Mission in Action - Mission Presbytery

Friday, November 11, 2005

A Report from Neve Shalom/Wayat al Salam

American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam Report
Presented to the Mission Presbytery
November 2008

In the last months, the support offered by the Mission Presbytery has been invested in two of the Oasis of Peace’s institutions: the Primary School and the School for Peace. The American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam are very grateful for the support provided by the Mission Presbytery. Following is a report on the last development of these programs.

PRIMARY SCHOOL
This academic year, the school receives a higher enrollment with 220 children in the school system. At the Primary School level, there are 170 pupils, with fifty more in the early childhood education.
The school faculty has 18 full and part time teachers, and there are ten more educators at the early school level. The educational system begins with nursery, preschool and then K to K-6 school.

Recent improvements
In 2007/2008, various improvements were made to the school facilities – painting, redecorating, and getting rid of some old asbestos roofing over some of the auxiliary buildings. New computers have arrived towards the end of the last year, as well as a multimedia projector. In the future, the School plans to add playground equipment suitable for the older children and some sports equipment such as a table tennis board.

Special Projects
Last year, the Primary School started and expanded several special projects:
The Environmental School, which expands on the ecology projects of earlier years, with the idea to make the school as environmentally conscious as possible. It involves the children and teachers at all levels, and tries to inculcate environmentally friendly principles, such as recycling, energy conservation, respect for the school environment, etc. A specialized teacher, Michal Moses, comes in to instruct the children on these topics. There is also an agricultural unit, which involves learning how to grow crops. The Regional Council (equivalent of a county) is trying to encourage schools in the area to be more environmentally friendly and, as an incentive, has created a "Green School" program. The Primary School is currently reviewing the advantages of joining this program.

Archaeology Project: this project has been in place for many years now, and allowed the uncovering of a Byzantine mosaic by the children. This year fourth, fifth and sixth grade classes are taking part in the project which current theme is preservation work on the mosaic. The goal is to include the site in the visit programs of the Jewish National Fund and the Antiquities Authority. Two four-day workshop have been conducted – one in late 2007 and one in March 2008 – with village resident Gideon Suleimani from the Antiquities Authority and other archaeologists from outside.

A Zoo Lab was created during summer 2007 by converting a classroom: this has involved creating, outfitting and decorating an indoor enclosure with access to a cage outside. Small animals have already been brought into the Zoo Lab. Each day, small groups of students come to feed the animals, clean their habitats and interact with them. The Zoo Lab offers students the chance to develop and deepen sensitivity to the needs and special qualities of each creature while learning about ecosystems, animal behavior and the impact of people on animal life.

Healthy School involves teaching the children the importance of exercise, healthy lifestyle and proper nutrition. The children are reminded of these things every morning on their arrival, since the school day starts with fifteen minutes of exercise and breakfast, including a discussion with the health teacher about nutritious food.

This year, the school also starts an Agricultural project to teach children about their environment – land and nature. This will touch on some of the central points in the conflict between their two peoples. Learning together about the environment aims to strengthen the message that they are all, Jews and Arabs, children of the land, fruits of nature, just as the animals and the plants.

Teachers Ongoing Training
While all the teachers at the school have proper certification as educators, the special challenges of binational education require ongoing teacher education and enrichment. The Primary School is working constantly with the School for Peace to organize ongoing training for the teachers. Recently a three-day training workshop with the School for Peace was conducted, as well as a series of lectures aimed at defining social needs in education, as a basis for curriculum planning. Parents and members of the NSWAS education institutions are also invited to attend. The series is meant to serve as a basis for developing additional curricula specifically appropriate to a binational school.

Challenges and needs
Curricula and texts
One of the problems the school faces is a lack of suitable texts for teaching languages. For instance, in teaching Arabic to Jewish first-graders, the teachers have had to use books that are actually written for seventh graders. Language books are geared either for native speakers or for students of a foreign language: two quite opposite functions. They need age-appropriate texts for students who are somewhere in the middle.
A curriculum development program is ongoing, largely funded by the Annenberg Foundation. This program will last three years and lead to a curriculum for the school, that will be usable by other bilingual schools in the country.

Expansion
The School's most significant challenge is to return the school to an enrollment of about 170 students in K-6 (plus another 50 in the early childhood education system). We would like again to have two classes at each grade level. To this end, we are making an ongoing attempt to advertise the school and to involve parents in this effort too. The children are already coming from 26 surrounding villages; we are encouraged to see students beginning to arrive from adjacent communities like Nachshon and Gezer.

Finances
A school of our size receives a budget for teaching that covers 130 hours a week from the Education Ministry. In a mainstream school, this is supposed to constitute 50% of the budget. However, at our school, there are 400 weekly teaching hours – the Ministry provides less than 15% of the annual budget of the Primary School. The education of a child in Israel is supposed to cost NIS 15,000 ($4,312), whereas at our school it costs NIS 31,000 ($8,911). The discrepancy is due to smaller classes and more teachers.
Due to creative arrangements we have made with our regional council (our friends’ associations have provided them with school buses), we are managing to offset the high transportation costs. But we still need to pay NIS 70,000 ($20,123) in past debts. Our strategic intent is to run the school without incurring debt and to work with the available budget.

Outside contacts
There have been some recent favorable press contacts, including a report on the school by the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s Arabic service, and a request to write a weekly column for a journal in nearby Ramle.

Cooperation with other schools
Hand in Hand, the Association for Bilingual Schooling, opened its first school in 1998, with active encouragement and help from NSWAS and the use of our school as a training model for teachers. Since then, two more schools have opened, and the association is trying hard to establish additional ones. In NSWAS, the staff sees the efforts of Hand in Hand as a very welcome extension of the longstanding aim to establish the legitimacy of binational education in Israel. There is no formal affiliation or collaboration between Hand in Hand and the Primary School, though informal contacts exist. For example, representatives from the school attended the inauguration of the association’s new school in Jerusalem. NSWAS school principal Anwar Dawood notes that there are certain differences between the schools, as reported by parents whose children attended the Jerusalem Hand in Hand school and then switched to NSWAS’ school. Part of the difference is well expressed in the choice of terminology for the schools, i.e. "bilingual" versus "binational". Perhaps because the NSWAS’ school is grounded in a binational community, which attempts to create equality at every level, the tendency here is to look at language as only one component in the encounter between Jews and Palestinians.

Beginning this year, the nearby "Tsafit" school in Beer Sheva, is now having both Arab and Jewish children who grew up in the village after they leave the Primary School for their 7 to 12th grades. Tsafit only had Jewish children before and is now cooperating with Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam to change the dynamics of the school and have the dual identities recognized. Programs to make the children and teachers more sensitive about these issues are organized. This year, thirty children, both Arab and Jewish, are enrolled at Tsafit.

International connections
Over the years, there have been many connections with schools in Europe and the United States. Two NSWAS teachers have traveled abroad on missions for the primary school recently: Reem Nashef visited Finland to explore a possible connection with schools there and Raida Khatib visited the UK in order to continue our connection with the Woodstock School in Oxford. We are optimistic that these efforts will bear fruit in the form of enriching and lively connections between our pupils and their counterparts abroad.
In the future, the school is hoping to be able to communicate interactively with partner schools via Internet on a more regular basis. The technical aspects are being reviewed at the moment.
An art workshop was organized in June 2008 with Jewish and Palestinian children from NSWAS and Tulkarm Refugee Camp in the West Bank. The drawings created by the children are now touring the United States and Canada.

Optimism for future
Anwar Dawood, school principal, feels that the school is developing very favorably and is optimistic for the future. He reports that there is a high level of confidence in the school within the community; that parents are expressing satisfaction; and that there is an evident willingness to help and contribute time by parents and NSWAS members.

SCHOOL FOR PEACE

A new Director for the School for Peace
Ahmad Hijazi was hired as the new director for the SFP, starting September 1st, 2008. A former participant - when a teenager - of the Youth Encounters himself, Ahmad has been living in the village for 16 years. Before becoming the SFP director, Ahmad was the Director of the Communication and Development Department where he developed public relations and fundraising strategies, and oversaw the planning and implementation of events carried out in the village.

Between 1995 and 1997, Ahmad served as the mayor of NSWAS and supervised the general oversight of the village municipality, community activities and educational institutions.
In the past 16 years, Ahmad has been facilitating workshops dealing with conflict in Israel, Cyprus, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom and the United States. He is often representing NSWAS outside of Israel and participates in outreach tours abroad, including numerous appearances in the United States.
In addition to his many activities in the village, Ahmad is regularly giving lectures at the Hebrew University on the psychological components of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and co-instructs classes for the "Conflict Resolution" Program. He is also a lecturer at the David Yellin College of Education where he designs and conducts training courses for teachers.

Ahmad holds a Masters of Organizational Behavior from the Polytechnic University in New York, and a Masters of Sociology from the Hebrew University. Among his publications are "Working While Arab" and "Home Group: The Uni-national Framework" (in Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue, edited by Rabah Halabi in 2000).

Launching a new Master Degree program in partnership with the Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College
In cooperation with the Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College, the School for Peace should soon introduce a unique new M.A. program in Peace & Conflict Studies. The program will offer an unusual critical perspective on the reality of the Jewish-Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and provide tools for active engagement. The program will explicitly link theory and practice, integrate micro and macro, and bridge the individual, group, and community levels.

The curriculum is multidisciplinary, drawing on political science, history, social psychology and sociology. Experiential cross-cultural encounter and a practicum fieldwork segment round out the program. Students are to be trained as activists in the field of conflict and peace, to work in civil society as facilitators for groups in conflict or on the political and policy level. The students, lecturers and facilitators will be both Arab and Jewish, with balanced participation.

While the new M.A. degree program makes its way through the approval process at the Council on Higher Education (a process requiring up to two years), the SFP and the Tel Aviv - Yaffo Academic College will launch a one-year Certificate Program providing an excellent grounding along the same lines as the M.A. program. This Certificate program can begin as soon as there is funding — either in October 2008 (if a donor steps forward very soon) or else in spring 2009. Demand for both programs is expected to be high.

Creating Change Advocates: Palestinian & Israeli Professionals in Dialogue and Action
Funded by USAID, and run cooperatively by the School for Peace and the Hewar Center for Peace and Development, the program brings together 120 Palestinian and Israeli professionals from three sectors: mental health, engineering and law. The objective is to train them to work from a human rights perspective that acknowledges the needs of both peoples. Through this newly acquired lens, the hope is that participants will help create opportunities for easing the conflict between the two peoples, form a critical mass dedicated to institutional change and reconciliation, and actively promote peace.

The program is now in its second phase where participants start to put into practice what they learned in the training workshops and design their own initiatives in their work environment. After a short summer break, the workshops are now continuing both in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam and Ramallah, as well as in Jordan for the binational ones. The program will end mid-2009 and should lead to the implementation of many projects by the participants.

Advocates for Change: Israelis and Palestinians in Dialogue and Action, made possible with the generous support of USAID and the American people in cooperation with the School for Peace at NSWAS and Hewar.
Negotiating Our Future

The SFP together with CCRR from Bethlehem are engaged in a partnership for the Negotiating our Future program, which is supported by the European Union. There are two goals to the program:
to enable Israelis and Palestinians to meet and negotiate a peace agreement, and
to learn from their joint work about the obstacles, and the successes of the negotiation process.
Each partner organization formed a delegation of 30, which is diverse and represents wide segments of society. The delegations met separately a few times, and have met twice, once in Turkey and once in Jordan.
The whole process is documented and after each session of negotiations the research team of the project analyses the process, from the documents, and gives the participants a feedback of the negotiations process.
The negotiations were conducted in five committees: Refugees, Jerusalem, Security, Borders and Sovereignty, and Natural Resources. The most difficult topics for negotiations were refugees and Jerusalem. During these negotiations, the Palestinians did not want to sign any agreements in any committee, before they see the whole picture. The Israelis wanted to sign agreements, even as drafts.

At this point, we see that we can learn from the success of one committee, which worked in a more equal manner, and after many hard arguments, over some topics, managed to create a joint working paper.
The two delegations are now at this stage, preparing for their third and last negotiations session, which will take place in November 2008.

Youth Encounters
During the 2007/2008 school year, seven youth encounter workshops were conducted at the School for Peace. The youth encounter participants continue to be drawn from a geographically diverse group of cities and villages. Recent graduates of the youth encounter workshops have also been invited to participate in youth leadership workshops. This year, the School for Peace took this opportunity to start or deepen partnerships with new schools.

Now that the new school year has started, the workshops will be starting again this October; the School for Peace plans to do at least six encounters in 2008/2009, depending on the funding available.
School for Peace Study Day

In May, the School for Peace called a study-day to discuss new thinking behind the methodology of its encounter work. Experts in the field, facilitators, and Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam residents attended the event.

Please ignore the date given above; it is an artifice. The report is current as of November 11, 2008.