SHARED SOCIETY
How one Jewish-Arab Israeli gap-year program navigated a fraught post-Oct. 7 landscape
All of the participants in the AJEEC-NISPED/Israeli Scouts post-high school program chose to continue with it after Oct. 7, grappling with the tensions of a mixed Jewish-Arab cohort
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A gap-year program for 80 Jewish and Arab Israeli youth had been running for a month when Hamas launched its bloody terror attack on Oct. 7, rampaging through southern Israeli communities with terrorist fighters and a massive rocket barrage, an attack that did not distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish victims.
Five Bedouin Israelis were taken hostage by Hamas — two siblings were released in a November prisoner exchange; the rest are still captive — and at least 17 Bedouin were killed in the attack.
“It was a serious shock for everyone,” said Rona Keshet, the joint society co-director of Arab Jewish Equality Empowerment Center-Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, better known by its acronym AJEEC-NISPED, an Israeli coexistence organization, which runs the pre-army program along with the Israeli Scouts. “Immediately [the participants] sent messages to each other, Arabs and Jews, asking if they were OK.”
Despite the challenges and complexities posed by the war, both in general for the country and particularly for a Jewish-Arab initiative, all of the participants chose to remain in the program and face those issues head-on, Khawla El-Turi, AJEEC joint society co-director, told eJewishPhilanthropy. The 2023-2024 program came to a close at the end of last month.
“The most surprising thing this year is the good friendships and interpersonal relationships which were formed within the group despite the difficult year and the war,” El-Turi said.
The cooperative gap-year initiative, going into its 20th year in September, aims to bridge cultural divides and promote mutual understanding through shared experiences between pre-army Jewish youth from throughout Israel and Arab youth of the same age from Bedouin communities in the Negev and from the cities of Ramle and Lod in central Israel.
“We realized that the only way to overcome the separation and hatred is the way of respect, understanding and cooperation,” Nadin Abu Doba, 19, from the Bedouin village of Abu Talul, told eJP shortly after the program ended.
The program consists of four communal groups with a total of 80 participants, half of whom are Jewish and half Arab. The Jewish participants spend the year in communal living arrangements in Beersheva, Ramle and Lod, while the Arab participants remain living in their homes.
Arab and Jewish participants volunteer in pairs during the year in Arab and Jewish schools.
Immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks, the participants felt the gap between their societies and the differences of their experiences. Three days later, the scouts were flown to Eilat to help with the Gaza border communities that had been evacuated there, while the Arab participants remained in their homes, afraid they would be attacked if they went out to buy food and other supplies, Keshet said.
Though the scouts could have remained to volunteer in Eilat, after three weeks they chose to return to their program.
“They realized that in this real-time political situation such a joint Arab-Jewish partnership program was too important for them to disappear from,” said Keshet. “There was a feeling that both groups wanted to return to the joint circle. This would not have been possible without the strong interpersonal relations they had already created. The glue was the moment the Arab participants felt the empathy of the Jewish participants. I think this was the first time they felt their feelings were not being erased and they were being believed.”
As the counselors began a series of dialogue sessions with the teens, first separated, Jews from Arabs, and then together, the teens showed a surprising deep sense of empathy for one another and a commitment to the program, Keshet recalled.
They worked on interpersonal relationships, between partner couples, said El-Turi with emotional discussions based on listening, inclusion, feelings on a personal and group level rather than on the general experience.
“In the second stage, the group was ready to touch upon what was [happening] outside the room as well. And they knew how to touch it in a way that was very sensitive, honest, allowing dialogue, and listening even to what is difficult,” El-Turi added.
They were given tools to learn how to deal with differing opinions and created a safe reality for a complex truth, said Mika Eshel, 19, a Jewish participant from Tel Aviv.
“We learned to understand that there is no single truth,” said Eshel. “Despite the disagreements, the room was full of love and giving that didn’t always come easily but was worth every effort; we created sanity in a reality without limits.”