90 lots for new homes.
He said,
"With most families who call now, we say come back after five
years."
===
Settlement is attacked: Wearing
Israeli army uniforms, gunmen enter homes and kill four people.
A6
===
Living in Jerusalem: An Arab man and a Jewish
family lament freedoms lost and opportunities missed.
A7
Reporter Deirdre Shesgreen:\ E-mail:
dshesgreen@post-dispatch.com \Phone:
202-298-6880
Published in
A-section on Sunday, April 28, 2002.
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