Against the grain
A recent conference in Tel Aviv dared to raise the subject of Arab-Jewish "shared society" -- not a goal in which most Israelis seem to have much interest these days
Givat Haviva, the educational-programming center dedicated to advancing shared Arab-Jewish existence in Israel, held its annual Shared Society conference last week. Founded in 1949, Givat Haviva operates an international high school whose student body is divided equally between Arabs, Jews and foreign students; highly regarded Arabic-language courses, and a number of other experiential programs intended to advance the cause of shared existence.
Over the past two years, unfortunately, Arabs and Jews have largely steered clear of one another. Israeli Jews for the most part are unwilling to make distinctions when it comes to Arabs, even when the Arabs are their neighbors and fellow citizens, whose towns also are hit by enemy missiles, with the difference being that their residences and workplaces generally lack shelters or safe rooms.
Jews are quick to criticize Arabs for their minimal participation in the mass “democracy” protests in 2023 – and seem not to recognize that the movement deliberately avoided addressing the inequality Arab citizens suffer, not to mention the injustices suffered by their brethren in the territories by the ongoing occupation, which is coming up on its 58th anniversary.
Certainly, there was great relief all around that the war initiated by Hamas in October of 2023 was not accompanied by domestic communal violence similar to that which shook the country in May 2021, but that can be partly explained by the fact that Arabs were afraid even to open their mouths. That was because it was made immediately clear to them after October 7 that any wrong move – which could include a simple expression of sympathy on social media for the deaths of their fellow Palestinians in Gaza – would be interpreted reflexively as support for Hamas, and could lead not only to social ostracism but also to criminal prosecution, as happened to thousands of Arab citizens following October 7.
Hebrew-language media, which in recent years had made great strides in featuring Arab reporters as well as interviewees on-screen, largely excluded them after October 2023. And those media consumers who wanted to learn about the impact of the war on the enemy have had to turn to foreign sources. And if the “government of change” that was in power in 2021-2022 showed political perspicacity and moral courage in inviting an Arab party (the Islamist Ra’am, headed by Mansour Abbas) into the coalition, two years after its members were returned to the opposition, some of its members drew the conclusion that the expedient move was to promise not to make that mistake again, a commitment that Knesset Member Gilad Kariv, of Labor (now part of the “Democrats” party, an alliance with the remnants of Meretz), was sharply critical of when he appeared at the Givat Haviva conference.
Attending a half-day of sessions about shared existence at the bright and airy Yitzhak Rabin Center, adjacent to Tel Aviv University, offered, if nothing else, an opportunity to commiserate with like-minded people. Hopefully, it would also be a way to recharge one’s batteries and be exposed to some new ideas about such issues as crime in the Arab community, the future of Arab-Jewish political cooperation, education, and the positive news to be found in economics statistics. Also, at the end of the conference, a generous lunch was served up.
Here are some of the things that I took away with me from the conference:
• It was bittersweet to be at the Rabin Center, a combination library, conference center and museum dedicated to the life and legacy of the prime minister who was assassinated in 1995. Today, Rabin is no less polarizing a figure than he was three decades ago – to the extent that he is part of the public ethos at all. Rabin was no revolutionary, but he had the courage and the intellectual integrity to allow himself to change. By the time he became prime minister in 1992, he had developed a vision of a better future for Israel and its neighbors, not just of never-ending war. On second thought, that seems revolutionary today.
Being surrounded by photographs of Rabin was not only a tragic reminder of what might have been had he not been murdered, but also of the fact that three decades later, he has been subjected to such demonization on the right that Israelis aren’t even able to mourn him together.
• Ironically, the individual who seemed to be on everyone’s mind, though he was not physically present at the conference, was intertwined with Yitzhak Rabin in the ugliest of ways. That person of course is Itamar Ben-Gvir, who just three weeks before Rabin’s murder, when he was all of 19, proudly displayed before journalists the ornament he had ripped off the hood of the premier’s Cadillac limousine, declaring how, “Just like we got to this emblem, we can get to Rabin.”
Ben-Gvir at age 48 is still the violent, racist and demagogic person he was at 19, but he is no longer a marginal figure. And, if you allowed yourself to murmur a “Baruch shepetaranu” (roughly, “Blessed are you, God, for relieving us of this blight …”) after hearing that Ben-Gvir had quit the government, you may have been jumping the gun. The smart money is on him and his Otzma Yehudit party rejoining the coalition, if and when Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds in finding a way in the coming weeks to scuttle the next stage of the hostage deal and resume the war.
• Speaking of “jumping the gun”: Ben-Gvir hasn’t met a problem that he wasn’t sure could be solved with a gun. Apparently, his proudest accomplishment during his two years as national security minister has been his success in getting close to another 200,000 firearms into the hands of Israeli civilians. Jewish civilians, that is, although more than one speaker at the conference noted that many of those arms have subsequently made their way into the hands of criminal elements in Arab society.
As Ola Najami-Yousef, who heads Givat Haviva’s Arab-Jewish Center for Peace, commented at the conference: “A state that arms its citizens is telling them, I can’t protect you.”
• Omer Bar-Lev, Ben-Gvir’s predecessor in what was then called the internal security ministry, spoke at the Givat Haviva conference. Bar-Lev didn’t make it into the current Knesset, but considering that much of his speech revolved around comparing his tenure as minister with that of Ben-Gvir, it’s clear that he hopes to make a comeback. Personal ambition aside, however, it was important to be reminded that Bar-Lev and his deputy minister, Yoav Segalovitz, treated the abysmal crime wave in Arab society as the national emergency it obviously is. Indeed, under their tenure, the number of murders among Arab citizens fell to 116 in 2022, from 126 a year earlier – both of which are appalling numbers that place Arab society in Israel near the top in homicide rates among OECD countries. During Ben-Gvir’s first year in office, however, that number more than doubled, to 241 (13 times higher than the rate among Jews), and in 2024 it reached 230. Equally disturbing is the fact that last year, only 11 percent of the murders of Arabs were solved, as compared with a rate of 60 percent for killings of Jews.
• Barlev’s speech was followed by a panel discussion on the issue of crime, led by Josh Breiner, the intrepid crime reporter of Haaretz who last week was awarded a prize for Excellence in Journalism from the Israel Press and Media Institute. In his preliminary remarks, Breiner noted that just a day earlier, a force of 1,500 police officers descended on Umm al-Fahm, the country’s third-largest Arab city, to shut down the offices of the Committee for Reconciliation, a civil-society initiative founded in 2021 to help resolve disputes within Arab society by way of sulha, an Arabic term used to describe for third-party mediation efforts. The decision to raid the group originated with the defense minister, Yisrael Katz, who said that his office had received "well-founded and unequivocal intelligence" showing a connection between the group and terrorist activities.
The founder and head of the Reconciliation Committee, it should be said, is Sheikh Ra’ed Salah, the founder of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, which was outlawed in 2015 because of its alleged links with Hamas and with the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt. Salah, who is extremely charismatic in the eyes of many Arabs, is no less a fearsome figure to many Jews. It doesn’t help that he has made little effort to assuage those fears, but that doesn’t justify shutting down the broad-based reconciliation organization he helped organize, which according to its report on its 2024 activity, helped resolve some 1,600 conflicts in Arab society, some of which had involved murders.
Ra’am’s chairman, Abbas, criticized the government’s action, and explained that the sulha committees organized by the umbrella committee in individual towns "don't belong to any particular party, ideology or movement. Membership in them is open to any Arab who wants to contribute to imposing peace and solving [problems] through reconciliation and sulha within Arab towns ."
• In the same session devoted to a discussion of law and order, Ghada Zoabi, the founder and editor of the Arabic news portal Bokra.net, mentioned, also incidentally, the case of an Arab couple whom she said had been missing for more than a month. “Neither the police nor the Shin Bet [security service] have shown interest in the case,” she claimed. That goes for the Hebrew press as well.
When I called Zoabi later that day for some details on the case, she explained that the missing couple -- Ali Shinawi and Roba Alrov, 30 and 25, respectively, according to a single short item that did appear on Ynet in Hebrew -- are from the village of Judeida Makr, near Nahariya. According to Zoabi, relatives who came to the couple’s residence in December looking for them found only their baby at home, with no sign of the parents. She explained that the “disappearing” of people is a new twist on the way that crime organizations handle issues like debt collection, and that often the next time the victims are heard from is when their bodies turn up in a nearby town. Bokra has been covering this troubling story in Arabic, in the hope of getting the police involved, but so far without success.
• Liat Atzili, an educator from Kibbutz Nir Oz, participated in the final session of the conference, dedicated to the vague aspiration of “Hope for a Shared Society.” If her name is familiar, it’s because on October 7, 2023, she was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, returning to Israel during the first series of prisoner exchanges, that November. Liat’s husband, Aviv Atzili, was killed while defending the kibbutz, and his body then taken to Gaza. To date, it has not been returned.
Atzili might be excused if her experience left her bitter, or pessimistic. But from her remarks at the Rabin Center, it seems that she emerged from October 7 and its aftermath more committed to the need for mutual understanding and shared existence between Palestinians and Jews. She laments the fact that the public education system in which she works is not remotely geared to advancing those goals.
“I don’t think you can develop a society that is democratic, pluralistic and shared, when children study separately from each other,” a situation she terms “a disaster.”
She continued: “I understand that to build a single, joint educational system is a long-term project, but in the short term, meetings of youth from different groups is possible and is something I’d like to see.”
Nonetheless, said Atzili, a pupil at the regional school where she teaches, Nofei Habsor, “can finish 12 years of education without a single meeting, in the school context, with someone who doesn’t look exactly the way he does, doesn’t talk the way he does, doesn’t think exactly as he does.”
She is candid enough to acknowledge that she didn’t much enjoy such encounters when she was growing up herself nor even after becoming a teacher. But she regrets the fact that students from Nofei Habsor no longer have mutual visits with children from the nearby Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj.
I myself have visited Bir Hadaj, an “unrecognized” Bedouin community in the Negev, and it is hard to believe that such poverty and neglect are permitted to exist in an advanced country such as ours. One can only imagine what a visit to a nearby village that lacks paved roads and a regular supply of electricity and water, would mean to privileged kibbutz children.
• It’s disheartening to find yourself taking encouragement from a public figure merely stating what should be obvious, but which is nonetheless not a popular opinion. Thus it was when Interior Minister Moshe Arbel , of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, called on the government to renew the entry permits of Palestinians from the territories who have been denied the right to work in Israel since October 2023 – to allow them "to have a livelihood and hope... while maintaining [Israeli] security.”
The very fact that Arbel appeared at the Givat Haviva event was not self-evident, and may explain the warm and enthusiastic welcome he received from the audience. And his remarks about the need to eliminate discrimination in Israeli society could also be characterized as unexpected: "Arab society is a full partner by right, not by grace. Our duty is to create equality. Decisions that crush the rights of Israeli Arabs play into the hands of our enemies."
These are sentiments that go against the grain in Israel today, and the same goes for the conference itself and the organization that sponsored it. It now remains to be seen how far the participants will be able to advance the shared-society agenda on their now-recharged batteries.
Thanks, how do I get on the mailing list for the next conference?
Thank you for sharing -- I'm sorry I missed it.