A talk by Mohammad Darawshe of Israeli coexistence organisation The Abraham Fund Initiatives
Monday 4th March, 7pm
St Botolphs Without Bishopsgate, London

Hope looks to me very much like Mohammad Darawshe. Hope resides in an intimate understanding of the circumstances of Israelis, Jewish and Arab, the judgement to act on it, and the sincerity and eloquence to convince a tired, mistrustful population. The Abraham Fund Initiatives (TAFI) are abundantly blessed with these qualities and have brought about genuine, strongly-felt change. For the Israeli government, the existence of TAFI constitutes a critique and also a lighthouse.

My notes and memories follow - happy to be corrected. There is a rhythm - he brings up instances of Israeli law which contrary to popular belief and Google searches is good and improving. Then he talks about the discrepancy between the law and the Israeli vision. Then he discusses what needs to change, and what TAFI has done.

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In the period following Israel's beginning in 1948, its 1.1 million citizens hoped that coexistence would come naturally. We now know to call this 'houmous coexistence' - the kind that assumes if people are only around each other in the same environment for long enough, eating the same food, repeating the words 'love' and 'respect', love and respect will materialise. So far it hasn't - on the contrary.

Until 1963 Arab Israelis were under military administration and required a military permit even to move around. The October 2000 clashes in which 13 Arab Israelis were killed, and the subsequent disregard of Israel's Attorney General, brought about the collapse of trust and a slap in the face for conflict resolution practitioners. The need for a structuring of Jewish-Arab relations became clear. A first principle was that the responsibility for a shared future is not on the shoulders of children, but on governments and adults. Children take their cue from their parents, not the other way round. A second principle was to take the increasing violence seriously as an indication that a period of 20-30 years of bloody relations was likely unless its causes were attended to now. A third principle was that a content population means security for Israel. A discontent population represents a weak link, a foundation for outside negative intervention. You can't have an internal escalation without a regional escalation. Hamas would like to export the intifada and this has led to two broad trends - the Arab Israeli separatist trend which Israel cannot accept, and the trend towards escalating the violence, which is likely to lead to a total withdrawal from the West Bank and a population transfer in the course of which Arab Israelis will become refugees. He doesn't accept the advice that he should stay with a Palestinian flag in a tent in Jordan. The only alternative is to find a working formula for coexisting with the majority group. A fourth principle is that coexistence pays, based on research (by Ezra Sadam, if I heard and spelt it right) that an improvement in economic value of Arab Israelis from 8% to 12% of GDP translates to 3-4% growth in the economy overall. A fifth principle is that Arab Israelis can act as a bridge to peace with the Arab world.

Israel was formed with the promise of equality - a secular, democratic, international and legal value - ratified in its declaration of independence. It was also formed as a Jewish state. But at the same time Israel is manifestly the only state of its Arab and non-Jewish citizens. It gives these citizens a passport, an identity card, the right to become a Member of the Knesset, as it does Jewish citizens. So de facto it is the state of its Arab citizens. There has been a huge legal and political shift in the way Israel operates. It is no longer an 'ethnic democracy' (democratic for one ethnicity to the exclusion of the others). There are Arab ministers on the Finance and Defence Committees - the inner circle, the board of directors. Arab Israelis have made it, and more will follow. What Israel requires now is a change in the way it sees itself - the vision needs to reflect the de facto situation.

Israel is changing. A law which will outlaw racism is currently underwent its first reading about three weeks ago. There will be affirmative action to make 10% of civil servants Arab Israeli by 2010, a start. More needs to be done. Jewish companies must respect the degrees of Arab Israelis. They need to consider barriers - distance, childcare - to Arab women as skilled workers.

TAFI started off as a funding body in the expectation that there would be recipients with sufficient insight and strength to know what to do. After trust broke down in the wake of the October 2000 riots, TAFI began to function as an operating foundation, funding its own projects to develop models and turning these over to local and national government and other NGOs. It has to punch above its weight - where Northern Ireland spends E126 on 1.7 million people, Israel spends only $10m for 7 million. TAFI often works with civil servants and government bureaucrats - people in these roles often feel it is their job to uphold the law, and the law is in Arab Israelis' favour. TAFI gained the recognition of the UN recently, which it uses to access funding

Language is a big area for TAFI. Arabic has legal parity with Hebrew. Yet until recently Arabic - classical Arabic which wouldn't even get you a plate of houmous but which would allow you to study the language of 'the enemy' - was only an option in 7th grade, and only 17% of children were taking it. TAFI's intervention was a project to pilot of 'communicative Arabic' (a compromise, a bit like the formal language of a news reader) as a core curriculum subject for 5th and 6th grade schoolchildren in 30 classrooms. The impression that there was no market for this was quickly dispelled, there was huge interest and 30 classrooms rapidly grew to 46 schools, and from 46 to 111 schools and 420 classrooms. Currently TAFI is building its case to turn the project over to the government. Significant to this is the astonishing turn-around in uptake of Arabic as an option in 7th grade - from 17% to 70%.

Another project is concerned with policing in a multicultural society. The perception, and self-perception of the police among Arab Israelis has been as a controlling force rather than a service for the community. The police have tended to view Arab Israeli communities through security rather than civilian spectacles, and the project has involved persuading the police to uphold their civic duty. Police stations have been opened in Arab municipalities and have grown in number from 3 in 2000 to 42 today. Initial hostility within the communities was allayed by the quickly-observable positive impact, and now there is demand for police stations. Residents in Arab municipalities which have them are beginning to express an interest in traffic and parking like everybody else. The old joke about the Arab Israeli who wears his seatbelt and keeps hold of his litter until he reaches an Arab municipality doesn't make as much sense these days because there is more respect for public space.

Structured dialogue groups involving the police have prevented lynchings and/or averted rioting subsequent to Jewish provocations (for example when a couple let off firecrackers in a church, when a Jewish man killed 4 Arab Israelis on a bus, when a Jewish police officer - subsequently convicted and imprisoned - shot an unarmed Arab Israeli man)

Another project is government development which addresses inherited discriminatory practice, most ignorant but some racist. Ignorance is the main problem. 83% of government officials have never been to an Arab village, with the predictable outcome that many Arab mayors don't know who to talk to in the Israeli government. TAFI is developing an information kit for 3000 top government officials. It will contain demographic information and research findings - number of women in employment, daycare provision, skills and so on. It will promote the retraining of Arab Israeli graduates to participate in public life.

An entirely different layer of interaction is community-to-community relations - the business of how to live as good neighbours in a mixed city or mixed region. TAFI has set up a forum for mayors which supports them in addressing government with a shared voice. There are precedents of joint Arab and Israeli requests meeting with success where individual requests met with failure.

Many Jews say that there can be no equality without coexistence, and many Arabs say there can be no coexistence without equality. TAFI holds the two in parallel. TAFI's business is to build connections - from the 5th grade children up to the mayors.

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Then there were questions - I've worked in the answers above. Worth drawing attention to, I asked how the boycott was affecting this type of cooperation, and what TAFI had to say to boycotters. He said that boycotts are weak and that boycotters undermine coexistence and are primarily boycotting peace. He invites people who are critical of Israel to visit and criticise. He hopes they will consider funding Arab-only posts within organisations. He also said, which appalled me, that during a fact-finding trip to Northern Ireland, he and a Jewish TAFI colleague had been boycotted by an International Relations academic at a university there on the explicit grounds that that institution's policy was to boycott Israel. If any evidence were needed for the destructive effects of PACBI's boycott, that would be a good example.

Now go and get on TAFI's mailing list, and note the new UK Friends Of which will have its official launch later in the year.