July 1, 2008
Israel Office
SHATIL
NIF Outside Israel
Weekly Message
Last week I experienced an intense, but invigorating, series of celebrations, meetings and site visits with the NIF Board and International Council. We began with a seminar entitled, “Building Hope in a Time of Crisis,” which featured provocative presentations by Avrum Burg, Yehezkal Dror, Itzik Galnoor, Bambi Sheleg and Aida Touma-Souliman, as well as by NIF Board members Naomi Chazan and Martin Indyk. In addition to providing intellectual stimulation prior to the formal meeting of the Board, the seminar was designed to pay tribute to Peter Edelman, who contributed so much to the institutional and intellectual development of NIF during his six year term as NIF president.
We continued the celebration of Peter’s tenure under the stars at the Mount Zion Hotel, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. The NIF-Israel staff produced a home-spun extravaganza, which included appearances by famed Israeli songwriter David Broza and by a choir of Arab and Jewish children from the Galilee, who closed the evening with an incredibly moving, trilingual version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
In true NIF fashion, the celebration focused on the heroes of the Israeli social change movement, including veteran activists like NIF Board and IC members Neta Ziv, Nabila Espanioly, Alice Shalvi and Morale Bar-On. They were joined by representatives of a younger generation of activists, who are continuing in the same tradition but are undertaking new challenges with respect to environmental degradation, the plight of Ethiopian immigrants and other critical issues facing Israeli society.
I will not use this space to report on the deliberations of the Board, but do want to mention two matters. As is our custom, we opened the meeting with a D’var Torah delivered by Chana Cromer, wife of our late Board member Gerald Cromer, who passed away in March; Chana’s learned words and the picture of Gerald that was fixed on the screen served as an inspiration to carry on Gerald’s commitment to peace, social justice and Jewish tradition as a paradigm for social activism. And, we closed the meeting with a passing of the gavel from Peter to Naomi Chazan, another extraordinary social activist and intellectual leader, who will now guide NIF as we move forward.
As part of the Board program, we organized small group dinners with representatives of NIF grantees. My group, before enjoying a relaxing and informative dinner with a team from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI - NIF’s flagship grantee), visited a school and welfare office in East Jerusalem.
While the Jerusalem issue provides a major challenge for Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, my colleagues and I were distressed to observe and hear about the disgraceful conditions of public schools in the eastern half of the city, which are the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and the municipality. The overcrowding is so bad that large numbers of children are being denied entry to neighborhood schools because there is literally no physical space in the make-shift classes (often rented rooms in an apartment building). ACRI and other NIF-supported organizations are prodding the government through litigation and lobbying, but there is simply no excuse for procrastination on such a fundamental right as ensuring appropriate educational opportunities for all residents of the city.
The study tour portion of the Board/IC program included: a learning session with NIF grantee Memizrach Shemesh; dinner in the homes of Ethiopian-Israeli families in the city of Gedera; a site visit to Ramle where we were informed of the many achievements of SHATIL’s mixed cities project; a trip to Nazareth for briefings on the situation facing Israel’s Arab minority; and an interactive, three-hour session, which provided a practical orientation to the work of SHATIL’s Conflict Transformation and Management Center.
A particular highlight of the program was joining the 15th anniversary celebration of Women Against Violence (WAV) in Nazareth. WAV, the remarkably successful organization that initiated the first rape crisis center and battered women’s shelter for Israel’s Arab population, has played a leading role in advocating for the rights of women in Israel, in neighboring Arab countries and internationally. In a briefing for our group, Aida Touma Souliman emphasized the critical role played by NIF in providing the initial seed funding for the organization and, equally important, for assigning Fathi Marshood, the head of SHATIL’s office in Haifa, as an organizational consultant.
Aida’s reminisces, and others heard throughout the week, provide constant reminders of the uniqueness of the NIF approach and of how we have changed the social change landscape in Israel. At the same time, our briefings, deliberations and observations also presented the challenges that continue to confront Israeli society and highlight the role that we must continue to play.
In this week’s NIF News, we feature the changeover of the NIF presidency as Prof. Peter Edelman stood down after six years and was succeeded by Prof. Naomi Chazan. We also report on the peaceful holding of Jerusalem's annual Gay Pride Parade, and on a dramatic reduction in racism at Israeli soccer matches as the NIF campaign completes its fifth season monitoring the behavior of fans. SHATIL reports on the first-ever town hall meeting in Sderot, a conference addressing the plight of the 22,000 Arab Israeli families in which one spouse is a Palestinian resident of the West Bank, and the first annual Other Voices Film Festival. |
|
