“I don’t want coexistence if I don’t have equality”

Interview by Sandra Rendgen

Mr. Darawshe, you are co-directing one of the oldest and largest peace organisations in Israel, Givat Haviva. It runs programs that aim to build good relations between the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel. How has the Hamas attack and the subsequent war in Gaza impacted your work?

Many of our staff members have lost something or someone during the war, they have a direct relationship to the war, to the attack. I myself had to mourn my cousin, who died in the attack of October 7^th. He was a Palestinian paramedic who tried to help Jewish victims at the Nova party.

Sometimes, experiences like these make our people question what we do. And how do you even work in a joint team during this time? Right now, it is very important that we provide support for our staff members. We work with our own teams, but also with other NGO’s or companies that have mixed teams. The point is constructive engagement and avoiding feeling sorry for yourself.

“I don’t want coexistence if I don’t have equality”

What made you work in the peace movement?

When I was 16 years old, I attended a three-day meeting of Jewish and Arab high school kids, at Givat Haviva, where I work today. That was my first ever encounter with Jewish kids my age. I remember it as a very nice encounter –  that was a surprise, we were expecting it to be explosive. Later, at university, I tried to start a student dialogue group with a Jewish student.

This dialogue group ended in a shouting match after 22 minutes. We thought we’d invited the “wrong” people and tried again, but the second and third meetings also collapsed very quickly. So I went back to Givat Haviva to find out how to keep a mixed group in conversation. I learned how to facilitate dialogue and began working as a facilitator with several peace organisations.

You have also worked in the political arena and you contributed to the field of conflict resolution as a scholar, challenging the idea of “coexistence”.

Yes, because one crucial problem is the lack of equality between the Jewish and the Arab population in Israel. I said, I don’t want coexistence if I don’t have equality. You might have a wonderful coexistence between a horse and a rider, but there is a very obvious power imbalance between the two. I introduced the idea of  “shared society” instead.

Equality is at the center of many debates between Jewish and the Arab groups in Israel. Most Jews and Arabs would generally agree on the concept of a “shared society”. But most Jews would say, let’s start with good relations, and this will result in equality. Most Arab citizens say we want equality first and then we will engage in good relations. I approach it as two tracks that we to work on in parallel.

“Making people interact with one other breaks stereotypes and reduces tension”

Where is more equality necessary? 

Equality has two dimensions, political and social. Political equality goes back to the basic questions: Whose state is Israel? Are Arab citizens equal to Israeli citizens or not? Is our citizenship equal, and not just in terms of voting? Should the national anthem be relevant to the non-Jews?

Also, there are 28 discriminatory laws that grant the Jewish population a higher political status than Arab citizens in Israel, such as the Nation State Law. Can we change them? The second aspect of equality is socio-economic, such as job opportunities, budgets for municipal development, for education, for social welfare, for housing. This is something we also need to integrate if we want to create a shared society.

How exactly do you work on building a shared society, especially in the current context of war?

In our programs, there are three steps we aim to combine – and despite our current difficulties, this basic method still works.

First comes the “social contact”: We bring together people from different groups– for the first time in their lives. We need more basic interaction that breaks the segregation. This could involve making hummus together or asking simple questions like: What did you have for breakfast? What colours do you like? The concept is to humanise the other. The ongoing conflict creates fear, mistrust and dehumanization, especially because people from the two nationalities almost never interact. Making people interact with one other breaks stereotypes and reduces tension.

The second step is to bring the conflict into the room – to put the difficult issues on the table. This is what we call “dialogue”. But dialogue is more of a narrative debate. One of the main issues is: Do we have equality or not in Israel? Is Israel the state of the Israelis or is it the state of the Jews? All of those issues are debatable.

The goal is to allow honesty in the discussion, to be able to say we have different perspectives. At this point, we won’t be able to reach a third narrative, a shared narrative, because we’re still in a living conflict. But what we can do is create understanding – understanding your own narrative and how it relates to the other narrative.

And what would be the third step?

Focusing on mutual interests. We might disagree in the narrative debate, but we still have a life to manage here in Israel. We go on the same busses and the same trains, we go to the same universities, we have the same economy, we have the same environment. How do we make that work? How do we create a sense of interdependency in the hospital, in the workplace, in the shopping center? Where and how can we work together for mutual benefits?

“Our programmes focus on damage control and de-escalation”

Creating a dialog between Jewish and Arab communities must have become particularly difficult after the Hamas attack and the following war in Gaza. Did you adapt your programs after Oct. 7^th, 2023?

Our main concern was dealing with difficulties in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. In order to prevent this after the Hamas attack and the war in Gaza, we have established a network of emergency centers across Israel. These centers deal with complaints of Arab citizens against the police, complaints of Arab employees who were fired from their work or suspended from university. They also deal with tensions in the workplace or at universities. We want to make sure that we intervene in real time, that we control the problem.

We contain the tensions by activating Jewish and Arab mayors in neighbouring towns as joint crisis management teams, as well as Jewish and Arab school principals who work with mixed staff and mixed students. We also work with doctors and sometimes even bus drivers. The idea is to create mixed pairs of professionals who collaborate to protect their work environment.

We are currently accumulating a lot of damage in Jewish-Arab relations: we have a very high rate of mutual mistrust and fear. Our programmes focus on damage control and de-escalation. Unfortunately, we recently lost­­­ funding from the Israeli government. That tells you that this government is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

“It is draining. At the end of the day you feel like your brain has been squeezed”

What skills are essential for the facilitators?

This is really the heart of our work. Ours is a profession and not just goodwill. There are lots of organizations that have goodwill. You need more than that: professional skills in conflict resolution, in managing group dynamics. Our facilitators work in mixed teams, with one Jewish and one Arab co-facilitator. We prefer facilitators to be bilingual so that they can allow participants to speak in their own language. Sometimes it is a barrier for someone to express themselves in a second language.

Also, the facilitators need to bring a deep knowledge of the issues, of the other culture, history, tradition and politics, so they can put things into perspective. They need to be very patient and understand that we’re not there to push our agendas, but also we’re not there to provide entertainment. You need a strong ideological motivation to work for a peaceful and equal coexistence.

It’s draining. At the end of the day you feel like your brain has been squeezed. We try to support our staff during these difficult times, because as leaders in this field, we don’t have the luxury to feel sorry for ourselves. We have a job to do.