Halfway
between the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem lies the tiny village of Neve
Shalom/Wahat al-Salam. Just 50 families call it home. But despite its size, the
village has attracted international attention, including Nobel Prize
nominations.
The Hebrew and Arabic phrases Neve Shalom and Wahat al-Salam translate into English as “oasis of peace.” The
village was founded by Bruno Hussar, an Egyptian Jew who converted to
Catholicism, and it takes its name from a passage in the book of the prophet
Isaiah, which can be translated, in part: “My people shall dwell in an oasis of
peace.”
It’s no accident that the phrase
comes from a text recognized as scripture by the three Abrahamic faiths —
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each of which is represented in the
village. But religious identities are just one part of the diversity that
villagers try to bridge in their daily life: Although all of Neve Shalom/Wahat
al-Salam’s residents are Israeli citizens, half are Palestinians and the other
half are Jewish.
Last week, two of the village’s
residents were in Rochester as part of a whirlwind tour of the United States. Abdessalam
Najjar, a Palestinian, is the village’s secretary general (the equivalent of a
mayor). His was also one of the first four families to move to the village at
its inception in 1978, after meeting Hussar as a university student a few years
earlier.
Michal Zak, who is Jewish,
discovered the village as a student when she went there to take a course. She
moved there after college.
“I wanted to do something for this
cause of Jewish-Arab relations,” she says, “and I wasn’t satisfied with what I
was doing just as a student going to demonstrations and dialogue groups in the
university. I wanted to do something deeper, and also that it would be more my
life, not that I have a life and then once a week I go to the demonstration.”
She has filled that goal and more,
working as the deputy director and adult department coordinator for the
village’s School for Peace.
The tour that brought the pair
through Rochester was organized by American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat
al-Salam.
“We do this a couple of times a year,”
says executive Director Deanna Armbruster. “It’s an opportunity to let people
know there are possibilities for peaceful cooperation between Jews and Arabs.”
It’s also an opportunity to keep US
public attention focused on the Middle East.
“The role that Americans play in
supporting efforts of peace isn’t to be underestimated,” Armbruster says. “We
all have a role to play.”
What follows is an edited transcript
of a conversation with Najjar and Zak:
City
Newspaper:Is the model of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam
something that you see the wider region being able to replicate?
Michal
Zak: I think that’s the model, that there should be equality between all
the citizens of the region. That would be my political solution, to change the
model of dominance and dominated and to have a model based on equality. But if
you mean do I think there should be other Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, other
communities, I don’t think so. If they are established, that’s fine, but we
don’t see ourselves as duplicating it in any way.
What’s more important for me is to
try to train people in our approach to looking at power relations, and to try
to implement some of these things wherever they are. For me, that’s more
effective than to have another community.
City
Newspaper:How does a political idea like a
two-state solution relate to what you’re saying?
Abdessalam
Najjar: A two-state solution or a one-state solution is a position. You can
achieve equality by this kind of solution or that kind of solution. You can
also create unequal relations with both kinds of solutions. The most important
thing in our approach is the equality, not the kind of solution. Any solution
should be achieved by the agreement of both sides. If they agree that equality
is one of the principles, then how they perform it — two states, one state
— is not so [important].
If you will ask me as a Palestinian,
I don’t want to see a Palestinian state with no future or with no possibility
of economic development, freedom, cultural development, prosperity, and all of
these things.
Zak: A solution of two states doesn’t solve the problem inside Israel between the
minority and the majority.
Najjar:
If we have a one-state solution, the same.
City:I assume you’ve been following the events
recently with Prime Minister Sharon’s visit to Texas….
Najjar: I knew it would not go anywhere. It’s not a peace process. Both sides didn’t
once come to agree on the principle that it should be equal on both sides.
Zak: It’s a peace process between Sharon and the United States.
Najjar: How can you call it a peace process and at the same time keep the right of
legitimacy for occupation? That’s not a peace process. The peace process is a
way of accepting the other side as legitimate to exist like you and to work
with him on an equal basis. Not to dominate, not to dictate the solution.
Peace will not be “Now we have two
states, and close the borders between the two states.” This will not work. If
there are no active, constructive relations, it’s not peace. We will wait until
the coming clashes; they will come.
I know this is not easy. But if we
will have some kind of creativity — to imagine it how it should be 20 years
from now, 60 years from now, that Jewish people from Haifa can travel to
Damascus, and then after that go to Amman, sleep there, and then go to Baghdad,
and a Palestinian living in Baghdad can take the airplane, land in Tel Aviv or
in Jaffa or in Haifa and visit and do things — this is the way that we should
imagine it. The people can’t imagine it — not Palestinians, not Israelis.
City: Do you see hope in what’s taking place in the Palestinian
leadership?
Najjar: No. I think the problem was not in the Palestinian leadership. I’m not sure,
but I think that if there were a need for brave and tough decisions, Mahmoud
Abbas is not able to do it. Arafat was able to do it, because Arafat had more
support from his people than Mahmoud Abbas. I don’t agree with all of the
western media, mainly the Americans and the Israelis, that Arafat was the
problem in not going ahead in the peace process.
City:You said earlier that one reason there’s not
peace is that the problem lies with the people themselves. You said they can’t
imagine peace. Do you feel the work that you’re doing at the village is helping
to change that, to enable people to imagine peace?
Zak: I think the main problem is not that they can’t imagine peace; that’s a result
of the situation. The main issue has to do with power. It’s the fact that
Israel wants to dominate the whole area and the people. There has been a
process of dehumanizing the Palestinians. This is the most dangerous process
that has been going on, the dehumanization, because it’s giving legitimacy to
do almost anything in the name of security.
The fact that Israel [feels that it]
can’t trust its neighbors — “If they had an army, they could not be trusted
not to attack, so therefore they should not have an army, so therefore they
should not be an independent state,” and all these things — is because
Israelis don’t see them as equal partners in the area.
City:What have you learned about the peace
process in your experiences in the village?
Najjar:
The peace process should start with changing our assumptions and our
attitudes toward ourselves and toward the other side. Nobody can work for peace
and oppression or occupation. We need first to liberate our selves from being
oppressor and oppressed. It’s not an easy process. We should empower ourselves
by taking responsibility for what’s going on.
What we are doing in Wahat
al-Salam/NeveShalom is making [peacemaking part of] our daily life decisions.
Of course, any relationship between us as Jews and Palestinians inside the
community has meaning on the wide level. Small things, like what language we
are using between ourselves — it has a meaning, because it’s a tool.
City: What do you hope this trip to Rochester will accomplish?
Najjar: We are not in a very isolated place. All that’s happening in the Middle East
has an impact everywhere in the world. We are in the global village. Nobody can
close his eyes and say “this is there.” What’s happening there is influencing
decisions here, life here and everywhere in the world.
If we are not taking care — all
the citizens of this world — how to achieve and how to create peace, sooner
or later everybody will suffer from the continuation of the active conflicts in
the Middle East and somewhere else. And not Americans or anybody else can say,
“We have been OK; the others, they haven’t been OK.”
To help peace in the Middle East
means to prevent conflict in the United States.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2005.
