Day 2 – Resilience and Peace-building During Crisis

I slept last night at Neve Shalom/ Wahat al- Salam – the site of our first grantee meeting.

According to their website: “Wahat al-Salam – Neve Shalom, Arabic and Hebrew for Oasis of Peace, is an intentional community of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel dedicated to justice, peace and equality in the country and the region. The Neve Shalom Educational Institutions were founded by community members in 1984. These institutions, based on the village’s ideals, work to create the conditions for positive social change.” I should be clear that Palestinians living in Israel can’t just move into Jewish towns. Except for this town, and a few others it is not legal!!

I woke up this morning to the news that one of the film directors of No Other Land, a Palestinian from Susiya in the West Bank was attacked by settlers and then arrested by Israeli police. This film won the Oscar this year for best documentary and is filmed on a site of a long term Healing Across the Divides commitment to maintaining health in a conflict flashpoint.

The Healing Across the Divides grant to Neve Shalom/ Wahat al- Salam is to jointly train Jewish and Palestinian mental health professionals in a framework “tailored for trauma-affected binational settings and lead to innovative community projects”. We just awarded the grant. Within 6 months we will be able to report back on the development of the curriculum and its implementation. Within two years we can, with luck, highlight their accomplishments at a community level. After the presentation and discussion, we took a tour of the joint Palestinian – Jewish nursery – 6^th grade school one of the few examples of this type of education throughout the country.

We then travelled north to meet with an already existing grantee, Mother Tongue, together with the new organization that they have become part of. See this recent Facebook post of ours that summarizes the amazing work that they are doing. Mabat their host organization is a very interesting organization that I am getting to know. According to their website: Based on leading multicultural education models, Mabat was founded in 2008 to address challenges with diversity at Israeli college campuses. The setting of our meeting with Mabat and Mother Tongue was nothing short of amazing – a kibbutz filled with peacocks! (see the photograph)

For supper, Jennal and I have the ideal supper in the best setting – falafel and knafeh –near the Damascus Gate to the old city of Jerusalem. We were surrounded by a polyglot of mostly Palestinians but also Jews with good representation of the Israeli army. We sleep at the Salesian Sisters Hostel/Hotel- highly recommended!!