KOLOT – Voices of Hope, Post-October 7 Series
Every Crisis Offers an Opportunity for a Better Future:
The Post-October 7 Work of the Givat Haviva Center
for a Shared Society
By Mohammad Darawshe
We all know what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. In an organized operation, Hamas broke through the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, surprising and paralyzing Israel’s security forces. Some 1,200 people, male and female, including infants and seniors, were murdered that day. Another 252 people of all ages were taken into Gaza. The war that broke out in the wake of October 7 continues to claim Israeli and Gazan Palestinian lives. Amid all these developments, we at Givat Haviva – the largest and most veteran organization in Israel promoting Jewish-Arab shared society in Israel – knew we had to respond.
All of Israel’s ethnic groups were impacted. The Jewish majority experienced indescribable fear that day. With the news channels broadcasting nonstop the trauma mixed with uncertainty, every viewer was readying for the worst. Social media was filled with those searching for relatives and friends from the Gaza-border communities, or who were attending the festivals, after contact with them had been lost.
The day also took a toll on the Arab minority community, which makes up roughly one fifth of Israel’s citizenry. Distraught community members of all political and religious stripes could barely believe the atrocities they were witnessing. Afraid that the Jewish community was about to rise up against them, they mostly chose silence and seclusion in order to avoid becoming the target of Jewish rage. The fear that Jewish Israelis would not differentiate between Arab citizens and Hamas terrorists was widespread in every Arab city, town, and village.
After the Shock: Back to Our Work
So, we arrived at the Givat Haviva offices on October 8 ready to get down to work – but also, as a team made up of both Jews and Arabs, in order to air and share our emotions with one another.
As a nonprofit organization that has been working for Jewish-Arab shared society for 75 years, we knew we needed to do our share. We wanted to provide the petrified Arab community, scared to express its legitimate viewpoint and avoiding direct encounters with Jews, with a space where it could unpack the confusion and fear it had been experiencing ever since October 7. We wanted to enable both communities to reach a place emotionally where they could display empathy toward the other and primarily listen and show respect. That is the only way it will be possible to arise from this catastrophe and begin to generate a better future.
We turned our campus into a center for evacuees, with over 300 people coming to us to find refuge and staying for three months until they were able to return home, while at the same time, our teams were working together to change programs and projects set to begin the next day.
October 8 was supposed to be the opening day of our programming cycle; we had a record number of registrants. But of course, none of the programs began that day. Instead, the team looked at each one of our programs, discussing what adjustments we would now need to make.
A safe place at Givat Haviva for evacuated families (youtube.com)
Jews and Arabs Continue to Meet at Givat Haviva
“Children Teaching Children” (CTC) is a program that we have been running for nearly four decades. The CTC program brings together junior high school students from the Arab community and the Jewish community, who study identity together for two years. These studies focus on examining the teenagers’ personal and group identities, breaking stigmas, and looking critically at the various narratives prevailing in Israel’s complex society.
We knew that in the post-October 7 atmosphere, it would be difficult to continue bringing these youths together. We decided to initiate conversations with those students already a year into the program, together with their parents, so that as many stakeholders as possible would be involved in our decision-making. Much to our delight, everyone felt the need to carry on, now of all times, with the identity studies, even if at first the sessions would be held in non-mixed frameworks for Jews and Arabs.
A few weeks ago, the first in-person encounter since October 7 of students from nearby Jewish schools and Arab schools took place on the Givat Haviva campus. Although there had been concerns, the students were happy to get to know one another, focus on their similarities rather than on areas of disagreement, and they departed with a taste for more. We left this session hopeful, determined to continue our work so that, in time, we will be able to hold such encounters with greater frequency and a larger number of participants.
Jewish Teachers Come to Arab Schools
Another program whose success since October 7 has been a pleasant surprise is “Shared Language”, which was designed to improve Hebrew proficiency among Arab students in Israel via the instruction of spoken Hebrew at Arab schools. Through this program, Jewish teachers come to Arab schools and are joined by an Arab teacher who serves as their liaison and mentor, to help them navigate both the school and the cultural differences between the two peoples. The teacher provides spoken Hebrew instruction to the pupils and, as a bonus, learns about the Arab community and Arab culture with the help of their Arab mentor, who provides support and also functions as a go-between, given the different worlds from which they come.
In the current reality, with the war continuing and the security situation unsettled, a Jewish teacher coming into an Arab school in an Arab community is no trivial matter. Nonetheless, no teachers have withdrawn from the program (aside from evacuees who were forced to relocate) and no school has asked to stop its participation. When, in December, schools resumed in-person teaching, we were very worried about what might happen. We were delighted to discover, though, how much the students had missed the program and their Jewish teachers.
At one school, a Jewish Hebrew teacher was drafted into army reserve duty because of the war. Amazingly, this complex circumstance actually generated a wonderful educational moment. The students were extremely disconcerted due to the contradiction they felt: On one hand, they love, appreciate, and respect that teacher. On the other hand, he was going to fight in the Gaza Strip, where some of the students have family; and even those who have no relatives there see the residents of Gaza as members of their Palestinian nation. They raised these conflicted feelings with the Arab mentor.
The mentor and the program coordinator identified the incredible potential for fruitful conversation. They sat down with the students and tried to unpack together what they were feeling about the teacher who had been called up. Ultimately, at the end of the process, the students concluded that their teacher is the same person they appreciate, respect, and love, and they trusted him to do the right thing. When the teacher returned from many months in reserves, he went straight to the school to visit his students – who welcomed him back with open arms. Stories of this kind not only provide Givat Haviva’s staff a tailwind to continue our work, but also demonstrate that our efforts allow bridges to be built in places where others believe the chasm is too wide.
New Programs for a New Reality
After October 7, we realized that, alongside the continuity that our programs required, we also needed to build new programs. The war and the security situation brought to the surface various challenges that Israeli society has been facing for many years. Now, however, the intensity of these challenges has grown significantly, and the urgency of offering an appropriate response has risen many times over. This stands out in particular when it comes to the various gaps between Jews and Arabs, and thanks to Givat Haviva’s decades of experience, we are prepared for this moment.
A number of academic institutions turned to us, for example, seeking guidance and support as they readied for a return to in-person classes. The academic world, it is important to note, is often the first official setting where Jews and Arabs cross paths on a daily basis, and in order to bridge social and cultural gaps, it is vital that this initial interaction be as positive as possible.
Almost all of Israel’s higher education institutions feature a sizeable majority of Jewish staff. As a result, many Arab students feel less emotionally attached to their school and regard their path to a bachelor’s degree as something to be gotten through as quickly and quietly as possible. Now, due to the wartime atmosphere, many Arab students have decided to pause their studies, or defer their admission, or transfer to an Arab university abroad, such as in the West Bank and Jordan.
Many Israeli academic universities seeking to reverse this trend have come to us for help. In response, Givat Haviva has put together a holistic academic intervention program that can be employed for the broad spectrum of challenges that the universities are facing – with students, faculty, administrative staff, and other workers; we are continuing to fine-tune the program so that as many schools as possible in need of our support can receive it and deliver to their academic community the most useful and high-quality student experience possible – even at a time of crisis.
The situation in Israel is super-complex, almost incomprehensible. But we realize the world is not binary: There is no black versus white, single right versus wrong; there is more than one solitary “true” narrative. Therefore, we must continue to move Israeli society forward by creating more opportunities to meet together, by urging Israel’s Jewish and Arab communities toward one another. We must not allow them to entrench themselves ever deeper in their separate realities, but instead must familiarize them with the other community – to converse, understand, show respect, and stop being scared.
Givat Haviva’s many years of experience have taught us that, out of every calamity, it is possible to extract points of light and hope for a better future. Even the dreadful October 7 can serve as a source of opportunity. Every crisis sharpens our understanding of the issues, teaches us where we could do better or contribute more from our knowhow and resources. That, in turn, increases our optimism as to the progress we can make in improving the Israeli reality so that the future can be a better one for every woman and man, irrespective of religion, nationality, gender, or sex.
The amount of support we have been receiving, both in Israel and abroad, shows us that we are headed in the right direction.
Givat Haviva 2023 Recap (youtube.com)
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Mohammad Darawshe is the Director of Strategy at the Center for Shared Society at Givat Haviva
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