Neta Ahituv, “Haaretz”, July 24, 2025:
In the midst of the decimation of already fragile relations between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, days of open racism, paralyzing fear and mutual suspicion, a near unique place among the ruins remains, where the dove of peace’s call is still heard. This is Givat Haviva, on the outskirts of Wadi Ara, where the eternal flame of shared society in Israel still burns, despite the evil winds’ attempts to extinguish it.
“The best way to educate children for democracy is education for a shared society,” says Michal Sella. “It’s not a luxury or a ‘nice thing’ that the children go through, but a struggle for the right to equality in Israel.” Sella is the CEO of Givat Haviva, a collective name for a vast campus with many institutions that all share the pursuit of a shared society for Israeli Jews and Arabs. According to her, “The clearest divide within Israel is between Jews and Arabs, so this relationship holds the surest way to change perceptions of reality. Your attitude toward the other society, whether Jewish or Arab, is the clearest indicator of your attitude toward democracy, equality, and the rule of law. If you believe they are citizens with equal rights, it means you have a foundation of democratic thinking. There is a sense that liberal society in Israel doesn’t fully comprehend how important it is to work and invest in the education system. “It’s true that this is difficult, long, and unglamorous, that feels like oldfashioned discourse, , not high-tech, but it’s critical for the continuation of liberal society in Israel.”
The Jewish-Arab Center for Peace in Givat Haviva is visited by about 23,000 students, about 1,000 Jewish and Arab teachers, and several thousand more adults each year, who enjoy (enjoyment is an important component of the activities) peace-loving programming dealing with the possibility of a shared and equal society. Rather than avoiding the harsh reality, they try to change it. Among other things, the Center has uni-national programs and binational programs for Jews and Arabs, summer camps, enrichment activities, a state school, soccer, photography, art and ceramics, lectures, a center for Arabic studies, a center for Hebrew studies, an artist residency, and also an international high school, where a third of the students are Jewish, a third Arab, and a third from around the world.
Sella has been the CEO of Givat Haviva for five years. She previously managed the education department of Hashomer Hatzair, worked as a journalist and editor on Reshet and Channel 2, and was a co-founder of “Whistle,” a non-profit organization established in 2016 to expose lies and demagogy of the Israeli government and media. Sella also worked for several years at the New Israel Fund and in the Knesset, where she was a parliamentary assistant to former MK Michal Biran (Labor), and later worked on the campaigns of Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni and as a research assistant to Yuli Tamir. It was Tamir who pushed her to study public policy, a degree she earned at Oxford. When she returned from her master’s degree, she wanted to work in the government and waited for the fall of the Netanyahu government. Meanwhile, she sought to influence civil society, a field that quickly became her professional passion
She took on the role of CEO of Givat Haviva in March 2021, just before the violent events of May 2021, in which Israeli Jews and Arabs rioted in Jerusalem, Lod, Bat Yam, Haifa, and more. Many assumed that after these events and the increasing concerns, activity at Givat Haviva would decrease, but the exact opposite happened. Givat Haviva received more and more requests to take part in the Center’s various programs, from both individuals and schools. Even after October 7, numbers remained steady.
Givat Haviva’s programs are dynamic, and the organization adapts its content to the needs of the moment. So in the early days of mourning, pain, and war, no binational groups were held, only separate groups. Sella explains that it was the educators themselves who expressed this need, and Givat Haviva responded immediately. “They were looking for ways to encourage the youth, who felt scared and confused. Especially Arab youth, who simply remained silent out of fear. They did not dare say a word about what was happening, and experienced a sense of persecution. Arab teachers in the Jewish education system felt the same way. This led many to contact us for advice. In response, we realized that we needed to step out of our comfort zone and support people over 18, so we also developed a Jewish-Arab leadership program that deals with understanding the others’ narrative.”
On a tour of the campus during summer vacation, I met Arabic-speaking teenagers who had just eaten what they had prepared during “cooking day” at Givat Haviva’s Hebrew camp. The instructors patiently went over the names of the utensils and cutlery with them, and it was clear that they had already memorized the Hebrew names of the fruits. The lush lawns, the water tower at the center of the campus, and the kibbutz architecture that characterizes the buildings on campus create a special atmosphere — on the one hand, everything seems familiar and nostalgic under the scorching Israeli sun; on the other hand, the tranquility here is on a different level. A few days earlier, in the same building, a joint photography class for Jewish and Arab teenagers, which Jinan Halabi has been coordinating for many years, concluded. She says that at first relations between the Jewish and Arab youth were hesitant, but deep friendships formed quickly, “a pattern that repeats itself every year,” she says. The photography class’s method is to assign joint tasks, so the children must work together. “Givat Haviva is a place that maintains sanity in an insane reality. It is a place of hope, of connection, of the future,” says Halabi, who also maintains continuous contact with the photography programs’ graduates to ensure the passion for photography and shared society does not crack under the burden of life in Israel.
One of Givat Haviva’s most popular programs is the oldest of them all. It’s called CTC, “Children Teaching Children,” in which the children undergo preparation in their schools and then meet for joint seminars at Givat Haviva. Zacharia Mahameed, the program’s coordinator, says that for him and for many of the youth, “Givat Haviva is where we feel safe, but when we leave the campus, sometimes we can feel we no longer recognize Israeli society. Each side is becoming more and more isolated and closed off. I am also a civics teacher, and I see the change in the classrooms. Obviously, there are moments of despair, but I am not working for myself, but for my students. We have nowhere to go, this is our country, so it is important that we find ways to integrate into it.”
One path to integration is by teaching Arab students Hebrew and Jewish students Arabic. In one of Givat Haviva’s programs, Jewish teachers come to Arab schools to teach the students Hebrew. “It can be quite stressful to be the only Jewish teacher in an Arab school,” says Sella. “Many of them don’t know Arabic, and some of the schools are located in towns where there have been murders, and yet it is a very popular program, both among the Jewish teachers who apply to join and among the Arab schools that invite them. Every Jewish teacher is assigned an Arab teacher from the school to accompany them, sometimes even to their car or out of the village. Such beautiful friendships have formed between Jewish and Arab teachers. After October 7, we thought there was no chance that Jewish teachers would return to teaching in an Arab community, so we were shocked when, just two weeks later, all the dozens of teachers in the program, except for one who left, returned and are still teaching today. That was one of the only things that gave me hope in those days.”
After October 7, the Givat Haviva campus took in 300 evacuees from Sderot, Netivot, Ofakim, and Ashkelon on its own initiative. Some of them were prison guards, security guards, and other licensed weapon carrying professionals. At the same time, many Arabs were walking around Givat Haviva and speaking Arabic. Sella suddenly realized, “I have a very serious pressure cooker here. On the one hand, 300 evacuees with various levels of post-trauma. On the other hand, a great many Arabs of all ages.” To defuse tensions in advance, she invited everyone living on campus to a joint conversation, in which she told about Givat Haviva and its activities, and explained that sometimes situations would occur there that might seem like one thing, but were actually an educational act – two people arguing in Arabic, for example. She asked that people not rush to shoot anyone. “We emerged from these months of hosting without a single Jewish-Arab incident and with many beautiful scenes of religious Jewish children, evacuated from the south, playing soccer with Arab children from the region.”
“We have our hands in the dirt,” says Michal Sella, Givat Haviva CEO, meaning that Givat Haviva is not busy with campaigns, research, or changing public discourse, but rather in the Sisyphean, daily, challenging, and not always rewarding work of education, even in challenging areas of Israeli society — Arab communities with rising crime or Jewish communities that have been hit badly. They do not give up on any population and offer their programming throughout the country.
Sella learned the method of thorough and unmediated permeation into society in a surprising place. One of the lengthy investigations she conducted as a journalist for Reshet was a documentary about the Hilltop Youth. As part of the investigation, she spent long months with the Hilltop Youth and the leaders of the settlers. “I have logged many hours with Itamar Ben Gvir and Bentzi Gopstein,” she says. “Few in liberal Israeli society know them and the geography of the hills as well as I do. What I saw there and learned from them is years-long, systematic work that includes a lot of investment in building leadership through action. They may have built a sick leadership, but they know how to work with youth and recruit them to the ’cause.’ Ben Gvir’s chief of staff, for example, was a protégé of his in the Hilltop Youth movement. From his perspective, it was worth investing two decades. If we want to see officers in the IDF who don’t seek to ‘wipe out’ the Palestinian population, who don’t behave like certain officers are behaving today in Gaza, who don’t fight holy wars, but only wars to maintain Israel’s security, we need to start with education. There are no shortcuts.”
What content do the ideological settlers impart educationally?
“They see themselves as pioneers, living in the Wild West. If you add faith, dedication, racism, hatred, violence, and, above all, charismatic and purposeful leaders, you get the exciting experience of a youth movement with a sense of unlimited power. They tell the youth, ‘You are the law, you decide, there is only land, you, and God.’ It’s very powerful. At the same time, they also have formal education in the form of an insane network of army preparatory schools, which educate for faith and sacrifice. They have been doing this for 20 years and in recent years have been reaping the benefits in government.
“We must denounce the extreme messianic education of the settlers, and at the same time learn their methods,” Sella continues, “because at the start they learned from us. They took the working settlement as a model, copied the methods, the passion, the founding group ethos of the kibbutzim and the desire to be a serving elite, but with distorted values. As someone who grew up in HaShomer Hatzair, I saw a sick mirror image in the Hilltop Youth. It’s the same framework, but with rotten values inside. I just watched a video of a fight between Jewish youth and Arab workers at Cinema City in Jerusalem. The Jewish boys shouted ‘Death to the Arabs’ — this stems from the complete absence of setting boundaries for discourse in the education system. Instead of us educating them on how to behave, it is settler education that permeates the public education system. They are a serving elite that managed to corrupt the moral backbone of Israel deep within the Green Line.”
Why were they able to instill their ideology in the youth?
“The politicians who supposedly represent us made a series of political mistakes. First of all, since Meretz, no liberal democratic party has fought for the education portfolio, which is one of the largest in the government — with a budget of 70 billion shekels. The religious-nationalist parties fought for it. This is how regular state education was abandoned to forces that introduced religious, anti-democratic, anti-scientific, anti-egalitarian content. You see it on every map that hangs in every classroom — the Green Line and the West Bank territories are not marked. A child sits in a state school in central Tel Aviv, looks at this map, and thinks that he can ride a scooter to Ramallah.”
What counterargument can peace-loving liberals offer?
“Right now there is really no counter to this. There is anger among secularists about the religiousization of the education system. It is an important struggle, clearly, but we must add positive principles to our opposition. Not just ‘what is not,’ but also ‘what is.’ Education cannot be just against, we must fill the vacuum and we cannot rely solely on parents to do it. The democratic camp believes that, overall, the public in Israel needs to be reminded that they love people and democracy. So they invest a million shekels in a campaign that proclaims how important democracy is. The problem is that we are no longer there. For years, they have infiltrated our education system, removed the liberal-democratic-egalitarian content from it and introduced morally rotten content. Our children are no longer in a place where they just need a reminder, they need all the education from the ground up. I appreciate the work of research and campaigns, I do not belittle it, but I also know that if we do not invest in education and thorough fieldwork, it will certainly be a loss in the long run. We have lost the political consciousness of an entire generation, the desire to be involved, the basic understanding of what democracy is and why equality is critical to sustaining it. We must rebuild an education system that will raise the next leaders. There is no problem campaigning for Lapid voters to bring them back ‘home’, to the values of egalitarian democracy, but we must also take care of the raw material of the populace. This raw material is children and youth.”
How is that done in practice? What does education for a shared society look like?
“First of all, learn about the composition of Israeli society. You’d be surprised to find that a lot of students in Israel have no idea about the different groups. They don’t know that there are also Muslim, Druze, and Christian citizens living in Israel, that there is a difference between an Israeli-Arab citizen and a Palestinian living in the territories, and they certainly don’t know about the exceptional status of the Arab residents of Jerusalem. In our seminars, there is a Hebrew-speaking instructor and an Arabic-speaking instructor, and there are strict and not-so-Israeli rules for conducting dialogue. Participants have to listen to the other side and speak only in turn, and throughout the day they learn about the differences and similarities between them, and talk about common interests. In the end, we are all citizens of the State of Israel and we have a unifying desire for things to be good here. Let’s say, protecting the environment is a common interest. These are teenagers, so there are many common interests — soccer, fashion, music, and so on. Very quickly it takes the form of a regular teenage seminar, where they deal with things that interest their peers.”
How do you neutralize the danger of racism in joint meetings?
“Through an educational moratorium,” says Sella. The concept of moratorium was coined by American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. His intention was that teenagers be allowed an open space for experiences, possibilities, and taking on different social roles without judgment or criticism, so they can forge their own identity in preparation for their entry into society as adults. Sella describes the educational moratorium they advocate this way: “Imagine a safe space surrounded by soft boundaries, say a gym with mattresses on the floor and walls. You move within it and feel safe enough to make mistakes because you know you won’t get hurt. Even if you reach the border, it won’t hurt you, but will only make you return to the center. This is the space you are supposed to create for a child to allow for an educational process. They need to feel safe to say something ‘wrong’ without having serious consequences. On the other hand, they need to be returned to the agreed-upon space when they reach the edge. This is how you neutralize the danger of racism.”
It seems that in Israel there is an educational moratorium for Jews only. While Jews can say terrible things about Arabs without consequences, Arabs are not allowed to say anything.
“I’ll respond with an example. In one of the joint meetings we had shortly after October 7, an Arab girl said to a Jewish girl something like, ‘Of course I’m against what happened on October 7, but we also must not forget that there is history before that, that there is an occupation.’ What the Jewish girl heard was that the Arab girl was in favor of what happened on October 7, and for her, that meant she was in favor of murder, rape, and kidnapping. She was very upset. It’s important to understand that there are also language gaps that make things difficult, and differences in approach. While the Jewish children usually speak relatively freely and are used to arguing, the Arab children are less used to it.”
How did that story continue?
“The Jewish girl called her mother and told her that there were ‘supporters of terror’ here, and to come and pick her up immediately. The mother called to inform us that she was going to file a police complaint against the Arab girl and that she was on her way to pick up her daughter. Now, if she files a complaint, there is a reasonable chance that the Arab girl will be arrested, and perhaps her family members and the educational staff of the school where she attends. Including a blindfold and a police case. This is not an unreasonable situation these days. So we asked her not to file a complaint until we talk face to face. By the time she got to Givat Haviva, her daughter had already forgotten the whole story and didn’t want to leave the seminar at all because she was enjoying herself. We found ourselves reassuring the mother, who said that she was post-traumatic and therefore reacted the way she did. In the meantime, the Arab girl’s family also arrived at Givat Haviva following the daughter’s call, and according to the best cliché — she brought delicious food for everyone and that day was over.” “A festive meal, hugs, and courageous friendship between the two families. We managed to resolve this by thinking about a safe space, the girls talked to each other for a moment without judgment, and listened to each other, and were able to talk things out and go back to being the happy girls they should be. Our feeling here since October 7th is that teenagers are on edge, just like the adults around them, but here they have a place to process it and meet the other.”
It’s surprising to hear that you work in close partnership with the Ministry of Education. What have you learned from working with them?
“When you talk about education in Israel, a sad picture immediately comes to mind and people claim there is no chance and no hope, but in my opinion it is exactly the opposite – it is the place with the most possibility and hope. There is hardly a country in the world that has such a centralized education system as Israel. The Ministry of Education employs all the teachers, controls the teaching material, and almost the entire population sends its children to public schools. This is unparalleled. So it is a system that can be reformed relatively easily. I personally know a lot of wonderful educators, schools, and Ministry of Education employees who are full of a sense of mission.”
There is an opposite feeling, that this centralization is a tool of control by the government to instill its nationalist-religious agenda, which is not in the interest of a liberal education.
“It’s true that this is not in our interest right now, but it can easily be turned around. The beautiful thing about education is that things can almost always be fixed. For example, you can easily improve the status of teachers, and especially of Arab teachers. It’s enough for the Minister of Education to say something good about teachers, support them, talk about the importance of the profession, and the atmosphere towards them will immediately change. I meet teachers who are scared, tired, who don’t earn much money, who are yelled at, who are not seen, but on the other hand, those same teachers are also the people who are most satisfied with their work. They enjoy teaching, they have a passion for education and a lot of care for their students. When a teacher experiences satisfaction in their work, it’s unlike satisfaction in any other job. I know these days everything seems terrible and discouraging, but I can tell you for certain that the vast majority of citizens in Israel, children and adults, want to live in peace, want a good life, want a different future. I see a lot of people here from different populations, who hear difficult things at home, “And then in just a few meetings, they change their worldview regarding ‘the other.’ A good life together is possible, I see it every day.”
Read the article in Haaretz online in English! – here
Photo: David Bachar