A Mideast Oasis of Peace

“For most of them,” Elias Eady said, “it was the first time they had ever been face to face with the other side.”

The “them” to which Eady referred are participants at a unique institution in the troubled Middle East--The School for Peace--where Jewish and Palestinian teen-agers meet, encounter-style, for three days for the simple purpose of discovering what is on each other’s minds.

The school is part of an equally unique village in Israel, called Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, which means oasis of peace in both Hebrew and Arabic.

“It was just a few families at first, half of them Jewish, half Palestinians, who chose to live together,” recalled Nava Sonnenschein , 36, an Israeli Jew who lives with her husband, Jacob, in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam. Temporarily at home in Los Angeles while Jacob does postdoctoral work at UCLA, the Sonnenscheins were among the first residents who arrived in 1978 on 100 acres of land leased from the adjacent Latrun Monastery, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

According to Nava Sonnenschein, “There had never been such a place in Israel,” where both sides of the centuries-old conflict felt comfortable. Israel’s educational system is generally segregated in deference to the wishes of both Arab and Jewish parents to educate their children in their own language and culture. And, most observers agree, when students, mostly Arab, do cross the divide, the price is assimilation. “The idea (of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam) was that we would each keep our identity, while living in peace,” said Sonnenschein.

Now, she said, the population stands at about 80--and there is a waiting list of applicants. “We aren’t supported financially by the government, so we can’t absorb too many people at once. We absorb about two or three families annually.” While she is here, Sonnenschein plans to organize a Los Angeles support group for the village.

Part of Joint Effort

For his part, Eady, 30, a Palestinian Arab who also lives in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, was in Los Angeles this week as part of a joint fund-raising effort of The New Israel Fund and American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam. The money raised will help fund the School for Peace and support the community of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam.

“The underlying philosophy is that since Jews and Arabs are in the Mideast to stay, they can live together peacefully,” Sharon Burde, executive director of American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, said by phone from New York.

In Israel, the peaceful community of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam has not one, but two schools.

One, divided into a nursery, kindergarten and primary school, is for the children of the residents. Unlike other schools in Israel, “The curriculum is binational and the instruction is bilingual,” Sonnenschein explained. “As soon as they are able to, the kids speak both Hebrew and Arabic.”

“Before long,” said Eady, “the kids speak the two languages fluently.”

The other institution in this exceptional community is The School for Peace, for which Sonnenschein served as educational director until 1987. This is not a school per se but a voluntary program of encounter workshops in which more than 12,000 Palestinian and Jewish teen-agers have participated in the 10 years the school has been in existence. The purpose, as Sonnenschein put it, is: “Not to change each other, but to understand and respect our differences.”

The first step, she said, is to visit the prospective participants in the setting of their own schools: “If we didn’t do it, they might be so immobilized by fears that they couldn’t participate in a dialogue, and benefit by it.”

Eady, one of the counselors at the school, said the 17-year-olds arrive 40 at a time--20 from each side--for three days of encounter workshops. While there, they stay in a youth hostel.

He described the procedure:

“They are divided into three groups, each with one Jewish and one Palestinian counselor. They sit on chairs in a circle. Usually, at first, they are very tense, afraid. They don’t trust each other.”

However, Sonnenschein said, “after they get to know each other, they share each other’s fears, pains, desperations, hopes.”

She gave two examples:

* “A Palestinian may tell how humiliating it is to be searched at the airport just because he is an Arab.

* “A Jewish youth may describe his fear of being attacked by Arabs while walking the streets of Jerusalem.”

Eady said the point of the school isn’t that they should all become friends for life--”the main aim is dialogue.” Sonnenschein said the hope is that the young people, tomorrow’s adults, will come away with the realization that the others “aren’t an abstract enemy but human beings like themselves.

“You hear things such as ‘I wish the country was only for me’ . . . ‘I wish there was no conflict’ . . . But the reality is that there is another side, and it has to be shared. We have to live together.”

There is no formal way to measure whether or not the concept of the get-togethers works, but there is a clue:

“The evening of the last day is free time, to be used as any of them choose,” Sonnenschein said. “It isn’t uncommon to see a party being held, with both the Palestinians and the Jewish young people attending and mingling with each other.”

As has been observed, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.