It Takes A Village - And the Village is Threatened

Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1997

NO PEACE OF MIND FOR MODEL OF JEWISH-ARAB COEXISTENCE;
ISRAEL: VILLAGE FEARS IT WILL BE DOMINATED BY NEW NEIGHBORS—A DEVELOPER AND
A UNION OF RETIRED ANTI-TERRORIST POLICE.

RICHARD BOUDREAUX, TIMES STAFF WRITER

DATELINE: 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."

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."