Chapter 17: Searching For Home: A Personal and Professional Quest for Peace

Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam (the Hebrew and Arabic words for “oasis of peace”) is a village in Israel that began as an intercultural experiment in the mid-1970s. There, Jews and Palestinians founded a community aimed at demonstrating the possibilities for living in peace—while maintaining their respective cultural heritages and languages.¹ My research work, which spanned a period of 9 years, focused on the two bilingual, bicultural educational institutions in this place of peace—an elementary school where Jewish and Arab children study together in the same classrooms, and the “school for peace,” which is a conflict resolution outreach program for Israeli and Palestinian adolescents and their teachers. Both of these educational institutions exemplify a genuine attempt at partnership between two peoples whose entangled story of trauma, loss, displacement, and strangerhood has created an arid terrain of deep enmity. In this chapter I discuss several meta-themes: the commitment of the participants to confront the central question of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence on a grassroots level within the village and school; the two schools as a micro society and as a moral community that can be used as a role model for conflict resolution and peacemaking; the village as a symbol for creating a dialogue between Arabs and Jews in Israeli society and in the larger Middle East arena; negotiation and compromise in an atmosphere of moral complexity.