by Gaia and Valentina
Between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, there is a place that nobody could have imagined possible: a community of Muslims and Jews living together in harmony called Neve Shalom which means “Oasis of Peace”. This name comes from a line from the Book of Isaiah: “My people shall dwell in an oasis of peace.”
It was created in 1978 by four families. Three were Israeli Jewish and the other was Palestinian. When this community was first created, it didn’t have trees, running water or connection to electricity. Their objective was to live together in tranquility, even though they were of two different populations with different cultural traditions. But they asked questions of themselves. For example, “Are you fooling yourself, are you going to be in some kind of utopi
an society, where it’s not really realistic?”
Today, 60 families live in this community and seven thousand teenagers have passed through attending the workshops that were created there. Most of these teenagers had never met a member of the other community and this shows the world’s situation. In this community there is a school called The School for Peace; in this school, people are thought to live together even if they are from another community. Most of the people who go to this school are not from Neve Shalom but are from the outside because the parents like the attitude of the school. This shows the effectiveness of the school. “It’s a working model of almost 40 years in which we are here and it can work,” declared Dr Nava Sonnenschein.
Living together in peace is possible.
However, this tiny village is also victim of some incidents as the one of June 14, 2012, where 14 of their vehicles had their tires deflated overnight and most of them were also vandalized by having racist slogans painted on them.
The village is runned by a secretariat which is elected by an annual democratic vote.
Neve Shalom received the Beyond War Award of 1989 and inspired the 1992 birth of the sustained Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group in the United States.