A few days ago, sitting under a large tree in the gardens of Givat Haviva, a group of Palestinians and Jews, all of them Israelis, gathered to talk about peace and coexistence.
Shocked by the massacre of October 7 and the bombs falling on Gaza, they wanted to prevent riots in their municipalities and reiterate their commitment to living together.
They were not moved by any messianic ambition or by any feeling of universal brotherhood, but by the simplest of reasons. “It’s the most practical and it’s what we want,” everyone recognized me under that eucalyptus tree, as night had already fallen, everyone a little scared by the sirens that warned of a possible Hezbollah attack from the south of Lebanon.
Givat Haviva is a community in the north of the country that has been working for harmony between Jews and Arabs since 1949, a year after the founding of the State. There, Arabic and Hebrew are taught, intercultural relationships are encouraged, and they talk about how to share an egalitarian society.
There are very few places like this in Israel, and Givat Haviva seems outside of time and space. The buildings are old and simple, with humble architecture, designed to eliminate social, cultural, religious and national hierarchies, a utopia that is as difficult to achieve today as it was in 1949.
The meeting has been called by Shuli Dichter, a civil rights veteran who has spent fifty years working for an Israel that reunites the two communities. About twenty neighbors come, including several mayors of Palestinian towns, who ask me not to write their names or say where they come from because they fear being targeted by radicals.
The Hamas attack on October 7 has shocked them. In the devastated communities around Gaza lived friends of his, early socialists, defenders of collective work and dialogue with the Palestinians. Many died in atrocious ways and others were kidnapped, like Vivian Silver, a prominent peace activist.
I ask them if they don’t have the feeling of having failed in their efforts to coexist. “In 1973, during the Yom Kippur war,” answers one of the Palestinian mayors, “they locked us all up, and the fact that they haven’t done it now is progress.”
“Conflicts isolate us, they put each of us in our homes,” comments a lawyer, also Palestinian, “and being here now is showing that we are still together, resolving our issues without waiting for the Government to do it for us.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, encouraged by the Zionism of Theodor Herzl, European Jews began settling in Palestine, which was then an Ottoman territory and which passed into British hands after the First World War.
For decades, Arabs and Jews resolved problems of coexistence by meeting in municipal councils similar to the one Dichter has convened in Givat Haviva. “They worked very well – he remembers – because there was no state authority that said how things should be done. Common sense prevailed. Today it is much more difficult, although civil society continues to be much more effective than the State.”
A teacher proposes that mixed groups go out into the street to ask for calm, but a mechanic wonders if it won’t be dangerous. The police guard the entrance to Arab villages and could take them for provocateurs. “We have to communicate to Arabs and Jews that we want to stop the war and talk about peace,” the teacher insists. “We must overcome the fear that we all feel,” adds a philosopher.
“The greatest fear a Jew can feel,” Dichter confesses, “is that the Palestinians will return to occupy the lands from which they were expelled in 1948, and Hamas has made this nightmare a reality.”
“I take responsibility for the errors of Zionism in this land,” Dichter continues, “but I am a Zionist and I firmly believe in the right of the Jewish people to live here. Zionism, however, must renounce Jewish supremacy. The old land of Israel needs humility and hopes that the Palestinians will agree to live with us. Not having convinced them was the great failure that lies at the origin of the State of Israel.”
The group nods and lets Dichter say what he always says: “The big mistake is thinking that Jewish identity implies Jewish control. Jewish identity has nothing to do with control. That it has been established like this is anathema to God, a great injustice. Only when Zionism is a civic Zionism, which does not aspire to domination of the earth and does not impose anything on those who are not Jews, can we live in peace. Only then, in a shared and equal society, will Israel be a true Jewish state.”
There are few Dichter in Israel and they lead a life on the margins. In a country of 9.3 million inhabitants, the binational community barely reaches 70,000 people. There are only twelve bilingual schools and they only have 3,500 students.
The peace camp, as groups that advocate for the return of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and believe in a two-state solution are known, are just as marginal. After October 7, facing dispossession and denouncing crimes against Arabs is risky.
Israeli society prefers not to see an occupation that dates back to 1967 and devises a thousand strategies to avoid feeling guilty. Very few ask, for example, whether Hamas’s atrocities could be a consequence of the subjugation of the Palestinians. “Few want to understand,” Dichter confesses, “because they would have to reflect and it is easier to act by instinct. Now it’s time to take revenge, and Zionism, as always, will end up imposing its aggressiveness.”
Robi Dametin does not believe in revenge, but in reparative justice. The Palestinian sniper who killed his son is in jail. She has tried to see him several times, but he doesn’t want to, and she tries to understand him, although “it is very difficult to understand something nowadays.” She prays for the release of her friend Vivian Silver and works for Parents Circle Families Forum, an association of Arab and Jewish families victims of the conflict. “Where are we going?” she asks me. “Not just us, but everyone. How is it possible that there are so many ultra-conservative and nationalist governments that believe they have a license to kill those who are different?
As the conflict worsens, the most radical right gains strength. Dichter fears that after this war a leader will emerge who preaches victimhood, violence and revenge and who will tell the left that they were wrong to want to make peace with the Palestinians. Shuli Dichter and his friends gathered under the great eucalyptus tree of Givat Haviva fight hatred and revenge, the dehumanization of those who are different, and they know that the path of reconciliation will always be difficult. “We can bomb them,” he explains to me, “we can win the war and build walls, and we can isolate ourselves from them, but we will never be able to eliminate the feeling of revenge, from us towards them and vice versa.”
