Those of you came on the parish pilgrimage to the Holy Land back in 2014 will remember visiting Neve Shalom (English, Oasis of Peace, Arabic Wahat al-Salam), the remarkable peace village founded midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in 1970. This is a village where Jews and Arabs (both Muslim and Christian) live together, about five hundred people in all, as a living witness of reconciliation and co-existence. The children grow up side by side; they study and play together in the village primary school. The adults have their ordinary jobs, and also run courses in peace-making; people come from far and wide to study reconciliation. As part of our bicentenary celebrations, St John’s Wood Church donated an artificial grass playing surface for the children to enjoy.
None of this work is easy at the best of times. Wahat al Salam/Neve Shalom is currently living through the worst of times. I have been wondering so much how things have been for them, and on Wednesday I got a chance to find out, at the Annual Meeting of their UK Friends. The basic purpose of the Village, to show that Jews and Arabs can live and work together, is of course anathema to extremists on either side. Palestinian extremists denounce the Palestinians of the Village as Zionist sympathisers, while extremist Jewish settlers denounce the Jews of the Village as giving comfort to terrorists. There have been two recent arson attacks; significantly, no-one knows for sure whether Palestinians or Jews were responsible. What they do know is that local police and government authorities (and the village is within the territory of pre-1967 Israel, not in the West Bank) have shown no interest in following up the attacks or improving security – so it fell to the UK Friends to pay for CCTV cameras and the like. Again, the local education authority have recently imposed a new headteacher on the primary school, who is deeply unsympathetic to the project of joint education in both Hebrew and Arabic. Again, the Knesset is shortly set to pass an NGO Taxation Bill, which will impose punitive taxes on donations to the Village from abroad. ‘Aren’t you a rather unreal oasis in the middle of all the conflict?’ asked someone of Samah Salaime, the deeply impressive senior villager who had come to speak to the AGM. ‘There is no-one who is unaffected,’ she replied. There are Jewish villagers who lost family in the atrocities of October 7th; there are Palestinian families who have lost dozens of relatives in the horrors inflicted on Gaza. But the long, patient, demanding work of dialogue and reconciliation goes on.
Samah is in London for the rest of this academic year, while she pursues a postgraduate degree in Peace Studies at SOAS. I am hoping to get her to talk in St John’s Wood in the New Year. Meanwhile, please pray for our brave friends at What al-Salam/Neve Shalom.- Anders