'Oasis of Peace' unites Arabs and Jews

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By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

NEVE SHALOM, Israel -- When Brother Bruno Hussar, a Dominican priest, came to this windy hilltop many years ago, he saw an "Oasis of Peace" where people of different religions would live in equality and harmony.

When Abdessalam Najjar came to the very same hilltop, all he could see was a lot of nothing.

"There were no houses, no trees, no road," Najjar recalls. "We found Brother Bruno sitting under a small hut and we asked him, "Where is the oasis?' He laughed and said, "You are here now -- we have an oasis of peace.' "

"It was a dream in his mind, there was nothing in reality."

Still, Hussar's vision of peaceful coexistence was a powerful one in a land rent by age-old conflict between Arabs and Jews. In 1978, the first five families -- one Arab, four Jewish -- settled on the rocky crest midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It was the start of a community unique in Israel, an unprecedented attempt to see if Jews and Palestinian Arabs could learn to understand and respect each other's faith and culture while preserving their own.

Now, 22 years later, it is a success of sorts. Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, as the village is called in Hebrew and Arabic, is home to 20 Jewish families and 20 Arab ones, about 150 people in all.

Jews and Muslims live side by side. Villagers of both religions work together in Neve Shalom's guest house, offices and schools.

The children are bilingual and attend classes taught by an Arab instructor one week, a Jewish instructor the next. Students plan activities for Islamic and Jewish holidays, and learn about the region's complex history from Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints.

"I know all the holidays (Muslims) have and they know mine," says Jonathan Shippin, 17, who moved here in 1984 with his Jewish mother and Christian father. "When I talk to other people (outside), they give me all kinds of reasons why the Jews are always right but I know the other side so I can answer."

Not free of tension

Neve Shalom has been called a paradise and Utopian. But residents stress that the village, with its mixed Arab-Jewish population, reflects the world beyond its borders. Hence, it is subject to many of the tensions that are making it so difficult to reach a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.

Major events such as the Persian Gulf War have temporarily divided Jewish and Arab villagers, with each side struggling to understand the other's feelings.

A seemingly innocuous plan to honor a Jewish resident killed in a military helicopter crash caused emotional wounds that have yet to fully heal. And, just recently, a bitter election for a key village job has left some residents wondering whether Arabs and Jews can ever live together.

That seems a minority view. However, even long-time villagers such as Abdessalam Najjar, whose family was the first Arab one to move here, cautions that Neve Shalom should not be seen as a model for the region as a whole.

"We don't think that all Jews and Palestinians should live in communities like ours," Najjar says. "Just the opposite -- we think there is a big desire to live in separate places and we should respect that. But to live in separate communities doesn't mean you should be at war. You can live separately yet still respect and cooperate with each other."

About the time Hussar was proposing an interfaith community, Najjar and some friends were discussing how interfaith education might help bridge the divide between Arabs and Jews.

"He had the idea of a community, we had the idea of a school and we started working together," says Najjar, then a teacher.

An order of Trappist monks leased Hussar several acres in a hilly area called " "the bitter land' -- nothing but thistles and stones," Najjar says. "I asked Bruno how much money it would take to build this community and he said he had only $20. But then he said, "$20 and people with a strong commitment is better than $2-million with no commitment.' "

Najjar and his friends scouted neighboring towns, where they found empty huts and old military barracks in need of cleaning but usable. They got permission to move them to the tiny village where they became the nucleus of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam.

Starting with the first 10 or so people, the basic admissions criteria were simple.

"If I, as a Palestinian, don't accept Jews here, I won't come and live here," Najjar says. "If I as a Jew don't accept the right of Palestinians to be equal, I won't come live here. We should be people of peace, accepting the other side as equal."

In 1979, villagers established the School for Peace, which has brought together more than 25,000 Jews and Arabs in a range of activities meant to foster better interfaith relations.

A year later, with the number of children in the village beginning to grow, Najjar's wife started a kindergarten. As the children got older, that was joined by the only bilingual, Hebrew-Arabic primary school in Israel.

The school has been so successful that it now draws 90 percent of its students from outside the village, some coming from as far as Jerusalem, 45 minutes away. Children are taught in both languages, and learn about Jewish holidays such as Passover and Islamic ones such as Ramadan. Lessons are sometimes followed by parties attended by parents of both faiths.

Although the children are still too young to study history in great depth, the school tries to present a balanced view of events that are perceived very differently by Jews and Arabs. To teach about the "tractor wars" of the 1960s, when farmers began to encroach on the no man's land between Israel and the West Bank, the school brought in a Jewish kibbutznik and a Palestinian farmer.

"They told two completely different stories," says Howard Shippin, whose son, Jonathan, attended the primary school. "Kids could see how it is possible to describe a historical event very differently."

The Shippins moved to Neve Shalom in 1984 after considering another type of semi-commune called a moshav. They liked the moshav's rural flavor but not the emphasis on conformity.

"In many ways it was quite a Utopian lifestyle -- they'd find you a job, give you a house and medical insurance," Shippin says. "But they had created a psychological model of those already there -- if you fit in, fine. It was also about a mile from a large Arab town so we asked, "What connection do you have with the Arab town?' and they said none whatsoever.

"We saw Neve Shalom as much more natural for us, though not as natural for Israel, which is a place where people tend to bunch together according to their backgrounds. We wanted to be more broad-minded and have more diversity of education."

The Shippins, yoga teachers who had been living in the Israeli city of Haifa, had never had much contact with Arabs. They were pleasantly surprised by their new neighbors.

"People were very hospitable -- you'd just be passing by and they'd say, "Tfadal' -- please come in. My son was about a year and a half old then -- I used to shepherd him around and we were often invited in. That is a natural way people make connections -- through their children -- because children don't differentiate between Arabs and Jews. You wander around behind your kids and meet people."

Shippin's three children are bilingual, although Shippin expects that Jonathan, the oldest, will lose some of his fluency in Arabic now that he is attending an all-Jewish high school outside the village.

"When children graduate from our primary school, they have more opportunities to forget the second language," Shippin says. "They don't have that reinforcement in school because the level of Arabic taught in Jewish schools is very poor and all their friends are Jewish."

'We are not in a bubble'

Language can be a sore point even in a village like Neve Shalom. Although Arabic is considered an official language of Israel, Hebrew remains the dominant tongue and is far more widely used both in speech and on signs. As a result, most Israeli Arabs, including those in Neve Shalom, are fluent in Hebrew while most Jews can barely stumble along in Arabic.

At the village's School for Peace, which brings Jews and Arabs together for workshops and discussions, sessions typically begin with a debate over which language to use.

"For Jews, it's obvious -- "We're in Israel and we don't speak Arabic,' " says Najjar, who often acts as a moderator.

Meanwhile, "the Palestinian reaction is, "We're here and we have the same rights as you.' But in reality, they end up speaking in Hebrew."

There are other tensions between Neve Shalom's Jews and Arabs.

During the 1991 Gulf War, villagers of both faiths huddled in the same bomb shelter for more than 10 days while Iraq's Saddam Hussein was firing Scud missiles at Israel. But the reaction to the Scuds was very different.

The Jewish villagers were frightened and more than a little upset that Israel had agreed not to retaliate. Some Palestinian villagers, though, cheered the idea of an Arab leader standing up to what they saw as yet another example of evil Western imperialism in the Arab world.

"I could see their point of view, but for myself it was difficult to become enamored of this violent dictator," Shippin says. "Very few Jews saw any good in him while the Palestinians were somewhat siding with him."

Najjar, an Arab, agrees it is hard to reconcile support for an aggressor nation such as Iraq with living in a community devoted to peace. But, he says, Palestinians thought it "a joke" for the United States to talk about liberating Kuwait when it overlooked so many violations of Palestinians' civil rights.

"We had fear and anger that the Americans were going to win because their policy is not fair to us as Palestinians," Najjar says. "This caused the Palestinians to be anti-U.S. intervention -- we were not supporting Saddam but the Jews at that time understood us as pro-Saddam."

The villagers talked things through, and each side came to understand the other's viewpoint. Frictions eased to the point that Najjar now admits he had "a feeling of joy" when he learned of the Scud attacks.

"Finally somebody was threatening the Israelis and I had never seen the Israelis frightened before. Now I can say that without any problem but I couldn't say that before."

In 1997, differences between Jews and Palestinians were again thrown into sharp relief when the village experienced its first accidental death.

Tom Kithain, who had grown up in Neve Shalom, was among 73 Israeli soldiers killed when two military helicopters collided on their way to Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon. The entire village mourned him, but problems began when Kithain's family said they wanted to put up a memorial.

The idea did not sit well with some Palestinian villagers, who questioned whether there should be a military-style monument to an Israeli soldier who might have been called on to fight against their fellow Arabs.

"I was deeply upset (about the death) but I thought it wasn't right that Tom, a boy from my village, my neighbor, was sent with the army to Lebanon where he might be asked to blow up my cousins," Nasser Srour, a doctor, told Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper.

Because Kithain was an avid athlete, villagers finally agreed to put up a plaque at the basketball court that reads: "In memory of our Tom Kithain, a child of peace who was killed in war." But many residents abstained from voting, and bruised feelings linger.

"I think the Palestinians overreacted," says Coral Aron, a British-born Jew who has lived in Neve Shalom for 20 years. "When they come here they know Jews are going into the army. . . . The thought instilled in kids here is not that they're fighting Arabs but enemies of the state -- not Israeli Arabs but Arabs outside."

The latest rift occurred in July during the election for village secretary. Srour called another Arab a "traitor" -- in effect alleging the man had cozied up to Jews too much in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to win the job. That led to death threats, a police investigation and accusations that Neve Shalom's Jews didn't show enough concern about a matter seen as just a quarrel between Arabs.

"Apart from three Jewish families, none of the others even picked up a telephone to find out what was happening to see how they could help me," Srour, the target of the threats, told Ha'aretz.

"If what happens between two Arab residents is not the concern of the whole community, there is no point in my living in Neve Shalom."

Some villagers say the tension among Arabs here reflects that among Israeli Arabs in general, a long-silent minority that is starting to demand a greater role in Israeli politics and society.

"There's kind of a rising nationalism among Arabs," Shippin says. "The danger is that Arabs who live in a community with Jews will be seen as collaborators and not as patriotic toward their own people as they should be. It's not by chance these things are happening now -- we are not in a bubble here, we're very much affected by what happens outside. . . . I don't think it will break the community up, but perhaps it will affect the quality of the experiment we have here and the level of cooperation."

For now, though, Neve Shalom remains very much a going concern. The village has space for 150 families, and 15 are waiting for their homes to be built so they can move in.

The village schools continue to attract international attention and serve as a model for those in other countries plagued by religious friction. Najjar and other villagers helped train 40 teachers from Macedonia, who returned home to start several kindergartens attended by Muslims and Orthodox Christians. Similar projects are under way with Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo.

Although Neve Shalom may never be as peaceful as Hussar envisioned, it remains an intriguing experiment that has survived far longer than many expected.

"Despite the bad things, we have to recognize that no one else in the Middle East has been able to do this," Najjar says. "If we were all saints, we wouldn't be connected to reality."

-- Susan Taylor Martin can be reached at susan@sptimes.com

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