Oasis of Peace (NSWaS)

Oasis of Peace (Neve Shalom in Hebrew and Wahat al Salam in Arabic) is a community of Jewish and Palestinian-Arab Israeli citizens, located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Founded in 1970, Neve Shalom-Wahat al Salam’s (NSWaS) mission is to promote models for peaceful co-existence. In 1984, NSWaS opened Israel’s first dedicated bilingual, binational primary school, fostering familiarity and respect for both national, cultural and linguistic identities with roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Palestinian Arab children educated in both languages; this model has now been replicated with eight schools adopting a similar model across Israel. The School for Peace was established in 1979 as the first Jewish-Palestinian educational institution to promote peaceful and egalitarian relations. It works with young adults of both nationalities, including students, professionals, and members of NGOs, offering workshops, training programs and university courses. Around 65,000 Jews and Palestinians have taken part.

After the events that began in October 2023, NSWaS proposed a programme targeting the primary school’s parents’ community. They propose to work with parents, ensuring that both groups have a safe and separate space in which to process the ongoing situation, and that the full community continues to be brought together to maintain connections, nurture longstanding ties and affirm mutual recognition. This SRT grant is exclusively in support of NSWaS’s parents’ community project.