Quest for shared society in Israel involves Pittsburghers
'We need to worry about our relations today, because they will affect our tomorrow'
Mohammad Darawshe has spent a lifetime promoting shared society in Israel. On Sept. 18, the Jewish-Arab relations expert told Pittsburghers that the path to bettering the Middle East stretches at least 6,000 miles.
Darawshe is a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute and director of Planning, Equality and Shared Society at Givat Haviva Educational Center. Previous posts include co-director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives and elections campaign manager for the Democratic Arab Party and the United Arab List.
Spending the day in Pittsburgh is “part of a larger visit to the United States,” he said.
This semester, Darawshe is a visiting scholar at the Illinois Global Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I’m a person that dances between academia and practice,” he said. “My job is to educate people, not to convince people, so expose them to my perspectives, engage in discussions, in dialogues and hopefully in partnerships.”
For nearly 40 years, Darawshe has worked to build sustainable ties between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Both during a conversation with the Chronicle, and later Wednesday evening while speaking before more than 200 people at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh, Darawshe addressed the work’s fundamental tension.
“There’s this discourse about Israel, the question about whose state is it,” Darawshe said.
Darawshe is a resident of Iksal, a village in northern Israel.
“My family has lived in the same town for close to 800 years,” he said. “We have no reason to move.” So when it comes to discussing Israel, the question is, “Is it the state of the Jews, or is it the state of the Israelis? If it’s the state of the Jews, then I’m out. I end up becoming stateless.” If the answer is that it’s the state of the Israelis, “then you American Jews, you become stateless.”
Darawshe believes Israel can be both, but the construction renders “three shareholders,” he said: the Jewish citizens of Israel, the Jewish Diaspora and the Arab citizens of Israel.
In order for those constituents to achieve partnership and common interests, there must be conversation and education, he said.
“If I am to promote the Jewishness of the state of Israel, I need to engage in dialogue with all of the Jewish partners, not just the Israeli Jewish partners, but also the Diaspora Jewish partners. And if the Diaspora Jews want to engage with Israel, they should engage with all Israelis, not just with 79% of Israelis,” he said.
Of Israel’s 9.4 million citizens, approximately 21% are Arab, according to the CIA.
“Unfortunately, most Jews that I meet in America do not know the basics about Arab citizens.
So part of education is, first of all, share the information,” Darawshe said.
Quest beyond the classroom
The academician and former politician began his educational quest decades ago at Givat Haviva, a civil society organization in northern Israel.
As a 16-year-old, Darawshe participated in Givat Haviva’s Encounters program, an initiative pairing Arab and Jewish youth. He found the experience “stimulating,” he said, and decided to make a career of it.
For nearly 60 years, that same program has brought together 300 Arab and Jewish children nearly every week. Through social contact, participants “see each other as human beings,” Darawshe said. Students at Givat Haviva learn that “we can eat from the same plate and not get poisoned. You can sleep in the same dormitories, and check your body in the morning and there are no new holes. No one stabbed you.”
The work of humanization can lead to coexistence, but the latter is not enough because “coexistence can be sustained with hierarchy,” he continued. It’s like the relationship between a horse and rider. Both enjoy the same view. Both drink from the same river. Both share the same sweat, but at the end of a wonderful time together “one goes to the barn and eats hay and one goes to the castle and eats steak.”
Creating a shared society requires respectful dialogue about equality, he said. “Otherwise, things will be swept beneath the rug and [conversants] will continue to produce antagonism.” Darawshe admitted that not every moment is ripe for talking, but in the absence of dialogue an awareness of “mutual interests” must remain. For instance, imagine if a Jewish patient was sick in the hospital and an Arab doctor arrived to treat the ailment, he said. “The mutual interest there is obvious…The doctor wants their job and the patient wants the treatment. That’s what you create when you create a win-win relationship. That’s where you create interdependency. The question is, how can we learn from this experience?”
He pointed to Israel’s tech sector as an example.
“Israeli society is not supplying enough people that study high-tech and study engineering,” he said. The “untapped brain power in Israeli society” largely rests in two areas: the Haredi and Arab populations. “The Haredi population, for their own reasons, say, ‘Don’t ask, please. We don’t want to study math,’ which makes them less relevant to the high-tech industry. Our community says, ‘Bring it on. We want to.’ And so we made it our job at Givat Haviva to identify those very good students in math in Arab schools.”
Investing in Arab students creates a beneficial pipeline, he explained.
The Israeli tech sector offers them “the best jobs, and Arab kids want those jobs because they pay three times the average wage. And who’s benefiting from this? Both the industry gets the brainpower and the Arab community gets the highly paying jobs.”
Change is underway, he continued. “Seven years ago, the percentage of Arab students in high-tech was 1%. Today, it’s 7%, but 20% of the engineering students in Israeli universities are Arab students. So the revolution is in the making.”
The day after is now
Darawshe said that creating a shared society means understanding that the current war will eventually end.
“I met with President Biden when he was in Israel, and we talked about the concept of the day after,” Darawshe said.
The two discussed a two-state solution, dividing Palestinians and Israelis.
“I tend to agree that that’s what’s needed between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but I told him my day after is very different, because in my day after I will remain an Israeli citizen. I’m home. Palestine is not coming to my town,” Darawshe said. “The final status arrangement will probably be a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestine is not coming to me. And I’m not going to Palestine. I’m going to stay an Israeli citizen. My day after is with the same Israeli Jews I have today. They’re not going to change…and as such, we need to
worry about our relations today, because they will affect our tomorrow.
“I need to worry about the relations between Jewish and Arab doctors in Israeli hospitals today, because if we poison that relationship, then we’re not going to have hospitals the day after,” he continued. “I need to worry about Jewish and Arab students in Israeli universities today, not to bring the escalation to extreme polarization, because otherwise I will not have Arab students in Jewish Israeli universities tomorrow.”
Pittsburghers can be a part of that constructive process, whether with Givat Haviva or any of the 160 organizations working toward shared society in Israel, Darawshe said.
While no individual can bring peace to the Middle East, “we can bring small pieces,” he said. Without those efforts, “if this kind of work disappears, I think it’s easy to slide into a worst case scenario.”
More than 200 people attended Darawshe’s JCC address.
Alex Neubert, of Northampton, Massachusetts, attended the talk while visiting Pittsburgh. Darawshe was “realistic,” Neubert said. Too often speakers “are too idealistic and that’s not helpful.”
“He was very upfront with what the problems were and had concrete ways of thinking about solutions,” Carol Neubert, also of Northampton, said.
Rabbi Hindy Finman, the JCC’s senior director of Jewish life, spent several hours with Darawshe Wednesday and credited Fara Marcus, the JCC’s chief development and marketing officer, with making Darawshe’s visit possible.
Marcus met Darawshe months ago in Israel, while participating in a Martin Pear Israel Fellowship through the JCC Association of North America.
Ever since that initial encounter, “I knew it was important to bring Mohammad to our community,” Marcus said. “There are so many people who have never heard his perspective or seen Israel through his lens. I certainly didn’t until I went to his home and we cooked together, and then he took us to his place of work. It opened my eyes completely to what it will take to have a shared society in Israel.”
Finman said she was grateful to listen and learn from Darawshe.
The fact that he’s been doing this work for “so many years — and is not burnt out, hopeless and full of resentment, someone who’s been on all sides of the trauma and victimness of it all, but still gets out of bed every day — and is committed to doing this work, was the hope that I needed to hear heading into the High Holiday season,” she said.
Before exiting the JCC, Darawshe said he was optimistic about the path forward.
“The questions and the comments I got throughout the day indicate there’s hunger for more, they want to learn more. So I’m glad I contributed my little piece…This is a very welcoming community to the concept of shared society,” he said. “I leave here feeling that I have partners — partners in the business of making a better Israel.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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