A few days ago, sitting under a large tree in the gardens of Givat Haviva, a group of Palestinians and Jews, all Israelis, gathered to talk about peace and coexistence.
Shocked by the massacre of October 7 and by the bombs falling on Gaza, they wanted to prevent riots in their municipalities and reiterate their commitment to live together.
They were not moved by any messianic ambition or any feeling of universal brotherhood, but the simplest of reasons. “It’s the most practical and it’s what we want”, one and the other recognized me under that eucalyptus tree, already at nightfall, all a little scared by the sirens warning of a possible Hizbullah attack from the south of the Lebanon.
Givat Haviva is a community in the north of the country that has been working for harmony between Jews and Arabs since 1949, one year after the foundation of the State. There, Arabic and Hebrew are taught, intercultural relations are encouraged and there is talk of how an egalitarian society can be shared.
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 a humble architecture, designed to eliminate social, cultural, religious and national hierarchies, a utopia that is as difficult to reach today as it was in 1949.
The meeting was called by Shuli Dichter, a civil rights veteran who has been working for an Israel that brings the two communities together for fifty years. There are about twenty neighbors, among them 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 the radicals.
The Hamas attack on October 7 shocked them. In the devastated communities around Gaza lived his friends, early socialists, defenders of collective work and dialogue with the Palestinians. Many died atrociously and others were kidnapped, like Vivian Silver, a prominent peace activist.
I ask them if they do not feel that they have failed in their desire for coexistence. “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 a step forward”.
“Conflicts isolate us, they put each of us in our homes – comments a lawyer, also Palestinian -, and being here now is to show that we continue together, solving our affairs without waiting for the government to solve them for us”.
At the beginning of the 20th century, encouraged by Theodor Herzl’s Zionism, European Jews settled 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 coexistence problems 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 suggests that mixed groups go out into the street to ask for calm, but a mechanic asks if it won’t be dangerous. The police guard the entrance to the Arab villages and could take them as provocateurs. “We must communicate to Arabs and Jews that we want to stop the war and talk about peace”, insists the teacher. “We must overcome the fear we all feel”, adds a philosopher.
“The greatest fear a Jew can feel – confesses Dichter – is that the Palestinians will reoccupy the lands from which they were expelled in 1948, and Hamas has made this nightmare come true.”
“I take responsibility for the mistakes of Zionism in this land – continues Dichter – 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 accept to live with us. Not having convinced them was the great failure that is at the origin of the State of Israel”.
The group nods and lets Dichter say what he always says: “The big mistake is to think 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 the domination of the earth and does not impose anything on those who are not Jews, we will be able to live in peace. Only then, in a shared and egalitarian society, will Israel be a true Jewish state.”
There are few Dichters 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 the groups that advocate the return of Palestinian territories to the West Bank and believe in a two-state solution are known, is just as marginal. After October 7, confronting dispossession and denouncing crimes against Arabs is risky.
Israeli society prefers not to see an occupation that dates back to 1967 and orders a thousand strategies to avoid feeling guilty. Very few question, for example, whether the atrocities of Hamas could be a consequence of the subjugation of the Palestinians. “Few want to understand – confesses Dichter – because they should reflect and it is easier to act on instinct. Now it’s time to take revenge and Zionism, as always, will end up imposing its aggression”.
Robi Dametin does not believe in revenge, but in restorative justice. The Palestinian sniper who killed his son is in prison. She has tried to see him several times, but he doesn’t want to, and she tries to understand, even though “it’s very difficult to understand today”. He prays for the release of his friend Vivian and works for the Parents Circle Families Forum, an association of Arab and Jewish families who are victims of the conflict. “Where are we going?”, he asks me. “Not only us, but everything . How is it possible that there are so many ultra-conservative and nationalist governments that believe they have a license to kill the different?”
As the conflict worsens, the more 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 it was wrong to make peace with the Palestinians. Shuli Dichter and his friends gathered under the great eucalyptus of Givat Haviva fight hatred and revenge, the dehumanization of the different, and they know that the road to reconciliation will always be difficult. “We can bomb them – he explains -, we can win the war and build walls, and we can isolate ourselves from them, but that way we will never be able to eliminate the feeling of revenge, from us towards them and vice versa”.