Neve Shalom
Based on Wikipedia: Neve Shalom
A Catholic priest, born to non-practicing Jews in Egypt, once convinced a monastery to lease him forty hectares of bramble-covered wasteland in the middle of nowhere. He paid three pence a year. Then he moved into a bus parked on the desolate hillside and waited to see if anyone would join him in building something impossible: a village where Israelis and Palestinians would choose to live together.
That was 1970. The village exists today.
The Man Who Lived in a Bus
Father Bruno Hussar's path to founding Neve Shalom—Hebrew for "Oasis of Peace," or Wahat as-Salam in Arabic—was anything but straightforward. He was studying engineering in France when he converted to Christianity, a decision that might have severed his connection to his Jewish heritage entirely. Instead, watching the vicious antisemitism of wartime France did the opposite. It sharpened his awareness of his roots.
He joined the Dominican Order, became a priest in 1950, and was sent to Jerusalem three years later to establish a center for Jewish studies. By 1966 he had Israeli citizenship. By 1970 he had a vision that most people would have dismissed as hopelessly naive.
The land he secured sat in the Latrun salient, a strategic area between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that had been classified as no-man's-land. The local Trappist abbey agreed to a hundred-year lease at what the British call a "peppercorn rent"—a nominal sum signifying the lease is essentially a gift. The terrain was treeless, waterless, and hadn't been cultivated since the Byzantine Empire. Hussar had no bathroom. He showered by driving ten kilometers to a nearby kibbutz once a week.
Foreigners came to share his experiment. Almost none lasted more than a month or two. One woman, Anne LeMeignon, built herself a hut and stayed.
The Impossible Premise
Hussar's idea was deceptively simple in concept and extraordinarily difficult in practice. He wanted to create a community where Jews, Christians, and Muslims could live together on equal terms—not by erasing their differences, but by preserving them. Each resident would maintain their own language, faith, and cultural identity. The diversity itself would become a source of enrichment rather than conflict.
In his own words:
We had in mind a small village composed of inhabitants from different communities in the country. Jews, Christians and Muslims would live there in peace, each one faithful to his own faith and traditions, while respecting those of others. Each would find in this diversity a source of personal enrichment.
The first five families—four Jewish and one Palestinian—arrived in 1978. They lived in tents.
Among the early members was Major Wellesley Aron, whose grandson, the Israeli singer David Broza, later explained the founding vision: "The group of people that my grandfather joined saw the place as an opportunity to expand on the idea of finding peace within yourself as a prelude to bringing peace to the community and the region."
Building Without a Safety Net
For years, Neve Shalom existed as what can only be described as an orphan community. No official assistance. No government recognition. Just a handful of families trying to prove something most people thought was impossible.
The Israeli government's change of heart didn't come until 1994, and only after lobbying by foreign supporters and the American diplomat Samuel W. Lewis. Suddenly there were subsidies. Legal status as a municipality. Autonomous zoning rights. The community could finally plan for growth rather than mere survival.
Around the same time, toward the end of the 1990s, the Trappist monastery made an extraordinary gesture. To mark the new millennium, they gave half the land—about twenty hectares, or fifty acres—to the village as an outright gift. The peppercorn rent was no longer necessary for that portion. It belonged to the residents.
How the Village Actually Works
Today Neve Shalom is home to around sixty families, with a population that reached 313 in 2023. By principle, exactly half the residents are Jewish. The other half are Muslim and Christian Israeli Arabs. Another three hundred families sit on a waiting list, hoping to join.
The community governs itself through a steering committee elected by annual democratic vote. The head of this committee serves as the village's mayor. Numerical balance between Jewish and Arab representatives is maintained at all levels of governance. Interestingly, while balance is observed, rotation is not—since 1995, the village administrator has always been an Arab.
When major decisions need to be made, a plenum convenes. This is a gathering of all full members of the village, and its decisions are binding on everyone. The process sounds harmonious on paper. The reality is more complicated.
The Language Problem
Here's something that exposes the persistent asymmetries beneath the surface: the adult Jewish residents are not equally fluent in Arabic. As a result, official minutes are kept in Hebrew. Workshops are conducted in Hebrew. In a community explicitly founded on equality between two peoples, one language dominates.
Rabah Halabi, a Palestinian resident, has described a "large gap between proclaimed policy and the actual situation." The academic Grace Feuerverger, drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, has shown how language issues in the village refract deeper problems of power. Hebrew isn't just a communication choice—it's a structural advantage.
In the village school, each Jewish class has both a Jewish and an Arab teacher. But mathematics is taught to children in their respective native languages. The attempt at integration is genuine. So are its limits.
The School for Peace
What makes Neve Shalom significant beyond its own hilltop is its educational work. The School for Peace, founded in 1979, has conducted workshops, seminars, and courses for over thirty-five thousand young people and adults from both Israel and the Palestinian territories. It trains facilitators in what it calls "conflict-group encounter skills"—the difficult art of helping people in conflict actually hear each other.
The village also runs a bilingual, binational school for children from preschool through eighth grade. Founded in 1984, it was the first such school in the country. About ninety percent of its 250 students come from towns and villages within thirty kilometers. These aren't children whose parents live in the village. They're children whose parents want something different for them—exposure to the other side of a divide that most Israelis and Palestinians navigate by avoidance.
Then there's the Pluralistic Spiritual Centre, known as the "House of Silence." Built in memory of Father Bruno Hussar, it serves as a place for spiritual reflection on the conflict and the search for resolution. Muslims conduct Friday prayers there. Jews hold Sabbath services. Christians worship on Sundays. The same building, the same space, serving all three faiths.
What Happens When the Conflict Comes Home
Living together doesn't mean living in a bubble. The outside world has a way of forcing itself in.
In May 2010, when Israeli commandos killed activists during the Gaza flotilla raid, a sign appeared outside the village. The original wording described the deaths as "murder." After internal debate—an attempt to reflect village consensus—it was changed to "killing." The Israeli news outlet Arutz Sheva reported that a rift had broken out between Jewish and Arab residents over the sign, with threats to expel the Jewish members. The community responded by stating that the initiative had been undertaken and authorized democratically by both Jewish and Palestinian members.
Two years later, the village experienced what Israelis call a "price tag attack"—vigilante violence typically carried out by extremist settlers. Fourteen vehicles had their tires punctured. Some were painted with anti-Palestinian graffiti. The message was clear: even an oasis has enemies.
After October 7th
The Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, and Israel's subsequent war in Gaza have tested the village's cohesion in ways that previous crises did not. Historically, about half of Neve Shalom's Jewish residents have served in the Israel Defense Forces, while the other half have resisted the draft. Palestinian citizens of Israel are not obligated to serve, and to the community's knowledge, no Palestinian resident of the village ever has.
There are rumors—unconfirmed but widely discussed—that more of the village's Jewish residents signed up for additional periods of military service after October 7th. What's not rumor is the silence. According to both Jewish and Palestinian residents, the village has become mostly quiet on the topic of the war.
That silence speaks to something important. In a community built on dialogue, there are moments when dialogue becomes too painful. When the conflict outside is so intense, so raw, that even people who have chosen to live together find it easier not to talk about what's happening.
The Critics
Not everyone believes Neve Shalom represents anything meaningful. The critiques come from multiple directions.
Edward Alexander, writing in response to a positive assessment in the Middle East Quarterly, argued that the village can only exist if Jewish residents suppress their Zionism in what he called an act of "self-abasement." He claimed Arabs observe this deference "gleefully." In his view, the experiment ignores a fundamental asymmetry: Arabs deny Jewish sovereignty while Jews refuse to renounce it. No amount of living together changes that.
Ahmad Yusuf, director of a United States-based Islamist think tank, offered a different critique. He acknowledged that techniques of crisis resolution and social psychology might address security concerns. But real success, he argued, would require problem-solving focused not only on security but on justice and equality. Optimally, this would mean a federal binational state. He concluded with an Arab proverb: A boy notices a butcher weeping as he slaughters a lamb. His father tells him to focus not on the tears, but on the knife in his hand.
The proverb is brutal in its clarity. Tears are not policy. Coexistence in one village doesn't change the structures of power that shape millions of lives.
The Residents' View
Those who actually live in Neve Shalom tend to be clearer-eyed about its limitations than outside boosters might expect. One resident put it this way:
The Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam experience humanizes the conflict. It is called an oasis, but only as compared to other areas in the country. The village has many difficulties but at least we are not being broken. We do have personal squabbles as in any village, but we are living the conflict instead of fighting it.
"Living the conflict instead of fighting it." That might be the most honest description of what the village actually achieves. Not resolution. Not escape. Just a different way of being inside the same painful situation that defines the region.
What Neve Shalom Actually Proves
The village doesn't prove that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be solved. It doesn't prove that coexistence scales. It doesn't prove that living together erases differences or resolves competing claims to the same land.
What it proves is narrower but perhaps more important: that under the right conditions, with enough commitment, Israelis and Palestinians can choose to be neighbors. They can send their children to the same school. They can worship in the same spiritual center. They can govern themselves together, imperfectly, with all the tensions and asymmetries that implies.
The academic H. Svi Shapiro assessed the village's aspirations and concluded: "Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam provides no definitive solution to this conundrum. It does allow us, however, to see how one group of courageous, idealistic, and thoughtful individuals is struggling to mediate the tensions inherent in this situation."
That's not nothing. In a region where the dominant approach to difference is separation—walls, checkpoints, separate roads, separate legal systems—the simple fact that this village exists is a kind of argument. Not an argument that the conflict is easy to solve. An argument that the people caught in it are capable of more than the conflict allows them to be.
A Concert on the Hilltop
On June 22nd, 2006, Roger Waters—the frontman of Pink Floyd, famous for the album "The Wall"—played a live concert at Neve Shalom. Over fifty thousand fans came to hear him perform on that hilltop between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, in a village founded by a priest who once lived in a bus.
Waters would later become one of the most prominent cultural figures calling for boycotts of Israel. Whether his appearance at Neve Shalom represented an endorsement of coexistence or simply a good concert venue is a question the village's residents probably debate among themselves. That's what they do. They debate. They disagree. They keep living together anyway.
The name, after all, comes from the Book of Isaiah: "My people shall dwell in an oasis of peace." The prophet didn't promise it would be easy. He just said it was possible.