00:00Back to school. Scenes like this are very rare in Israel. Jewish and Palestinian students
00:06going to the same classes to learn in Hebrew and Arabic. On the curriculum, reading, writing,
00:12math and eventually history. It's Tamara's second day at school. Her father Roy Silverberg
00:24wouldn't want his children to go to any other school. They learn that the other exists.
00:30They learn that they are people but also to more detail. What does it mean to be a Jewish
00:34person? What does it mean to be a Palestinian? This village is called Oasis of Peace. Wahat
00:41al-Salam in Arabic, Neve Shalom in Hebrew. It's an intentional community of Palestinians
00:48and Jews living together set up nearly five decades ago. Several hundred people live here.
00:53Silberberg's job is to foster dialogue between adults in the school for peace.
01:00This is a very special room and can you guess what it is used for? I'm thinking people are
01:08standing here and you're observing them inside? Yes. This is how we study relations and the
01:14dynamics between Jews and Palestinians when they are in dialogue.
01:18Silberberg's job is even more necessary, he says, since the Hamas attacks on Israel
01:23nearly two years ago and the war Israel launched on Gaza afterwards.
01:28For many people it makes them that they don't want to take risks and they don't want to come
01:33and they don't want to be in dialogue. But for some of them it feels like, in light of this danger, they must. It feels urgent for them to come and to understand more, to try and change themselves and try to change reality.
01:59Even this village, where people from both sides actively choose to live together, is damaged.
02:05The mask came off after October 7th. This is what one member of this community chose to tell me off camera.
02:11She said this experience of Jews and Palestinian Israelis living together as neighbors has been challenging from the start.
02:18But recent events reveal deep internal tensions that she says are now threatening to rip this community apart.
02:27That's just one view. As we seek others, many are hesitant. Samakh Salaymi shows us an olive tree garden honoring those who risked their lives to save others during times of conflict.
02:40We are dancing with the wolves here. So it's for my strategy here, our strategy is to be wise and to protect the kids, to protect the school and to do whatever we can to preserve what we have.
02:53The wolves, she says, are those within the far right government who are poised to take control of the school curriculum, which still enjoys significant autonomy.
03:03People don't like our agenda. You know, people don't like that Arab and Jewish people choose to live together. We know that we are not popular. We know that. And we are very afraid from being attacked.
03:17The community has been attacked several times physically, including a settler-linked attack in 2021. People here also feel under political pressure from forces opposed to their experiment in coexistence.
03:30Rayek Rezek served as mayor of this village. Now he runs this cafe. He says he can only talk with his Jewish neighbors about a solution to this conflict under one condition.
03:43Recognize your mistake, you know. Say, I'm sorry. It should begin with an apology from the Israelis to the Palestinians. First of all, to apologize for us. And then we can sit and we can figure out what can we do in this land.
03:57Despite the difficulties, he believes this community must continue as small-scale proof that coexistence can work.
04:06If it fails, it's going to be a story for 100 years about a small community, a smaller project between Jews and Palestinians that did not work. How can you talk about the big project in the whole land of Palestine, Israel?
04:21For the kids here, playing and learning together is a given. Roy Silberberg and the others in this village want their children to grow up in peace. For him, that starts by teaching them together about each other.
04:36A report from our senior international correspondent, Fanny Fashar, who joins us now from Jerusalem. Welcome, Fanny. I understand people were quite reluctant to speak to you. Why do you think that was?
04:49There's a lot of pain in this village, just like there's a lot of pain across Israel in the Israel occupied West Bank and certainly in Gaza. So this is not like an island separated from what's going on in the rest of this region and in this country. People are in deep pain.
05:07Deep pain. And this pain is expressed in various levels. Either people are turning inward and they didn't want to talk to us. Also fearing, expressing fear of the possibility when this report airs, what may the neighbors say about their opinion.
05:21So there is fear, which is, of course, for one, linked to October 7th. There is a collective trauma in this village, just like in other parts of this country.
05:30But also there is this historic trauma. And this is what the former mayor referred to when he said and told us, look, my neighbor is Jewish. I'm going to take care of him.
05:38If he's sick, we can talk about everything and anything. But when it comes to finding a solution to this conflict, I'm not going to argue with him, he said, only under one condition, if he apologizes.
05:49And with this apology, he means actually this demand, an apology for Nakba, which is the catastrophe of 1948 that Palestinians referred to as a catastrophe because hundreds of thousands of them had to leave their villages, their homes.
06:03This is the same year, 1948, when the state of Israel was created. So there are limits to arguments within this village, while at the same time, a lot of people also expressed hope.
06:14Look, even though the trauma, be it October 7th, it's going to now be passed on from one generation to the other, as well as the historic traumas that are being passed on from one generation to the other.
06:26There is the chance in this village to now create something new by teaching children from an early age on about each other's history, culture, identity, to then hopefully create something new to be able to communicate with each other, to then at some point understand each other better.
06:43So this village is not only about coexisting, but actually really living together.
06:48And could this village be seen as a bit of a utopian approach to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially since the events of October 7th, 2023?
07:01Look, a lot of people have written about this village and it never actually started as a utopia.
07:08People told us it started as a rather more or less realistic approach of trying to find a different way of talking to each other or even starting to talk to each other.
07:17Both Palestinians and Israeli Jews by creating something new that goes beyond the decades long conflict of suffering, of struggling on all sides.
07:28And this was the attempt of setting up this place in the late 1970s.
07:33But once again, it is not separated from the rest of this conflict because people told us we are 50 kilometers only from Gaza.
07:40We are hearing the Israeli Air Force as they fly over the village.
07:43So people made very clear that yet it is an attempt.
07:46This attempt is a process and it's not concluded yet.
07:50In fact, it's going to probably take decades until people in this village can say, in fact, it works.
07:56What they talk about now that they try to communicate, but it doesn't always work just for pragmatic reasons.
08:01For example, one person told me when there is a room to talk to each other and this room is filled with, let's say, 10 people and eight of them are Palestinian.
08:10But two of them are Israeli Jewish.
08:12He criticised that very often it's still the language Hebrew that's being utilised and not Arabic to talk about each other's problem.
08:20So he was expressing a form of dominance that he doesn't like.
08:23Yet nobody in this village told us that they want this project, how they call it, to fail.
08:29They believe that this can stand and provide a positive, a more positive example than most parts of this entire region go through as of now, but also looking back at the history.
08:42TPEC
08:44So
08:50So
08:53I
08:59E
09:00E
09:01E
09:03E
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