Working for Peace

An American charity pushes Israel to treat its Arab citizens with respect

When Israel and Hezbollah began bombing each other last month, Ami Nahshon didn’t know how long the fighting

would last or how many casualties to expect.

But he knew one thing for certain: The progress his organization had made toward promoting cooperation and peaceful coexistence between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens was in danger of sliding backwards.

Almost immediately, Mr. Nahshon, president of Abraham Fund Initiatives, a group that operates from offices in Jerusalem and New York, gathered his staff to take action.

The charity began closely monitoring the Israeli agencies at work during the crisis, such as emergency and rescue services and public-information units, making sure the government was not ignoring the plight of the 1.2 million Arabs who represent about 20 percent of Israel’s population — and about half the people in the northern Galilee region, where the majority of the Hezbollah rockets fell.

When the charity discovered that safety information had been widely publicized in Hebrew but not in Arabic, it immediately got in touch with government officials and offered to translate and distribute public-safety notices to Arabic speakers. It did the same for psychological-counseling agencies, helping to translate materials used to treat trauma victims.

For almost two decades, Abraham Fund Initiatives has dedicated itself to creating an Israeli democracy in which both Jewish and Arab citizens feel equally at home. By providing grants to charities that promote good relations between Arab and Jewish Israelis, and operating programs in Israel to help change the institutions believed to exacerbate the problem, the charity aims to eliminate inequality and discrimination.

This summer’s war, Mr. Nahshon says, demonstrated the disparity in treatment. “The state of Israel has not created significant policy that says to the Arab citizen: ‘You are a valued and welcomed part of the society, deserving full equality in every sense.’”

While Mr. Nahshon and other people on the Abraham Fund’s staff — a mix of Jewish and Arab Israelis — worry that some of the positive momentum it has built over the last few years will be eroded by the violence of recent weeks, they have grown necessarily accustomed to a two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach to progress.

“Crisis should never be seen only as a negative,” says Mohammad Darawshe, an Arab Israeli and the Abraham Fund’s director of development in Israel. “Often these situations create new windows of opportunity; when you are exposed to big problems, that’s when you start really digging in to issues and stop touching only the surface of them.”

In the Beginning

The Abraham Fund Initiatives was founded in 1989 by Alan B. Slifka, a money manager in New York City, and the late Eugene Weiner, who was a sociology professor at the University of Haifa.

Mr. Slifka came up with the idea 20 years ago during a visit to Israel, where he witnessed the deep gulf that existed between the Jews and Arabs there.

“I was interested in learning about Middle Eastern culture, and it struck me that none of the Jewish people I met knew any Arabs,” he says. “They didn’t talk to each other at all. It was as though there were two separate societies.”

The two men soon discovered that while many small grass-roots organizations were quietly working to bring Jews and Arabs together on the local level, no mainstream Jewish institution was willing to publicly declare that such efforts were important.

“Twenty years ago, it wasn’t politically correct to talk about creating coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Israel. It wasn’t clear whether a Jewish institution should be actively spending time and money on activities with Arabs,” says Mr. Slifka. “But it was our contention that coexistence is an activity that required an address and an administrator to oversee and take responsibility for creating change.”

The Abraham Fund was named for the common ancestor of Jews and Arabs, and for its first dozen years, it operated mainly as a grant maker, distributing more than $10-million to about 700 programs that seek to improve relations between the two groups.

“There was a feeling initially that if we had more organizations doing more good projects, we could saturate the field to the point that it would become natural for people to get along,” says Mr. Darawshe. “One thing that has become evident, however, is that you cannot create change from the bottom up if it is not also matched with government policies from the top down.”

So over the last six years, the organization developed its own large-scale programs in an effort to change the societal institutions they believe contribute to the tensions between Arab and Jewish Israelis. It uses its $4.8-million annual budget to pay for such programs, as well as to make grants to projects run by other groups.

Teaching Schoolchildren

One of the Abraham Fund’s signature programs, for which it will spend $1.1-million for 2006-7, is called Language as a Cultural Bridge.

In Israel, Jewish and Arab children typically attend separate schools, and despite the fact that the country has two official languages — Hebrew and Arabic — Jewish students are taught only in Hebrew.

“We believe that language is a very important symbol of how societies work together,” says Mr. Nahshon. “The fact that Arab children learn Hebrew and Jewish children do not learn Arabic illustrates the disconnect that culturally exists between the two groups.”

In 2004, the Abraham Fund collaborated with Israel’s Ministry of Education and local governments to create a pilot program in 15 public schools to teach conversational Arabic to Jewish fifth graders. The effort was so successful that last year the program was expanded to 60 schools, with more than 5,000 children in fifth, sixth, and seventh grades participating. This fall, fourth-grade lessons will be added.

The Abraham Fund hopes that eventually all children in Israeli public schools, from kindergarten through 12th grade, will be taught in both Arabic and Hebrew.

The program’s success has surprised even its creators, who had anticipated some backlash.

“Parents, rather than picketing in front of the school — which, frankly, was an imaginable outcome — have been telling principals that they want classes for themselves so they can keep up with their kids,” says Mr. Nahshon. “We find also that the message to Arab Israelis that Jewish kids are learning their language is tremendously well received; it says ‘we respect you, we value your culture,’ which is a very powerful message for a community that largely feels marginalized.”

Monitoring the Police

Another Abraham Fund program, the Police-Community initiative, aims to change the culture within Israel’s security forces.

The program, which will receive $308,000 this year, was created after 13 Arab Israelis were killed by Israeli police in October 2000, when demonstrations turned into riots.

“The event scared the hell out of everyone,” says Mr. Nahshon. “The Arabs saw themselves as exercising their democratic rights to protest, and the police felt threatened and responded by treating them as the enemy. Arab citizens started wondering: ‘What is our role here? Israel is a fairly developed democracy with civil rights. How could this happen?’”

A year later, the Abraham Fund, working with Israel’s national police force, built a program that includes a series of activities, including some multicultural-awareness classes and Arabic lessons for officers.

Like the Language as a Cultural Bridge effort, the program started small, but within three years, spread across the country.

Yoav Stern, a senior columnist at the Israeli publication Ha’aretz who specializes in Arab culture, says that the Abraham Fund’s efforts are to be commended, particularly for their Police-Community program.

“Training the policemen on how to address Arab citizens is actually super-important because this is one of the main problems of the relationship between the Arab community and the state,” he says. “The Abraham Fund is considered to be the most moderate organization in terms of Arab participation — because it is not political at all. Usually such organizations tend to be too political.”

He adds that the group’s help during the war — translating the Israeli Army’s Web site into Arabic, for instance, and providing assistance to Arab towns and villages in the north, is also to be lauded, but adds: “Is it enough? It isn’t, and can never be.”

Raising Money

Raising money has always been a major challenge for the Abraham Fund, whose financial support has mainly come from American donors and foundations.

The idea of “creating equal opportunity for Arab and Jewish citizens within Israel” isn’t always at the top of people’s priority list, says Mr. Nahshon.

“Many philanthropists see the big issue as being the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or violence between Israel and other neighboring countries,” he says. “It can be challenging to get people to understand that the domestic relationship between Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens is profoundly important as a precondition for Israel reaching peace with its neighbors.”

To that end, Michael Greenberg, director of development at the Abraham Fund’s New York office, says that the charity has been working to educate potential donors about its work.

In addition to sending direct-mail appeals, it has started holding a series of talks and informal get-togethers.

The charity has also begun to invite current and potential American donors on trips to Israel to meet with beneficiaries of their programs. It plans to sponsor such trips every 18 to 24 months, with participants paying their travel expenses.

Susan Tribbitt, an immigration lawyer in New York, who learned about the Abraham Fund five years ago, participated in one of the group’s trips last fall and says that seeing the organization’s work with her own eyes prompted her and her husband to step up their giving to the charity.

She says she was particularly impressed with how connected the organization is with leaders in both Arab and Jewish communities. For instance, she says the group met with local police chiefs and mayors of both Arab and Jewish towns, and visited Amman, Jordan, to meet with Prince El Hassan bin Talal. “The Abraham Fund has obviously earned their stripes with these people in order to have the kind of access they did,” she says.

The Abraham Fund is also beginning to reach outside the United States for money. This year, the charity secured $115,000 from the European Union.

“We hope that getting that substantial grant will help us access other sources of funding in Europe, assuming that the war did not damage our progress,” says Mr. Darawshe. “Usually war has a negative effect on donations, because when there is turmoil, many donors say: ‘This is not the time for doing good; when things are a bit more stable, we will come in.’”

This year, the organization also created a Friends of the Abraham Fund association in London and became a founding member of Foundations for Peace, in New York, collaborating with groups in India, Northern Ireland, and Serbia.

“We have high hopes that by advocating together for the importance of peace-building on the societal level, we can help governments and major international funders understand that serious investment needs to occur in this work,” says Mr. Nahshon.

In addition, the charity is beginning to make inroads within Israel.

The Abraham Fund, for instance, has identified a small group of influential business people to cultivate.

“We’re not yet directly asking for funds, but these are people who have access to money, and once they see that we have the proper management structure and program evaluations, we believe the money will follow,” says Mr. Darawshe.

This summer’s violence necessarily pushed some of the Abraham Fund’s fund-raising efforts to the back burner, while the charity attended to more immediate issues.

In addition to trying to relieve tensions on the street, the Abraham Fund also had to tend to its own internal dynamics. The organization’s staff of 22 (15 in Jerusalem, seven in New York), and its board of directors include both Jewish and Arab Israelis.

The Jerusalem staff, in particular, has grown accustomed to airing different points of view amicably around the water cooler, but when the war began last month, it was difficult not to let emotions cloud their focus.

“Suddenly, instead of us dealing with internal civil rights and cooperative ventures between municipalities, all these political issues surface and they become the topic for discussion,” says Mr. Darawshe. “Instead of narrowing gaps, they focus on the gaps.”

Within the first 24 hours of the war, the Jerusalem office’s staff members got together for a discussion. “It is very important for the sustainability of our staff that we talked through these issues early on,” says Mr. Darawshe. “If you don’t confront it right away, it can really destroy an organization.”

He says that after the police killed the Arabs in 2000, some Jewish-Arab groups shut down because tensions between staff members became too heated.

Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, executive director of Abraham Fund Initiatives-Israel, says he, for one, is very proud of how professionally his staff has handled the crisis. “All of us recognize that our role goes far beyond our immediate environment. We are all working for the same goal, for coexistence, for equality,” he says.

Adds Mr. Nahshon: “There are certainly palpable remaining tensions. But slowly we’ll begin to get back to our day-to-day business of providing access and leadership to Jewish-Arab cooperation and with a bit of luck, we’ll be able to pick up where we left off.”