An Oasis of Peace

Roger Berkowitz

Masha Gessen writes about Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, “an intentional community of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli families.” Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom means "Oasis of Peace," in Arabic and Hebrew and was founded by Bruno Hussar, an Egyptian-born Jew who fled the Nazi invasion of France.” Gessen writes about how the village has changed since the October 7th attacks by Hamas and the Israeli military response.

Six months after the Hamas attack on October 7th, I went to Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom to see what the war had done to the village and, more broadly, to the Israeli peace movement. Amir told me that a gap had opened between the Palestinian residents of the community and some of their Jewish neighbors. The Jews wanted the Palestinians to denounce Hamas and its murders. The Palestinians felt that some Jews were indifferent to the devastation of Gaza. The cognitive distance wasn’t unfamiliar to Amir: he experienced it with his in-laws and with other Israeli Jews. He had never thought that he would experience it in Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom . . .

I have been visiting Israel for decades. This was the first time that the psychic divide between most left-wing Jews and settlers seemed smaller than that between left-wing Jews and Palestinians. One longtime Jewish anti-occupation activist said that he had been inconsolable for months following October 7th. Part of the tragedy, for him, was what he experienced as the silence of his Palestinian colleagues and collaborators. “It’s not easy to reach across and say, ‘This is horrible,’” the activist acknowledged. “I think of it as training a muscle. Some Israelis are trained—that’s not because we are better people, it’s because we are citizens of a bad country.” In recent months, some Palestinian colleagues have reached out privately, but two things are missing for him: a public expression of solidarity on the part of Palestinian human-rights activists and a reassurance that they see a just future in which Palestinians and Jews can live together. He’d previously had “a growing sense of camaraderie based on a shared vision and a sense of urgency.” Now, he went on, “I’m not confident what remains of that vision.”

In the days following October 7th, many Palestinian citizens of Israel were silent because they were terrified—scared of Hamas, of right-wing violence, and of the Israeli state, which immediately started cracking down on Palestinian speech. Also, they are human. If you are a Palestinian and your first thought, however fleeting, wasn’t about the suffering of your own people—the displacement, the occupation, the decades of violence and harassment—and the retaliation to come, then you are superhuman. Many Israeli Jews who have worked against the occupation for years, who were targeted by their own government and ostracized by their own neighbors and families, expected their Palestinian counterparts to be superhuman at this moment—because the Jewish activists felt that they’d been superhuman for Palestinians. To the Palestinians, though, these activists had simply been a small minority of Israeli Jews who were honest and decent.

When I told a friend in Ramallah about what Novak calls “the condemnation discourse,” she asked, “Still?” My friend didn’t mean that the atrocities committed by Hamas had been somehow diminished by the passage of time, just that the need to state the obvious might have lost its urgency in the face of ever more human suffering. But for most Israelis, including on the left, the urgency seems only to have grown, and for many of them, it has made it close to impossible to see the suffering of the Palestinians. Even Maoz Inon acknowledged, “The gap between Israelis and Palestinians was never as wide as it is today.”

Maayan Schwartz, a filmmaker who grew up in Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, told me that the tensions in the village were mostly playing out in the WhatsApp group. “When I go to pick up my daughter from kindergarten, or in the street, it’s all normal,” he said. He lives on the first floor of his parents’ old house. His brother, Omer, and his family are on the floor above. Maayan is tall and lanky, with a trimmed beard. Many of my questions—about military service, about the relationship between Palestinian and Jewish residents—made him fidget. After high school, he joined the military. He was never in combat; he spent his three years of service fixing computers. Still, the parents of some of his classmates—he was the only Jewish boy in his year—did not accept his decision to serve. “To this day, I am having a conversation in my mind with people in the village about going to the Army,” he said. The arguments against it, he went on, are “very much pacifist, and I don’t think I am a pacifist. I don’t think you can be a pacifist in this part of the world.”