Neve Shalom

Neve Shalom. A village inside Israel where both Israelis and Palestinians live together. I’ve been to cities like Jaffa which claim to be “mixed” places, but where the inequalities—the lack of mixing—are glaring. Neve Shalom is different; this place is intentionally mixed, which means the housing screening committee, the school admission board, etc. not only consciously accept an equal number of Palestinians and Jews, but the leadership of the village rotates or balances Palestinian and Jewish roles as well. It is very intentionally mixed.

It was amazing yesterday to hang out at the pool and hear both Arabic and Hebrew spoken together. Often, in Israel, if one hears Arabic there’s a sense the speakers are being discreet and certainly that they are being looked at differently. I’ve heard Arabic and Hebrew spoken together at checkpoints where soldiers shout a few words in Arabic or Palestinians are spoke to in Hebrew and respond in Arabic. But here is the first time I’ve ever heard the two languages spoken without a grave and noticeable power difference. It was phenomenal.

Don’t think I’m naïve. The village’s name is in Arabic and Hebrew and yet I introduced it in Hebrew because it is mostly called its Hebrew name. There’s a context for this and for the two languages in the pool, and it is not without power structures. The elementary school struggles to provide a bi-lingual education and talks about the difficulties of teaching the majority the minority language, etc. This village exists inside of Israel, and the battle of languages, and identities, does not remain outside the village.

But I sit here this morning, on the patio of my little cottage with a stunning view of valleys that are farmed, hills of pine trees (usually Palestinian villages that were destroyed and covered with trees), and Tel Aviv in the far distance, and I think, seriously, this is what Israel was supposed to be. It’s not paradise; it’s just co-existence, and people are capable of this. And yet, instead there was and is genocide and occupation. This place offers a really striking and successful model, but to whom? So I think about this a bit, and I know that what is happening here, while they say it is an outreach project and not a utopia, is in fact a utopia because it is no where that is relevant to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, or most in the Diaspora.