AJEEC: The institute promoting Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Negev

“I arrived at AJEEC in 2009, after receiving a phone call from Vivian. She told me: ‘I heard that you work with Bedouin and know how to speak English, so let’s meet up’ – and I went.’”

Ilan Amit, co-director of AJEEC – the Negev Institute, was referring to Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old activist murdered in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7. Silver was the founder of the unique center focusing on shared educational experiences and social-oriented activity aimed at empowering Jews and Bedouin in the Negev. AJEEC, which means “I am coming to you” in Arabic, is also the acronym of the Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation.

Over nine months since the brutal attack that took her life, Silver’s spirit can still be felt resonating around the institute and in its workers’ hearts.

Amit wrote his doctoral thesis in the Netherlands on issues relating to immigration, development of social services for asylum seekers and deportation, working with East and Central Africans and Syrian refugees. “This is not much different from the unrecognized Bedouin villages in Israel. Here, too, disadvantaged populations need to be connected to the country’s service system, while suffering from a deficit of knowledge and access,” he explained.

In our interview, he answered the following questions.

How is AJEEC different from other coexistence organizations in Israel?

There are many organizations that are engaged in these issues, and they are all respected and have their place. We are the largest one in Israel, with 200 employees and over 10,000 participants, and we work with seven government ministries. 

We don’t do demonstrators, protests, petitions, lawsuits, or dialogue groups. We try to solve the root issues of Arab-Jewish relations. We create economic and social solutions for Arab youth from disadvantaged places, the marginalized, the poor, the crime-prone, attempting to help them rise to a higher socioeconomic level so that they can even start a conversation with their Jewish counterparts.

We boast a shared management model: Every administrative position has both a Jewish and an Arab post. We make sure to promote partnership in practice and not just to talk about it theoretically.

What programs do you have and what are their goals?

We try to empower the Arab youth in contexts of employment and education, help them integrate into the economy and society.

We have a youth organization, Shabibat AJEEC, with 9,100 participants in 24 branches. This is the only youth movement financed by the state. It’s also the first time that a program born in the southern periphery goes out to the Arab society in the North, as usually it’s the other way around. 

You see, even within Arab society, there is a certain unequal or alienating attitude toward the Bedouin population, which is viewed as poorer and less educated. So the fact that an informal education model originates here and makes its way to the greater Arab society is revolutionary.

One of our main programs is the ‘gap year for Arab society,’ a term that we coined at AJEEC. As many already know, Arab youth seldom enlist in military service for a wide array of reasons, so we developed this gap year program, which is a civilian equivalent of the National Service. It allows them to volunteer, learn, experience, and get a head start on life. This helps bridge the gap between a young Jew and a young Arab, as those who complete their military service receive an ‘entrance ticket’ to employment and education systems that seem self-evident, but in Arab society these are not within reach.

This year,  950 young Arabs have went through our transitional years program.  Some 250 of them are from the weakest parts of society. We are talking about life without basic infrastructure – schools, kindergartens, health services. A sort of Israeli favela [slum] with high crime rates.

Some 80% of prisoners in rehabilitation programs in the South region are Bedouins, and 80% of hospitalized  Children in the Soroka Medical Center are Bedouin – while they constitute only a third of the Negev’spopulation. I refuse to believe that they are born criminals or sick.

So yes, we aim to produce a generation that is able to feel a sense of belonging, connect to the various systems in Israeli society, and return as leaders to their communities to solve the fundamental problems.

Do you have any indication of your alumni and their whereabouts?

We see our alumni in government offices, large organizations, in academia. Amazing people who, today I can say, grew up with AJEEC, and without us, they would not have been able to reach these places. They also come back as volunteers and even employees of AJEEC, and this is the biggest contribution.

I’m very moved when I see a young alumnus who grew up with us and keeps insisting on a life of partnership with Jews, wanting to take part. And this is true not only in the South: Over half of the organization’s activity is north of Kiryat Gat and exports models and programs. For example, our youth movements are also based in the Arab authorities of Kafr Kassem and Nazareth.

How did the Hamas massacre affect your work?

On Oct. 7, we very quickly realized that something bad was happening. Vivian wrote to us on WhatsApp, and we understood that something unusual was beginning to unfold. The very first deaths from the rockets fired at the Negev all happened in the unrecognized Bedouin villages – 12 Bedouin citizens died from those rocket barrages in the area of Keseifeh. This was due to the deficiencies in basic infrastructure, including a lack of protection measures and siren infrastructure. Even the Iron Dome did not cover unrecognized villages, since they are defined technically as ‘open areas.’

Already at 9:30 in the morning, everyone was on phone calls with one another. As the picture became a little clearer, we at AJEEC opened a situation room dedicated to the Bedouins in the Negev, alongside regional councils and the Home Front Command. We came to meet the very basic needs of the Bedouin residents of the Negev, which the state did not provide. 

The situation for the Bedouins is bad during normal days and even worse during an emergency. So we decided to shift the focus of our work to five main issues:

Firstly, we purchased bomb shelters with philanthropist funds and placed them in strategic locations in unrecognized villages.

Secondly, we raised funds for 10,000 food baskets for families, with contributions from all major companies in the Israeli economy, such as Telma, Strauss, Osem, and big banks. This was due to the fact that the feeding program of the Education Ministry was shut down for the first couple of weeks, and the children benefiting from it not only lost school time but also their only hot meal of the day.

Thirdly, we gathered organizations dealing with psychological assistance in Arabic, to help cope with the mental trauma. As I said, there are no functioning siren systems in the unrecognized villages – people just sit in their living room and suddenly they experience an explosion. This is even more traumatic than what it already is for the rest of us, who hear a siren and have to run to a shelter. So we shifted our focus to dealing with such instances of trauma, mainly for young people.

Fourth, our volunteer array held entertainment programs for the benefit of those children who had to sit at home under constant stress and trauma without classes and after-school activities.

Finally, as we were experiencing an endless barrage of fake news and incitement attempts, we also understood that we must combat these issues online. You have to understand – we live here in a relatively protected bubble. The events of May 2021 did not erupt in the Negev, and there are almost no cases of violence. This is a rather rare partnership in all walks of life, including health, academia, and employment centers. So, we understand that this thing needs to be maintained.

We are seeing many joint projects of neighboring Jewish and Arab authorities aiming to maintain this atmosphere, such as Rahat and Bnei Shimon, Dimona and Qasir El-Sir. This is an important stance from the leaders’ perspective, which says that we are working together and will not allow anything to undermine our relations.

Unfortunately, much of the spirit of Arab-Jewish partnership in the Negev does not necessarily come from the right place. 

I wouldn’t want this to be the sole reason for us to be better partners, but the fact that quite a few Bedouins were killed trying to save the lives of Jews in the Gaza border communities and the Supernova festival, even losing their lives trying to save Jews whom they don’t know; the fact that quite a few Bedouin army soldiers are killed; and that Bedouins were also murdered and kidnapped on Oct. 7 – all of these created a sense of shared fate that manages to confront the attempts of extremist elements on both sides to incite and agitate.

We were also a kind of ‘civilian home command’ – food, protection, psychological help – and we expanded programs for formal and informal education, and for young people. We are not ready to give up any ingredients. As a community organization, if we do not respond in an emergency and don’t appear to be with the community even in difficult times, we will not have the opportunity to speak normally. And vice versa – the ability to respond in an emergency comes from the fact that we are part of the community on a regular basis.

How does the government view your work in these difficult, tense times?

Even before Oct. 7, we were a country where elections were held non-stop, resulting in a lack of a state budget for almost seven years. As I mentioned, we are working with government ministries and always making sure to sound our voice to receive our fair share, including the five-year plans 550, and 1297.

Unfortunately, this year we are getting a 15% cut, compared to 5% for society as a whole. These measures damage mutual trust, convey suspicion, and make promoting the partnership ever more complex.

The current government also makes it harder to strengthen partnership through an increase in the number of house demolitions in the Negev. No matter what one thinks about it in the legal aspect, these demolitions undermine the fabric of our common life here. There were close to 200 demolitions near Shoket – an entire village in the process of recognition and transferral to a new location was wiped off – and this does not help us in any way.

Add this to the inciting discourse from politicians and the media, and you find yourself against great forces pushing and pulling against the civilian voices that opt for partnership. As the largest partnership organization in Israel, we understand that we have a historic role. We need to hold tight to all those participants and communities, and make sure that the instinct is one of partnership and not confrontation.

I have to stress that cooperation from the communities is unprecedented. To stand together in the face of the war, to volunteer, to work together is not obvious. The Negev could look completely different after Oct. 7. We were afraid to believe that the Bedouins are friends of Hamas’s Nukhba forces and that they would attack us shortly – but nothing of the sort has ever happened here, and the partnership is only increasing.

Regardless, and contrary to all predictions, our collaborations with government ministries are only increasing. The state realized that we have a foot planted on the ground: that we are a professional body that measures itself outwardly and inwardly and knows how to carry out complex programs in collaboration with the authorities. So the state, with all the challenges, some of which are technical and not political, continues to lend a hand, which is positive.

Has Oct. 7 also raised more suspicion among workers?

There were some squeaks at the beginning. For instance, one of the first instincts of the Jewish youth movements in Israel was to send volunteers to take care of the evacuees in hotels. But some of our Arab volunteers were thinking, ‘What about those who weren’t even offered a chance to evacuate? Why do our Jewish counterparts disappear to those hotels with the evacuees?’

It all required a lot of work with the youth organizations, and we also had to work from below to strengthen the partnerships. Because of the nature of our organization, we suffered every single possible blow: a founding partner of ours was murdered by Hamas; we had evacuees from the Gaza border communities, women with spouses in reserve duty for many months, workers with relatives kidnapped to Gaza – and Bedouin workers who lost relatives in the Gaza Strip as a result of IDF bombings – an entire cycle of harm. We are used to looking at our grievances from one side, but at AJEEC we had to experience it from all possible directions.

We have workers whose feed in Arabic is filled with pictures from Gaza, and others who open their feed daily and only hope that they won’t recognize a name under ‘cleared for publication’ [meaning announcements of fallen soldiers].

So, with the help of an organization called aChord, we prepared a Jewish-Arab and Arab-Arab training program. We found out that internal Arab tensions also need spaces for processing, even before entering the Jewish-Arab discourse, as there were many Arab policemen and soldiers who were hurt or wounded. So each society must work on its own before even returning to the discourse of partnership.

Have you been trying to tackle the issue of radicalization online?

Less than two weeks after Oct. 7, when the fog cleared a bit, we brought in mental health experts, mainly Arabs, for Zoom sessions. We then talk with the youth about these issues, spot red flags, and offer tools to deal with and dissolve the poison that penetrates young people through their phones. Every smartphone can become a machine of poison and incitement with enormous power, and when young people are overflowed with a feed that is full of incitement all day, in the end it does something to them.

As a cure, we also tried to create as many unmediated meetings as possible between Jews and Arabs, such as field work, packing meals, informal joint activities – all to let them have as little screen time as possible and less time to be exposed to the horrors. Volunteering and working together is the best antidote to the incitement and poison that comes out of the phones and social networks. And when they work for a common goal, then it’s even stronger.

We also put an emphasis on the religious establishment, with imams and sheikhs who were interviewed, to online platforms telling their listeners to stay away from incitement and lies and avoid friction. We also launched an online campaign featuring Jews and Arabs dealing with the hardships of our times.

However, I must stress that as long as most of these inflammatory messages continue to come from our leadership, we will continue to be in this challenging spot. The leadership wields great power in sending inciting messages or calming and reassuring messages. 

Unfortunately, much of the incitement came from the Knesset. This is not social resilience, and it does not contribute to the future of the State of Israel. Nothing good comes from inciting. If you want to be a strong country, you need a language of partnership and not friction. Perhaps our contents should be passed in Knesset, have Jews and Arabs pack food together [Amit laughs].

Can you share some insights from working with Vivian Silver?

I worked with Vivian for quite a few years. She was an uncompromising person. She founded AJEEC and Women Wage Peace, led marches and initiatives and petitions for peace, and volunteered on the Road to Recovery. She was a person who did not compromise on her belief in the pursuit of peace.

I learned non-stop from her. One of the first things people say is, ‘Well, look what happened to her – how she drove sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals, and they were precisely the ones who came and murdered her in her home.’

To them I say, ‘Yes! Look at what happened to her and what it shows us – that we cannot give up on partnership, peace, and equality. That we cannot live on our sword forever, nine months into this incessant war.’ We must insist on the path of partnership. This is a belief, a faith, in the path of partnership – and if we give up on it, we will give up our ability to live here. If we give up the path of living together, we can give up on the state altogether: Every fifth citizen is an Arab, and we cannot live here with wars forever. We don’t want to be a secluded Sparta that lives in constant war.

I have no doubt that if she were here today, Vivian would scorn us if we gave up the path of partnership and peace. And she would not believe that these events would make us question the righteousness of our path of partnership.

I feel obliged to continue her path. I love the State of Israel, and I do what I do for the sake of the country. I live and volunteer and work and contribute, and I want this place to be better and worthy of life. My children are in a bilingual school, I volunteer and work in Jewish-Arab frameworks – this is the future of the country, a future of partnership and equality. Disparities and incitement will not take us anywhere good.

This damned war is not between Jews and Arabs but between the State of Israel and a terrorist organization called Hamas. To think that my partners at work are enemies who want to murder me and support Hamas is not only wrong but constitutes a victory for the same Hamas.

For me, there are two images of victory from this war: one of the hostages returning home, and the second one of an Israeli society functioning as an inclusive and healthy one.

It is a great privilege in this terrible moment to be part of the forces of reconciliation and repair. And we need as many forces as possible with us because we see what is happening out there.

Vivian had a regular phrase. Whenever we would start a team meeting or a seminar, she would say: ‘Stop for a moment; see what is happening here in here – and see what is happening out there.’ Here and now, too, at AJEEC, Jews and Arabs sit in the same room, working together and racking their brains to understand how to expand our sense of partnership. 