Why do I do what I do

Israel is my chosen home. At the age of sixteen, I decided to make Israel my home. At the age of 22, I moved from New York to Israel and have never regretted my decision. Israel has never been a perfect country, and no country is. But when I immigrated to Israel, it was a land of hope and opportunity that I don't see today. When I spent my intervening year in Israel in 1974-1975 for the Judea Youth School Year Programme, I spent a year on a kibbutz and half the year studying in Jerusalem. I learned from my teachers that immigrating to Israel is not just a change of address, it should be a change in the essence of our lives. Becoming an Israeli means making a commitment to making Israel a better country. During that year I learned that Israel faced three basic problems: socio-economic gaps between citizens (gaps between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews), questions regarding the nationality of Arab citizens of Israel (one in six Israelis were subsequently referred to as “Israeli Arabs”), And the cause of the Palestinian people and the land occupied by Israel in June 1967 and under Israeli military control.

The issue I was most interested in was the Palestinian issue. As a university student in the United States, I began studying and getting to know other Palestinians and Arabs to try to understand what they wanted. I visited the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization, where the Palestine Liberation Organization has observer status at the United Nations. In 1976, I met with the High Representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization and suggested to him that the PLO recognize Israel and accept a Palestinian state on land Israel captured in the June 1967 war. His response was, "Over my dead body, you Jews have stolen our land and we will take it back." While not unexpected, the response was disappointing. I believed in my heart that one day the PLO would face the reality of Israel's existence and decide that liberating part of their land was better for them than having nothing. When I immigrated to Israel in 1978, I decided that until the Palestinian cause matured, I would devote my energies to helping create a more equal and democratic Israel by working to try to improve relations between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. I joined a volunteer organization called Interns for Peace and went to live and work in the Arab village of Kafr Qara for two years.

I learned that Jewish-Arab relations in Israel must become the responsibility of the state to ensure equality and not just the work of voluntary civil society organizations. I wrote a letter to Prime Minister Menachem Begin suggesting that the State of Israel needs to hire people to work on this issue. Prime Minister Begin replied to my letter and I was invited to come to Jerusalem to meet with this adviser on Arab affairs. From that meeting I was referred to the Minister of Education, Mr. Ziflon Hammar of the National Religious Party.

With the help of MK Muhammad Watad of Mapam, who found a provision in the state budget to finance my position, I was hired and went to work in the Ministry of Education. I was a young man, a new immigrant and got a high-ranking position in the ministry. The ministry's main policy document issued by the Director General, Eliezer Shmuli, signed the new policies it developed including encouraging Jewish and Arab schools to participate in meetings between them. I fought for budgets to help out with those programs and eventually got paid to work with them. With Neve Shalom-Wahat Salaam, we have developed a training program to co-facilitate meetings. Together with Aluf Harvin of the Van Leer Institute, we set up a government commission to evaluate Education for Democracy and Coexistence (as we called it Building a Shared Society at the time). The committee was chaired by Deputy General Director Aryeh Shoval and I was a member of the committee. Our main implementation recommendation was to establish a Department of Education for Democracy and Coexistence, which was implemented by the next Minister of Education, former Israeli President Yitzhak Navon. She then established the Institute of Education for Arab-Jewish Coexistence, which she directed in partnership with the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Education, with funding mainly from the German Hans Seidel Foundation. I did that until the first intifada exploded when I left that job to start addressing the issue of Israel and Palestine.

I believed then and for many years that Israel could fulfill the terms of its own definition as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people provided that the Palestinian people could live in their own country, in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, side by side with Israel. The First Intifada and the subsequent Palestinian declaration of independence in November 1988 gave credence to my claims. I believed that if there was peace between Israel and Palestine, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel would not be viewed as suspects because of their identity with their people and not their state, and then true equality could be achieved within the State of Israel. This was the basis of my support for the two-state solution. I also thought it immoral and unfair that we Jews, who have suffered so much persecution, should treat the Palestinians the same way we have been treated. Moreover, economically, socially and politically for Israel in the international community - Israeli-Palestinian peace made sense and was to me, and is clearly in Israel's interest.

But we failed. We did not make peace. The Palestinian state was not established. Settlements grew and expanded. The Israeli occupation is deeper and more extensive than ever before, and the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israel in ways that are totally unacceptable to anyone who can look objectively at our situation. Israel has the right to defend itself, but that defense does not include denying the political, civil and human rights of millions of people. Our tragedy is that those who oppose peace with the Palestinians have prevailed for the time being. The two-state solution may no longer be viable, but that does not negate the basic fact that millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians live on this tiny piece of land between the river and the sea. This issue is more existential than ever and I refuse to give in to despair. Our survival as a people depends more on making peace with the Palestinian people than on any other issue. Without a definitive resolution to this conflict, I will continue to work every day to try to help all of us find our way back to the negotiating table and back to the hope that we can one day live in peace.