Ethnic Relations : A Place Where Arabs and Jews Build Peace : Five years later, an Israeli project funded by Los Angeles group is showing how the two traditional enemies can cooperate.

The small neighborhood clinic was jammed with mothers and their babies. Some of the women were playing with their children in a room of brightly colored exercise equipment. Others were weighing newborn infants with the clinic’s nurse. And many were just having a good chat as they waited their turns with the doctor.

It might have been a healthy-baby clinic anywhere in Israel, a nation that lavishes all the care that it can upon its children.

But this was in Ajami, an old and decaying section of Jaffa in southern Tel Aviv, and the women were both Jewish and Arab, neighbors who increasingly are finding that many of their problems are similar enough, despite their ethnic and religious differences, for them to work together on solutions.

“We are different, but not that much,” said Ibrahim abu Shindi, coordinator of a renewal project that is seeking to improve social services as well as to rehabilitate the housing and community buildings of Ajami and adjacent Lev Yafo.

“An Arab mother wants her child to be healthy, lively, energetic and intelligent just as much as a Jewish mother does. Arab parents worry about crime and drugs in the neighborhood as much as Jewish parents. And an Arab family needs jobs for its youth just as a Jewish family does. All that should be clear, but in Israel it still needs saying.

“What our people are finding,” Abu Shindi continued as he walked through the clinic, “is that we can--and I would say, must--tackle many of these problems together. We look at Ajami-Lev Yafo as one place, not as a neighborhood of Arabs here and another neighborhood of Jews over there. But we are virtually the only community in Israel where Arabs and Jews work together in this way.”

Bringing the Arabs of Ajami together with the Jews of Lev Yafo was a goal of the neighborhood rehabilitation project, a partnership between the Tel Aviv municipality, the Israeli government and the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, which is helping finance social renewal aspects of the effort.

“We want to renovate the housing and to change the social environment here,” said Abu Shindi, 32, an Israeli Arab from Ajami. “But coexistence between Arab and Jew is an important target for us, a critical one.”

Jewish and Arab residents of the neighborhood today sit with the project’s professionals on ethnically mixed committees that run a variety of programs, including the child care clinic and projects devoted to crime prevention, drug abuse and vocational training. Still other programs function independently within the two communities to meet their separate needs.

“We don’t try to force the togetherness with quotas or an artificial mix, but let it develop naturally,” Abu Shindi, a social work graduate from Tel Aviv University, explained. “We set up classes, for example, to help students prepare for English-language exams, and then maybe Mohammed goes home with Moshe to study, or perhaps Moshe with Mohammed. . . .”

Nearly 32,000 people live in Ajami-Lev Yafo, which stretches south from Jaffa’s old city along the Mediterranean coast. Half are Israeli Arabs, most from families like that of Abu Shindi that have lived in Ajami for generations, and half are Jews, most of them poor and many of them new immigrants from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Bulgaria.

A flourishing Mediterranean port and Middle Eastern trading center for centuries, Jaffa declined during the struggle for an independent Jewish state, and its many Arab residents fled after Israeli independence. The city was later annexed to Tel Aviv, which had overtaken it in population and importance, and the city government made plans to redevelop the area with seaside housing for the wealthy.

“For 40 years, this area was neglected, and the result is crime, drugs, a low level of education, deterioration of the housing and the environment, a loss of spirit,” Abu Shindi said, walking down the street where he was born. “The rehabilitation has begun, but we haven’t been able to do it all in four years. It will take a decade at least and maybe a generation.”

Today, Ajami is predominantly Arab and Lev Yafo almost all Jewish, but the area between them is so thoroughly mixed that Arabs and Jews live in the same houses and apartment buildings, and--unusual for Israel--one of the neighborhood elementary schools is integrated.

“I don’t see an Arab or a Jew--I see a mother,” said Hannah Yanay, an Arabic-speaking Jewish psychologist who works with five paraprofessional volunteers in counseling neighborhood families with young children. “There are many differences, but there is an underlying commonality among these new mothers.”

In a neighborhood survey late last year, 71% of Ajami residents and 51% of Lev Yafo residents described Arab-Jewish relations as “good” or “very good,” compared with 38% of respondents in Jaffa as a whole and, in two comparable national surveys, only 19% to 20%.

Equally important, in the view of those involved in the project, the proportions of Ajami residents (22%) and Lev Yafo residents (35%) who said they had no relations at all with Jews or with Arabs were considerably less than half the national averages.

And the parents’ association at the neighborhood high school now has a Jewish chairman and an Arab vice chairman.

“Our communities tend to be self-contained, even imprisoning,” Ali Goughti, principal of Ajami’s Hassan Arafe Elementary School, commented. “There are many Jews who know no Arabs personally, and thus there is fear and suspicion. And the situations in which Arabs meet Jews are often not, well, the most favorable for friendship.”

This, in fact, was the attraction for the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles when it undertook nearly five years ago to help Ajami-Lev Yafo as part of the Jewish agency’s Project Renewal, which has worked to rehabilitate more than 160 distressed communities throughout Israel over the past 14 years.

“If Israel will not just survive but reach its greatest potential, Arab and Jew must work together,” Terry Bell, the federation president, said during a visit here last month. “That this was a mixed neighborhood made it particularly appealing to us--we thought it was a project that really looked toward the future of Israel.”

The Los Angeles commitment is not only financial--more than $10 million over a decade--but personal, with the involvement of U.S. specialists in the planning and development of many aspects of the project, including drug awareness, the teaching of English, university loans for residents studying to be teachers, nurses and social workers and the upgrading of Ajami’s Hassan Arafe Elementary School.

But there were questions, both in Los Angeles and in Israel, about why the federation was helping Arabs rather than Jews, and those questions multiplied with the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“When we began the project, we had the support of the whole federation--no question,” said Stanley Hirsh, who was the organization’s president when the project was undertaken. “Objections did come from certain factions of the religious right that always want all money to go for Jews and only for Jews. . . .

“Regrettably, when the intifada began, it shook people, and Arabs started looking like villains. But the villains were not Israeli Arabs, and certainly not the people of Ajami. Still, this has slowed our fund raising in L.A.”

But the Los Angeles federation, does not intend to retreat from its basic commitment to financing the Ajami-Lev Yafo project as a whole, said Martin Karp, the federation’s representative in Israel.

“Clearly, we are not going to put money into a drug awareness program that works only on one side of the street, the Jewish side, while drug abuse flourishes on the other,” he said.

For Arab residents of Ajami, the American involvement was met with initial suspicion that it was a continuation of previous municipal efforts to squeeze them out so that the area became only Jewish.

Abu Shindi said that attitude has changed as the project’s impact has widened.

With an operating budget of about $700,000 a year from the Los Angeles federation, the Ajami-Lev Yafo project is also turning the Hassan Arafe School into an educational model, upgrading the teaching of English in Jewish elementary schools, running summer programs that bring Jewish and Arab youths together, combatting drug use and assisting immigrant absorption. Money is also being raised for a new $4-million community center that will be named for the late Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum.

The latest Los Angeles contribution here is a $1.4-million early childhood development center, which is being built in Ajami but will serve both Arab and Jewish families. Named after Hirsh, its major contributor, the center will greatly expand the medical, psychological and social services available in the neighborhood, where more than 300 babies are born each year.

“After the intifada, this project lost some of its momentum, but I never lost my momentum,” Hirsh said in Los Angeles. “The Arab citizens of Israel are entitled to no less than the Jewish citizens, and that’s something I and my family feel strongly about.”