Ilan Amit
Building a Shared Society in the Hardest of Times: The Arab-Jewish Emergency Response Center for the Negev Bedouins
Dr. Ilan Amit and Kher Albaz - Building a Shared Society in the Hardest of Times
- Hi, everybody, good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you are in the world. So, I’m really delighted today that we are joined by Ilan and Kher to talk to us about the Bedouin community and particularly focus on the last eight, nine weeks. So, first off, I’m just going to introduce them both. So, Dr. Ilan Amit has been developing, managing, and leading community planning and development programmes promoting a joint Arab-Jewish society for two decades. He has worked with the Arab-Bedouin society in the Negev and within the Israeli-Palestinian space while simultaneously researching, writing, and publishing academic papers related to his field work. In his work in civil society, Ilan laid the foundations for programmes narrowing gaps in health, environmental development programmes, and education for a shared society. In the academic world, Ilan lectured at the Ben-Gurion University, University of Amsterdam, the Open University, and college programmes focused on the Middle East and civil society. Kher Albaz is an expert on government social policy and current trends in Bedouin society. He is involved in a broad range of projects related to community planning and development, both at the local and national level. Kher has spent many years as manager of the regional Welfare authority, which provided services to Segev Shalom, Kseifeh, and Ar'ara, and the unrecognised Bedouin localities in the Negev.
He has worked as a welfare and social worker in Canada as well. And I also want to acknowledge that you both join us today straight after a memorial for the co-founder of AJEEC, Vivian Silver, who was tragically killed on October 7th, a woman who really dedicated herself to building trust and relationships between all communities in Israel, but also working to better build connections and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. So, I know that you guys have had an emotional hour, and I also know that she would be very proud of you both now coming over and joining us for an hour to really help more people understand the Bedouin community and the challenges they face, but also the great work of AJEEC. So, thank you both very much. I think it would help to start off with just telling our audience a little bit about the Bedouin community, perhaps some of their socioeconomic challenges, the difference between Bedouins from the north and the south, and just giving a bit of an overview. So, Ilan, perhaps if you could start us off with that.
- Thank you, Carly, and thank you for hosting us at the Lockdown University. I’m Ilan Amit, co-director at AJEEC, and we’ll say a few words about AJEEC later. I’ll say a few words about the Bedouin society in Israel. Just to kind of draw the map of locations and demography very quickly, I’ll say that Bedouins are citizens of the State of Israel. About 21% of Israel’s population is actually Arab, mostly Muslim. The 21% are about two million people, and about a quarter of those are considered, culturally, Bedouins. 330,000 of those Bedouins live in the Negev, which is the majority of the population we work with in AJEEC, in AJEEC’s programme, and the Negev Bedouins historically were marginalised, I would say, by the state in ways that left them mostly without ownership of their lands, of their historical lands. In the situation that we today describe as residents of the unrecognised Bedouin villages of the Negev, those are about 150,000 people of the total population of 330,000 people of the Negev Bedouins, who live in, I would say, basically described as desert shanty towns, without running water, electricity, sewage, internet access, or any other public services given by the state. While being, fully, participant citizens of the State of Israel in the economy, in higher education, in education, and in any other framework, there are huge gaps among the Bedouin population of the Negev today. It is the poorest, socioeconomically, population in the country. All of the Bedouin unrecognised villages and all of the Bedouin towns recognised by the State of Israel are ranked at the lowest socioeconomic ranking of the State of Israel, with enormous gaps in education, in access to services, in access to higher education and employment. Adding to that is the fact that in the past few years, we have been experiencing a pandemic of crime and violence that has been raging through Arab society and the Bedouin society of the Negev as a result of poverty, gaps in education and employment, and so on.
We in AJEEC have been working with this population for the past two decades, mostly in programmes enabling the access to public services, education, higher education, and employment, with a focus on youth and young adults in the Negev, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in the sense of our programmes. We put a lot of emphasis on the promotion of a shared society, Jewish-Arab partnerships, Jewish-Bedouin partnerships, in our programmes, where we bring Jews and Arabs together in the effort to narrow gaps, and in the effort to narrow gaps together. Since October 7th and the break of this terrible war, we’ve been working together, Jews and Arabs, in order to provide the needs of the Bedouin community that was hit very hard by the Hamas attack on October 7th, either in the sense of Bedouins who were kidnapped, murdered, hit directly by the Hamas terrorists on October 7th, mostly Bedouins who were working in the Gaza envelope and were hit directly by the Hamas attack or in the sense of supporting the needs of families that were hit by the Hamas rockets on October 7th, rockets which fell directly on Bedouin families’ houses in a situation where there are no bomb shelters, barely an alarm system, and in a situation where the majority of those villages are not protected by the Iron Dome system, preventing the Hamas rockets from hitting those areas in the Negev.
So, Ilan, before we talk a little bit more about October 7th, you’ve touched on some of the challenges facing the communities, and I thought perhaps you could expand a little bit more on what it means for a village to be unrecognised and perhaps what has changed, you know, over the last few years, for the good or the bad, in terms of what that means with regards to the state.
So, historically, the majority of the Bedouin population in the Negev was left under different statuses underneath the umbrella of a military regime until the ‘70s, and under that status, the majority of the Bedouin population was not included within the acknowledgement of land ownership in the State of Israel, which includes, obviously, house ownership. If the state does not recognise your ownership of your land, it also doesn’t recognise the legality of the house that you’ve built upon it, and the majority of those Bedouins were left without a legal ownership of their house, lands, and agricultural lands, and that’s a population that was mostly agricultural, at least until the '70s or late '70s, where the state decided to build, top-down, seven Bedouin towns and to move the majority of the Bedouin population from the unrecognised villages, from the villages where they historically lived in, into those newly built seven towns in the '70s. I should say at this point that that experiment was not very successful. The move of that population from an agricultural, traditional way of living in the villages on their agricultural lands into newly built cities, into a newly built kind of modern life in the Bedouin towns was not a very successful thing and was met with very high rates of unemployment, lack of access to basic services, very low rates of participation in education and in higher education programmes. And we’re slowly catching up in filling those gaps, mostly with civil society work, assisting the Bedouins in the recognised towns, those newly built seven towns from the '70s, assisting that population in accessing employment, higher education, and basic education programmes, while the 130,000, 150,000 Bedouins who are still living, till today, in unrecognised villages, without ownership of their lands and houses, are still living in that reality where they are not provided with any basic services, electricity, sewage, water, housing, main roads, or anything like that.
So, Kher, perhaps you could touch on, culturally, why the 1970’s move wasn’t successful and perhaps what’s happened over the last four or five decades.
Yes, first, thank you for having us this evening with you, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to, first of all, talk about our work and our communities and our attempts to change reality here. As Ilan mentioned, the Bedouin community is the poorest. It has been the poorest in the country for many, many years, and just to give a small indication, every second family is under the line of poverty in this community, and we are talking about official statistics that are provided by the social security on an annual basis. Also, the quality of education is very low. We have an average of 7,000 young men and women who reach up to the age of 18 every year in this community, which is a very young community. More than half of it is under the age of 18. Out of the 7,000, maybe 10%, best case scenario, are able to reach higher education. So, the level of education is very low, the poverty is very high, and, of course, the quality of life is very, very low. I live in one of these Bedouin recognised towns and the infrastructure and the economic development opportunities and the quality of life is very low compared to the other towns and cities in Israel. As it was mentioned, most of the Bedouins are on the socioeconomic scale of one, which is the lowest in Israel. Yes, there has been some change in the recent years.
Actually, there were some attempts to maybe start putting some more resources in terms of changing the reality, but I think the lack of proper planning for these recognised towns and the lack of proper planning for the unrecognised towns and getting into a solution where it allows people to live in a better quality of life, I think the fail in that created the situation that Ilan mentioned earlier, by having this wave of crime growing all the time and with the lack of hope of the younger people. By the way, in terms of percentages, more than 70% of the young people who are actually able to access certification are young women, and we have a major problem with young men in this community, and therefore, the reality is that it’s very difficult. The change that occurred since the '70s, I think it was a fail also because Bedouins did not take sort of a very leading part in planning. So, the towns were not built based on the needs of this community, and therefore, what we see now is the quality of life and the sense of security that people have within the planned towns is even less than those who are in the unplanned towns because the living in the unplanned towns, or unrecognised towns, is still based on the tribal system, where extended families live in the same areas, while the case in the recognised towns is that parts and the segments of the different tribes moved into the town and created some sort of, I would say, involuntary, unplanned, very rapid change that resulted in a lot of the tension and the issues that we were talking about.
Kher, can I ask, obviously your journey may be non-traditional, you know, you obviously are well educated, but continue to remain living in an unrecognised village, what do you put your personal journey down to?
Well, I mean, one thing that’s very important to clarify, I mean, we, the Bedouin community, does not, maybe it’s a bit different than the Western communities in the sense that we live in a communal way of life. We have a strong commitment to our communities and the community itself has a strong commitment to the individual, so it’s not, in most cases, it’s not a personal decision for me just to decide to move from where I live right now with my extended family to maybe, to Be'er Sheva or to another city in Israel with a higher quality of life. So, that means that wherever the solutions need to be, they need to be on the communal base, not on the individual base, and I think the fact that this community has wanted or are eager to change the reality, it allows those, like myself and others, who would like to invest in themselves and get a higher education to do that, but the expectation is not to leave the community. Rather, then, after finishing the schooling or after finishing education, higher education, it’s to come back and invest on the community itself, and I think that’s the case for many people. From my generation, the numbers there were small, but now we see in recent years that the number of young people who are actually going towards education and coming back to help the community is increasing. And I think one of the roles of AJEEC is to provide these younger generations with the opportunity to be able to access higher education, to be prepared and ready to go and be accepted at universities and colleges and get a proper education. That’s not a given. That’s not an easy approach and that’s not an easy thing to do, and I think our responsibility is to allow them and open the doors for the younger generation to be able to integrate. I think the need for the Bedouin community now is to find ways of integrating itself into the Israeli society, not just education, but also in the economic systems, unemployment, and in the social life in Israel, and that will allow them to, you know, improve their quality of life, and this is one of the major goals right now.
So, you started to touch on October 7th and the effect on the Bedouin community. I want to ask you to expand a little bit on that. When I was in Israel a few weeks ago and we spent the day together, I came back afterwards and I shared, you know, a kind of writeup of my trip with a number of close friends and colleagues, and I was surprised how many people didn’t seem to know about the effect on the Bedouin community, both in terms of from rockets, but also from the Hamas terror attacks. So, perhaps you can just expand a little bit more on the effects to the community.
Yes, I think this war was actually one of the worst events that we have seen, generally speaking, in Israel, and specifically in the Bedouin communities. The first family that was hit by a rocket in Israel in this war was a Bedouin family, and family members were killed, and you actually saw that. The other thing is that many, many people were injured as a result of this war by rockets that had fallen on the Bedouin towns, both recognised and unrecognised, and also, the number of 20 people were missing and/or kidnapped by Hamas, and the first two were released about a week ago, a brother and a sister, children. So, this time, we actually were faced with something that is brand new to us, that was not the case before. Suddenly, we are in the middle of the whole cruel war that we went through, starting October 1st. So, I think the fact that, for the first time, we’re faced with real danger together with all the other communities in the south, with the Jewish community mainly, that created some sort of solidarity between the communities. They suddenly realised that war is actually affecting everybody equally, and therefore, we have seen a huge, I would say, a very evident solidarity in the region. That’s on the one hand, and secondly, I think the fact that many, many heroic stories about Bedouins who tried to save lives during the first day of the war on the Gaza envelope, people risked their lives to save lives, and actually, some lost their lives while trying to save people in that area, that also gave the Israeli society in general an indication that there is a small minority here who is putting itself at risk just to be able to save others, and it’s a common destiny, if you will, and people started realising that. And I think one of our challenges now is, how can we take this sense of solidarity and this sense of common, I would say, destiny, how can we take that and shape it into something that will serve these communities in the future? How can we create this shared society, that it’s built on the basis of respect to each other, while knowing that it’s a shared destiny and build on that to create a more resilient and more, I would say, closer communities in the south, and in Israel in general, using this experience, this very, very bad experience that we went through, to make our life quality and our existence here more resilient and better to everybody.
Ilan, do you want to perhaps share one story that you’re aware of from October 7th that, you know, will help people connect?
So, I’ll just say that, maybe to make this a bit clearer, one of the reasons that Bedouins were hit so hard by the Hamas attack on October 7th was because, geographically, they lived within the rocket range coming out of Gaza, and the second reason is because Bedouins actually are employed heavily in the Gaza envelope, kibbutzim and moshavim, the Jewish towns and villages surrounding Gaza, either in agricultural lands or in the chicken coops or cow sheds held by the kibbutzim and the moshavim. So, when with the Hamas attack on October 7th was taking place, it was them working in those areas, yes, and therefore, that’s why they were hit so hard. One of the things that happened, and I think that this is one of the places where those heroic stories were actually taking place, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Nova party that was taking place on the morning of Shabbat, October 7th, where the participants were Jewish, but actually, the people who were operating the security around the party or the people who were operating the shuttles from the parking area into the party were mostly Bedouins, and they had the shuttle buses. And the people who were trying to save lives were actually the Bedouins working around the party and in proximity to that area, and in some cases, Bedouins who were living in Rahat, dozens of kilometres away from where the party was taking place and the massacre in the Nova party was taking place, heard that something is happening there and actually got on their cars and jeeps and vehicles and drove towards the party in order to save people’s lives, Jewish lives, I have to say, their family members, brothers and sisters, and the Jewish people who were participating in the country. And just like Kher said, some of those Bedouins have lost their lives trying to save Jewish lives, so people they didn’t even know. They just heard of the attack, drove straight away there, and started saving people’s lives, and just like Kher said, the first rockets that hit the Negev on October 7th, 6:30 in the morning, literally, the first rockets falling in the Negev hit two villages, the unrecognised village of Al Bat and the unrecognised village of Kuḥlih, where two families lost family members, mostly children, while sitting in their houses. All of those things happened literally in the first hours of the attack, and ever since, we’ve been working together, Jews and Arabs, Jews and Bedouins in the Negev together, in order to respond to the needs of that community that have lost so many lives.
So, perhaps let’s talk about what the community has been doing since October 7th, both, as you’ve touched on, Jews and Arabs together, but also to navigate the needs, particularly of those in unrecognised villages, as heavy rocket fire continues.
So, October 7th, literally in the first hours of the attack, we’d opened up the Emergency Response Centre for the Negev Bedouins, which, in a way, was already established in 2020, during the COVID response times. The Emergency Response Centre is combined with a partnership, a very broad partnership, by civil society organisations, Bedouin regional and local councils, philanthropy, and partnerships with state authorities and offices, like the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Education, and we’re still providing their needs two months into this bloody war. We’re responding to the needs of the Bedouin community that are growing ever since, and I’ll just give a few examples. About 40,000 Bedouin kids in the Negev, Bedouin children, rely on one hot meal a day provided by the Ministry of Education Nutrition Programme. The Bedouin educational system has never opened up since the October 7th attack because the Bedouin schools don’t have sufficient shelters from the bombs, from the Hamas rockets, which are still falling in the Negev on a daily basis. So, those 40,000 children are not receiving that one hot meal a day, and for the majority of those kids, that’s the only meal a day that they receive. We started delivering food given to us in mass donations by Israeli factories, like Strauss, Tel Michal, massive factories in the Israeli market who are sending truckloads of packaged food, which we deliver into the villages.
We started operating first aid, trauma response, mental help provided by psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers who are operating two hotlines, assisting people who are suffering from trauma and stress because of those attacks. We were launching media campaigns in order to fight against the incitement and fake news that is targeting the Negev Bedouins directly, and specifically Jewish-Arab partnerships, and most importantly, we started delivering mobile bomb shelters and putting them in the Bedouin villages, mostly the unrecognised villages, mostly next to early childhood centres or community centres, where we know that they are needed the most. All of those are examples to the needs and to the responses that the Jewish Arab Emergency Response Centre has been providing since the break of the war on October 7th, and we hope that this war will end soon and enable us to go back to normal and respond to the ongoing needs of that community in the Negev. Yeah.
And I think, to add to that, one challenge. I mean, in both sides, there are people that do not like to see that living in shared society, living in a shared space is something that is good or possible, and they try their best to fight that. So, since day one, when the war started, we have seen, on both sides, people actually using a lot of fake news to create tension between the two communities. And just to give you an example, the second day of the war, on the evening, one of the mayors in the Bedouin towns got a phone call saying that there’s a group of young Bedouins who were throwing stones on the main road on Jewish cars, and a video was posted there on Facebook saying that this is the case and asking people from the nearby Jewish city to come and protect the people on these Jewish cars, and the mayor acted perfectly. He immediately called the police, and they went to the same intersection that was mentioned in the Facebook post and there was nothing there, and the video that was used in this fake post was a video that was actually taken three years ago from somewhere else at all. So, can you imagine the reactions, tension and the reactions, that could have been if something would have happened at that area. So, the tension is very high, and the fake news are a part of our lives in the last couple of months, and we need to also do our best in terms of protecting the communities, and mainly the young people, from this fake news. So, we started releasing, also, some videos that we initiated to warn people from, you know, from fake news, to show them what’s the best way to know what’s real and what’s not, and try to get a sense of calming people down and not letting them go behind all these, you know, incitement videos that they’re seeing on the internet.
So, there has, in the past, been tensions between Jews and Bedouins in the south. How have those more traditional tensions shown up over the last few months, and what do you subscribe to the fact that, so far, you have managed to keep, you know, between all the leadership, the communities cooperating well without any incitement taking place?
You know-
Go.
I would say, probably one of the biggest differences between the reality we faced before October 7th and the reality that we’re facing today is the fact that the Jewish population is arming up rapidly. Over a quarter of a million new requests for personal guns were applied since October 7th, that’s a quarter of a million guns, and the Ministry of National Security has been handing out tens of thousands of additional guns to neighbourhood watches all over the country. We’re in a new reality, and tensions between Jews and Arabs and tensions between Jews and Bedouins in the Negev existed before, but they’ve never risen to the point of, you know, full-blown clashes. And what can be a fight over a parking spot in a shopping centre in the Negev, in Be'er Sheva, can now very easily become a gunfight and an armed battle, and we’re in a very different reality now, where we have to be much more careful and much more focused on calming down both the Jewish population and the Bedouin population in the Negev in order to prevent that reality from escalating. And we are in a situation where the Jewish population is terrified by Arabs, and, you know, I can understand that. The atrocities of the Hamas attack on October 7th are terrifying, and people carry that in their memories and in their hearts. I cannot even think of a person I know, a Jewish person I know, who hasn’t lost someone or who knows someone who was kidnapped. It really touched us personally, the Hamas attack on October 7th, and the Jewish population is terrified by the Arab population. People are afraid, and at the same time, the Bedouin population in the Negev is terrified of the Jewish population that is terrified from Arabs, and we’re in this very sensitive situation where both populations are very afraid of each other, both populations are quite armed, and the situation is explosive, flammable, and things can go up in flames pretty quickly. Our work, promoting a shared society, is to bring Jews and Arabs together around shared interests in employment, in higher education, in informal education, and in other programmes and try to reduce those things and try to create a situation where people feel much more natural to live together, to work together, to go to the university together, to join hands together in informal educational activities, and prevent from that explosive situation to, actually, actually explode.
I think one of the most important things that also, actually, it was done, and we continue to do it, is asking leaders on both sides to come, you know, to go out with very clear messages regarding the shared society and shared space, and each one of these leaders would approach his own community saying that this is for the best of everybody, to keep the life calm and not to go, you know, and not to follow all these inciting messages that we’re hearing all the time. And I think the leaders in the Arab municipalities, the mayors, religious people, a variety of leaders came out with a very clear voice from almost day one saying that this is not good to anybody, to be in a situation where communities can conflict easily.
So, stepping back to some of the challenges the Bedouin community were facing before, which is what has also led to a reality where there aren’t shelters and the villages are not covered under the Iron Dome, what has AJEEC, or perhaps in some of your other advisory roles with the government or government commissions, what are some of the proposed solutions, given the cultural differences of the way the Bedouin society wants to continue to live and the challenges, of the Israeli government for it? And we visited a couple of unrecognised villages with you, you know, and they are very spread out, you know, there’s a small number, a couple of hundred people maybe, you know, across quite a large area of a town or a village, with not easy access to any of the kind of existing services. So, what are some of the ways that you’ve advocated to overcome those challenges?
So, I would say that, you know, there’s that phrase by, I think it was Abraham Lincoln, that the greatest inequality is the equal treatment of the unequals, and the gaps between Jews and Arabs are enormous. The Bedouin society is the poorest population in the State of Israel, and the state has to recognise the situation, and it has to recognise the fact that it must channel enormous resources in order to narrow the gaps between Jews and Arabs in the Negev. It’s a starting point for the building of a shared society and a shared future between Jews and Arabs in the Negev. Gaps in employment, in education, in higher education, we’ve talked about a few of those before, and I think that, today, it’s almost a miracle that, for example, when you go and visit the Soroka regional hospital, which is a regional hospital covering the entire area from Kiryat Gat to Eilat, an enormous area, you actually see that 41% of the medical staff in the Soroka regional hospital are actually Arabs, where we’re looking at a population with next to zero access to employment, higher education, education, and so on, again, a population that, two months into the war, still doesn’t have an up and running educational system because of lack of sufficient shelters, and still, 41% of the medical staff, surgeons, doctors, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, are actually Bedouins from the Negev. The Bedouin society of the Negev is reaching out for those partnerships, reaching out for those partnerships with the state, with the medical system, with the higher educational system, definitely with the mass employers in the Negev, the factories, and the state just has to reach back. The state just has to reach its hand back and say, “Come on, join us, let’s work together,” and I think that’s a lot of what we do in AJEEC. We build those bridges. We build those bridges in the academy, in the educational system, in employment, and we help the state recognise those gaps, we help the state develop those programmes, attract the Bedouins into those programmes, and we stabilise those partnerships until we feel like we’re ready to launch them and allow them to work together without our involvement. In some cases, those things take a couple of years. In some cases, those partnerships take decades, but eventually they succeed, and the numbers speak for themselves. I mean, the fact that there are more and more Bedouins each and every year in employment, in higher education, in high-ranking positions in the medical system speaks for itself. We just have to build the bridges between the state and the Bedouin society itself, and then things kind of happen on the road.
So, Kher, I just want to follow up on that because, you know, whether it’s the government of today or previous government, you know, the state really has struggled with how to engage with the Bedouin community, and I’ve been in conversations where, you know, part of the challenge is that modern-day Israel isn’t necessarily designed for some of the cultural differences in the way the Bedouin community have been used to living and the need to think about how to modernise that society. What do you see as the ways to overcome that?
Well, the Bedouin’s community was a very traditional community, you know, 50, 60 years ago. Social change does not happen within a day. Social changes have to be planned and have to be, I would say, very well, in the sense, very well, easy to implement if the plan is in place. That’s what we are advocating for, and by the way, AJEEC, the word AJEEC means I come towards you. I think, if we go by that, saying that the two, the Bedouin community together with the state officials, sit together and plan the transition of the Bedouin community, it will be a lot easier. I think what happened in the past is that there were not serious attempts to help the Bedouins move into the Israeli society in a very well invested and very well planned manner. I think it was trying here and there, and Ilan mentioned earlier the attempts on the planned towns that were not quite successful. That was the result of this lack of sort of partnership in planning and partnership in implementation. I think the Bedouins now have enough, I would say, resources and they have enough, and the example of the medical staff in Soroka is just one example, the Bedouin community has a huge resource that can be used for the common good. I think the fact that this community is so young and is changing is something that we can, if we use it properly, and if we create this proper shared space, I think we can benefit from that, all communities, including the Jewish community in the south. I think the fact that now there are some, I would say, if you were asking me, the Bedouin community changed in the last 50 years a lot more than many other communities that I know all over the place.
They moved from being semi-nomads in the desert into living in the city of Rahat while it’s, you know, looked at as a very modern city, and that’s in a very short period of time. I think the shift, the change, does not have to be only on the physical side by building these big houses and paved roads, electricity and water, but also helping the community move from one, I would say, cultural state to a new cultural state, but doing that by planning and by having this thing done on a professional way rather than just, it’s happening. I think the fact that AJEEC is an Arab-Jewish organisation with a mixed staff, and it’s working for 20 years now successfully, if I may add, it’s good proof that communities can work together and can get to better results if they work together. We should not expect to, I would say, to accept this almost certain future. We need to create this shared society. We need to create this resilient society by working together and not separately. At the beginning, we talked about Vivian Silver, who was one of the founders. I think the fact that Vivian Silver is a very well-known figure is that she never gave the sense that she is doing, or she is helping, the Bedouins and she’s doing it for the weak and she is providing to the needy. Rather, she created partnerships, and I think, if we go by this change of state of mind, from moving to, you know, helping the poor to creating this shared space where people can, together, work to improve the quality of life for everybody, we can get better results. Let me just end by just saying that, you know, the gaps, the huge gaps, between the majority and the minority is not helping in creating a resilient society. We need to work hard. I think it’s not a political thing. Shared society is not a political term. It shouldn’t be the right or left-wing political belief. It should be a strategic decision by the State of Israel to decrease these gaps and to create this shared space.
I think that the fact that we have well over 10,000 participants, programme participants, in AJEEC today really speaks for itself, and people tend to look at Jewish-Arab relations in Israel through the lens of, what would happen if we wouldn’t invest in shared society? Oh, there will be violence. Oh, there will be a third Intifada. If we want to invest in the Arab local authorities and regional councils, you know, we wouldn’t have violence. And I think that this is the wrong way to look at shared society, we should look at the potential. About 50%, a bit over 50%, of Arab society in Israel is under the age of 18. Think of the potential in the labour force, in the medical system, in higher education. Think of the potential of Arab society in Israel as a socioeconomic bridge between Israel and the surrounding states. We should look at the partnerships through the potential that they can carry and not through the threat that they might carry, and that’s how we work. And with over 10,000 programme participants, a local organisation that started in the Negev, co-founded by Vivian Silver and Amal Elsana in the early 2000s, which now has well over 10,000 participants, I think the numbers really speak for themselves. Both communities, both societies are reaching out and understanding the potential in that partnership, even in harsh times like these, in the middle of this war.
So, in terms of some of the challenges that often are given as examples when people talk about shared society, service in the IDF, sentiment around how the Bedouin community may feel about Israel, may feel about the Palestinian cause, what is the level of service in the Bedouin community, whether it’s in the IDF or in national service, and has there been any polling done since October 7th on the Bedouin community sentiments post the attack?
So, historically, the Bedouin society used to serve in specific battalions, I would say, in the military, and along the years, we’re seeing lower and lower rates of service, also because of the socioeconomic situation in the Negev and the fact that a lot of those people are living in unrecognised villages, with numerous cases of house demolitions, where the state has been demolishing houses that it’s declaring illegal, and that definitely has an effect on the willingness of people to serve the military, when they live in places where the state refuses to acknowledge their land ownership, where the state demolishes their houses. By the way, that is not only happening within the Bedouin society, that’s also happening up north with the Jews’ society, another branch, I would say, of Arab society in Israel, Arab citizens in Israel. Those incidents are lowering people’s willingness to participate officially in, for example, in the military service. The numbers of participation in the economy, in the medical system, in higher education keep going up, but, yes, the numbers of service go down. It’s a question of trust. It’s a question of partnership and trust between Jews and Arabs. It’s a question of trust between the citizens of the State of Israel and the Bedouin society, and I believe that the greater the trust will be and the more resources that will be channelled towards the Bedouin society will be, we will be seeing higher numbers of people in the Bedouin society, for example, serving in civil service or national service, or even in the military service, but we’re not there today, not at all.
And in terms of any opinion polling post-October 7th, has that been done?
We have been seeing surveys slowly coming out, and we’re seeing interesting numbers. We just had a conversation, we just had a meeting with a representative of Accord, a centre that has been conducting those polls in Jewish and Arab societies. We’re seeing that both Jews and Arabs are convinced that the other side is planning either an attack or some sort of an atrocity against them. Jews are terrified by Arabs, and they are certain that all of the Arabs are planning to attack them. Arabs are terrified by Jews, and they are certain that Jews are planning to attack them or to evict them or any other form of harm. Well, when you actually ask the communities themselves, they have no such plans in mind. The Bedouin society in the Negev has no plans. Again, Bedouins were saving Jewish people’s lives on October 7th. Bedouin doctors, nurses, physicians, and pharmacists are still working around the clock in the Soroka regional hospital, saving Jewish people’s lives, including the soldiers coming out wounded from Gaza, till as we speak, right now. So, while both communities, Jews and Arabs, are certain that the other side, and I actually don’t like that, I don’t like to to use the “sides” kind of terminology, but while both communities are certain that the other side is just waiting for the next opportunity to attack them, when you ask people within the communities themselves, they have no such plans in mind. And I feel like, you know, two months into this war, after two months of working around the clock in our shared Emergency Response Centre, I feel like our Jewish-Arab partnership is only strengthening, that we’re building much more trust, we’re building better partnerships, and we’re working together stronger. Even after the loss of our co-founder, murdered by the Hamas on October 7th, we’re only building and establishing stronger partnerships for the future, and for me, this is the real win over the Hamas. I’m sure that IDF, that the Israeli military will win the war, the physical war against the Hamas, but we also have to make sure that we win the war over the cohesion of Israeli society. We have to make sure that we come out stronger after this, after this war is over, in the morning after. We have to make sure we come out of this together, Jews and Arabs, and not in a situation where we hate each other, we’re terrified by each other. That will be the real win over the Hamas atrocities.
I think shared society is something that does not build itself. I think it needs to be built by us, by civil society organisations, by government offices, by local municipalities, and needs to be invested in and planned properly. I think what we need to do is to work with the younger generations. I think, by changing their state of mind in terms of how to see the other and creating an opportunity for them to meet each other, not just on a one-time basis, but have to work together for the common good, I think that will change reality. And I think there’s a need to rebuild the trust between the two communities, and for that to happen, we need to do a lot of work to create this shared space, to create this platform where people can feel, you know, comfortable meeting. If you go to Be'er Sheva, which is a nearby city now, where we live, you would see that a lot of people are actually seeing Be'er Sheva, from both communities, from the Bedouins and from the Jewish, as the centre of their lives. They do their shopping there, they work there, they live there. Some of them, they go to universities in Be'er Sheva, an oncologist, and I think these shared spaces need to plan how to create this sense of security for everybody to be comfortable moving there, and I think that’s something that is for us to do in the future, nearby future.
And what do you think has changed now between the Arab and Jewish society than after May, 2021, when, obviously, there was an increase in tensions and quite a lot of violence between the two communities? Did you see that in the south, similar to in Acre and Ramle, and how do you navigate that difference?
A lot of what happened in May ‘21, when we look back at the events, actually did not happen locally. When we look at Lod, where the majority of the clashes was taking place, we actually see that both Jewish, far-right Jewish, groups and far-right Arab groups were coming in, were coming in into Lod from outside of Lod. It was not the Jewish and Arab citizens of Lod who were actually clashing. It was incitement happening within Lod, that’s true, but it was actually clashes that were happening, taking place by external populations. And by the way, in the Negev, between Jews and Bedouins, almost nothing has happened. The Negev remained fairly quiet during the May events, and I’m not saying that because I think that the Jewish population behaved or that the Arab population has behaved, but I’m saying that because it’s evidence for the partnerships between both populations. Yes, there was tensions, yes, there were very heated discussions, but violence almost did not take place in the Negev, and when we look back on the events of May '21, mostly in Ramle and Lod, and we analyse them, we see that in places where we invested, not just us, I’m looking at our broad partnerships with local municipalities, mixed cities, shared society organisations, academy, we see that in places where we put the investment, just like Kher said, shared society does not build itself, in places where we were investing and creating encounters between Jews and Arabs, in sports, in culture, in higher education, in formal education, in places where we were investing and building a shared society, there were no clashes, and in places where we neglected the population, we did see those clashes taking place. It’s just an evidence for me for the need of building that shared society between Jews and Arabs.
And I think we have to face reality in terms of the, I would say, the macro level. I think what’s happening in Israel in the last couple of years or so is also affecting the Arab minority in Israel. I think the fact that, in the Jewish community, the political arena is not quiet, to put it mildly, it’s also affecting the minorities in Israel as well, and I think the tension between the Jewish groups within the Jewish society and also the violence wave that is harming the Arab society in ways that we cannot even imagine, I think that this general situation, this general, I would say, atmosphere of sort of violence, that’s not helping anybody. And I think it’s not enough just to say that we need to work locally in building this shared society and shared space, but we also need to put, and I’m saying in general terms now, the whole Israeli society needs to put a lot of effort in also improving the general environment that we are living in in terms of the sense of violence that we see in the air, in terms of the conflict that we’re always seeing in the air between the different groups, politically speaking. And I think it’s for the politicians and leaders in Israel to focus or put more effort into, I would say, calming down the situation and start building the trust again between the different groups in Israel, within the Jewish community and within the Arab communities and between the two communities.
One of your big partners in the unrecognised villages in helping build the temporary shelters is IsraAID, and Yotam, the CEO of IsraAID, always talks about what he describes as post-traumatic growth, which, I think, for the first few months, has been very hard for any of us to imagine, but actually, when I stood with you guys in one of the unrecognised villages and saw the educational activities going on for informal education with children, who currently weren’t going back to school easily, and helping them, you know, Jews and Arabs together, partnering, that is the type of post-traumatic growth he often refers to. What potential do you see to come out of the horrors of October 7th that perhaps gives us an opportunity for better relations and better partnerships?
I think, when we work towards a shared society and a shared future, we always make sure to anchor it in very practical means of narrowing gaps between Jews and Arabs, the Israeli industry, the Israeli higher education, the Israeli medical system, the places where people have the simplest encounters, just making a cup of coffee together before you take your shift, just getting on a bus in Be'er Sheva, where the bus driver is an Arab and you’re Jewish, just standing in line for the ATM in a mixed line of Jews and Arabs. The simplest of encounters, I believe, generate the strongest sense of a shared society. Not in, you know, big ceremonies, not in big announces, not on billboard signs, just simple daily encounters between Jews and Arabs who sit together next to each other on a class in a university, just two kids playing soccer in a mixed Jewish-Arab group in Be'er Sheva. And we try to anchor those encounters in the simplest of events while, at the same time, making sure that we’re narrowing gaps between Jews and Arabs so at the end of the day, when the Jewish person and the Arab person go back to their homes, they’re just a bit more equal than they were when they’d met, and that’s how we see it. That’s how we see partnerships, and that’s how we see our role in the Negev and in Arab society in general. You know, you’ve visited an unrecognised village with us. That mobile bomb shelter that, together with Israel, we’ve managed to put in the unrecognised villages makes us just a bit more equal than we were the day before we put that mobile bomb shelter in that village because now we have a bit more of a similar opportunity, to hide in a shelter when the rockets come falling from Gaza. It’s as simple as that, anchoring partnerships in the opportunity to narrow gaps between us.
Kher, anything you would like to add?
Yes, I think, as I said earlier, I think in order to see a resilient Israeli society, we would have to include in this society all the different parts of it, not to leave the Bedouins outside the circle, not to leave the Guarani outside the circle, not to leave the Ethiopians outside the circle. I think we need, in order to get our resilient society, we need for all the different minority groups to feel included, and doing that is something that we need to focus all our efforts into. One of the attempts that we tried recently to do is to create, while trying to scale up the shared space, is to get neighbouring towns to work together, a Jewish town and a Bedouin town to start common projects, to start to create maybe opportunities for cultural events together, for tourist events together, maybe economic development projects together, to get all these barriers between the communities, to get rid of them and create a space where communities can find ways of getting together, and I think mutual interests is not a bad term. It’s a very good term to create, where people can meet around, you know, mutual interests. Health is a mutual interest. Economic development is a mutual interest. Education is a mutual interest. There are many, many, many things that we can do together to improve, first of all, to improve the quality of life for everybody, get this sense of trust, and building trust is something that we need also to invest in.
Thank you both very much. I know that, you know, having to join us today after the day you’ve had, and I know there are memorials all over the world every day this week, there’s one in New York on the weekend for Vivian, I hope that by joining us today, you know that you are helping to remember her and spread her incredible work. And it was really eye-opening and important for me to join you on the ground a few weeks ago, and I recommend that everybody look up AJEEC, A-J-E-E-C, online to learn more about your work and to look for opportunities when they are either in Israel or visiting to further help build the bonds in shared society. So, thank you both very much, and I know it’s late in Israel, so good night.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.