No Peace of Mind for Model of Jewish-Arab Coexistence

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.”

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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.”