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Creating Trust

The Inter-Community workshop focuses on meeting two needs:: the need to provide "Partnership "members with tools which enable them to succeed in their work and to enjoy it, as well as the need to create models of concrete partnership in various regions of the country.


The preparations for such a worksho involve an enormous amount of work. First, three neighbouring communities, representing the incredibly heterogenous society of Israel, have to be chosen: a well-organized kibbutz of Western Jews or native Israelis, a less well-organized moshav of mostly uneducated Jews from Arab countries, and an Arab village or a Bedouin tribe - itself often torn by different religions, ideologies or tribal feuds. The Galilee workshop included Kibbutz Sasa, Moshav Dovev and the village Jish. We had contact with the three of them while working on our model of how to solve a conflict of interests concerning land ownership. Dovev participated only marginally. The Negev workshop took place in the Bedouin tribe Al-Husseil and in Kibbutz Dvir. As in the Galilee, the moshav that had been "won over", then dropped out in the last minute. Though their representatives trusted us, the people did not.


The Sharon workshop, in the centre of the country, included Kibbutz Horshim, the village Jaljulia, and Moshav Sdei-Hemed, after violence had broken out between them. We had made contact with Neve-Yamin several times, but in the end we chose another neighbouring Moshav, with mixed oriental and Western population, Sdei-Hemed.


We then began the delicate task of winning the trust of leaders in each of the three communities. After some basic information about "Partnership" has been communicated, these leaders were asked for two things:
1) To suggest four or five people in the village who could be motivated to participate in the workshop, in order to work for a concrete partnership between the three communities afterwards.
2) To give hospitality to the workshop, i.e. to a group of about fifteen Jews and Arabs, in addition to the participants from the other two communities. They were asked to provide ten families as hosts for meals and sleeping accomodities, several rooms for the gathering of the workshop participants from morning till supper, and a large hall for the evening activities with the people from the entire community.

In some of the communities, because we could not get in contact with the designated representatives, we held meetings with random groups and won them over as participants. We learned from the first two workshops that holding only one meeting before the workshop was not enough. The organizer of the Sharon workshop [my pupil, Ma'ayan Biran] therefore set up seven meetings, two with each village and one for the registered participants from the three villages together, as well as held many additional meetings with individuals and representatives. Still, in the end, the five participants of the Moshav did not turn up the first day; they appeared only when we were guests at their settlement on the last day.

In addition to the problem of trust and reliability, there are also enormous technical stumbling-blocks which have to be overcome. Even in a kibbutz there is just one telephone and participants rarely have a car; Arab villages seldom have public rooms for even small gatherings; there are no holidays in common, and people work six days a week.This means that a continuous participation of three days is possible only for very few people. In the Negev workshop, we won over an orthodox religious social-worker from a moshav. This gave us the opportunity to practice partnership betwen religiously observant and non-observant participants, but again, it involved many technical problems. Since some of them could not be solved, additional psychological difficulties resulted.