“Be the change you want to see in the world.”  The famous words, often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, are scattered among various flags, including Israeli and Palestinian, at the entrance to the offices of the Younited school, nestled within the campus of Givat Haviva, Israel’s oldest and largest institution for Jewish-Arab shared society. Just beneath the slogan, a yellow flag flutters in the wind — a quiet but searing reminder of the 58 hostages still held in Gaza. It’s a juxtaposition that captures the tension of the moment: the dream of a peaceful and equitable future, tested by the darkest day in recent Israeli history and the ensuing war in Gaza, still grinding on a year-and-a-half later.

Givat Haviva is a civic organization built on the values of mutual respect and trust between Jewish and Arab citizens. It works to promote a democratic, egalitarian and prosperous society, through activities focused on the fields of education, language learning, joint leadership development, culture and art.

On Oct. 7, 2023, that vision was brutally tested, when Hamas terrorists launched a deadly attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people, kidnapping 250 men, women and children and triggering a devastating war that has killed tens of thousands more. As Israel reeled from the horrifying attacks, Givat Haviva found itself taking on roles that went far beyond its mandate — it became a refuge, a mirror for itself and wider society and a case study in whether hope can endure under siege.

At Givat Haviva, which houses the Younited boarding school — where Jewish, Arab and international tenth-12th grade students live and learn together — among numerous other Jewish-Arab partnership initiatives, leaders and students alike have had to confront grief, fear and political division, while trying to protect the bonds they’ve built. 

Interviews with eight students and five administrators paint a portrait of an institution struggling to bridge a divide in Israeli society that often seems unbridgeable.

“This is the place for us to say, ‘Either we are relevant, or we are not.’ To work for a shared society is a life project. And my question is, how do I make it succeed and not fail?” said Mohammad Darawshe, director of strategy at Givat Haviva. “We need to come with answers. We need to give direction of what can be done and not how you escape from the mission.”

A place of refuge

The day after the onset of the attacks, when IDF soldiers were still battling Palestinian terrorists on Israeli soil, dozens of people who had fled their homes in the cities of Ashkelon and Netivot near the Gaza border turned up at the gates of Givat Haviva.

“People just showed up with no clothes — and nothing — and shaking kids,” Michal Sella, the CEO of Givat Haviva, told Jewish Insider during an interview in her office last month. “And of course the first thing we did was to say, ‘You are very welcome,’ and to open all the rooms.” The campus, which has sheltered people from the Gaza border area in previous rounds of violence, quickly housed 300 evacuees, with more on a waiting list. 

Soon after, around 100 Jewish and Arab teenagers returned to their boarding school — followed by 300 Arab students from a seventh–12th grade school located on the campus.

With evacuees, Younited students and local schoolchildren all on campus — at a time of unprecedented communal tension — the school’s leadership faced enormous challenges.

“It was seen as a very explosive environment. It was very hard to manage all this, and our goal was for all of them to get along, to be able to share this campus. And of course, the main goal was that we would not see any kind of violence within the campus. That was very challenging,” Sella recalled. “We worked very hard to keep everything calm, and we were very, very cautious, even doing things that usually we will not do.“

After the Oct. 7 attacks, the levels of fear and suspicion between the Arab and Jewish communities reached a new high, particularly among those who had been directly impacted. 

The measures Givat Haviva leadership implemented in order to keep the calm included steps that go against the very fiber of its ethos.

The first few days following the reopening of the Arab school, the campus leaders deliberately kept the students and evacuees apart, while they worked on calming any initial fears held by the residents of Netivot and Ashkelon in light of their recent trauma. They explained to the recent arrivals from the south that they would be hearing more Arabic on campus, “but it’s kids, that’s their school, Givat Haviva is their home and actually the evacuees are the guests of these kids so we need to learn how to live together,” Sella said. 

Within days, the youngsters began to bridge the divide naturally. Children from the Gaza border were playing soccer with both the children from the Arab school and the international school. The international school students also began volunteering to help with the evacuee children. “So we did have this system of all of us benefiting from having one another on this campus,” Sella said.

A new normal

When the Younited students returned to campus in the weeks after the attack, nothing felt normal. 

Shaked, a Jewish Israeli 12th grader from Binyamina, recalled the surreal days following Oct. 7. “I wasn’t thinking about school — we were all just focused on what was going on,” she said. One student who lives near the Gaza border didn’t respond to messages for days. “We were so worried about her.”

Before returning, Shaked joined her classmates for a Zoom call — not a class, just a space to process. “Looking back, it was a really smart decision — not to keep us isolated,” she said. “We were each in our own bubble of misery.” 

When the students did finally reunite, each carrying their own fears, the tension was palpable. “It was all so vulnerable,” she said. “You want to be around people who get you, who’ve experienced it from the same angle. And sometimes, you just don’t have the emotional capacity to see from the other side.”

Salma, a Muslim Israeli student from Taibe, harbored similar emotions. “I was scared,” she said. “It was exhausting. I didn’t want to talk about politics or justify anything. It was tiring.” The school, she noted, is inherently political — bringing together students who typically do not live and learn together. “So it was very difficult.”

Both girls spoke of personal grief — Salma lost a friend in Gaza early in the war and Shaked’s father was called to reserve duty. “I didn’t want to start justifying anything,” Shaked said. “I was worried about him, about my cousins [who were also serving in the army]  — I wasn’t in a position to explain why.”

But something changed when they returned to campus.

“Each person’s individual bubble popped,” Salma said. “And we were in one big bubble of misery — but it was together.” That shared grief, she explained, was the starting point — not the political debates, not the ideology, but the simple recognition that everyone was hurting. “Eventually there were political discussions, and there still are. But it had to start at the common ground of: we’re just kids, and we’re exhausted.”

Salma and Shaked had already completed 10th grade together, a year in which their friendship evolved and strengthened.

“I think when we came back, it was like all our fears went away, because it was just the together that we were always used to,” Shaked said. “The atmosphere, it wasn’t the same, but it was even stronger, because it was with the pain, and it was with all of it. The Hamas war wasn’t just an attack on Israel, it was attacking the belief system of this school, of hope, of shared society, of living together. And I think eventually, us coming back here is what made me have hope again. And I think that was very powerful.”

For many, attending the Younited school marked a journey toward rethinking deeply held assumptions.

Soliman, an Arab Israeli student from Haifa, transferred into the 11th grade at the school this academic year from an all-Arab school. “I came from a circle where everyone had the same perspective,” he said. “And then I came here. And the war started again.”

The transition was overwhelming, he admitted, “talking a lot about politics. Before I came here, I was a bit afraid. I didn’t feel confident enough to share my opinion about the war.” But over time, something shifted and he began to speak up. “I realized I could be confident. I could be comfortable talking about things that some people think are a bit touchy or a bit problematic.”

That sense of being heard, he said, changed something in him. “I’m not that much into politics,” Soliman said. “But I’m with humanity more. If it’s a Palestinian life or an Israeli one — it’s still a life. You have to talk about this, even if you don’t want to. It’s about basic rights — to live.”

Hila, a Jewish Israeli 11th grader from Pardes Hanna, started at the school one month before Oct. 7 and barely knew her classmates. She questioned how she would cope with the complex combination of the country’s new reality and her new environment. “I don’t even know them and English (the common language spoken between the students) is not my first language. I’m not sure I know how to explain myself in this language,” Hila remembers thinking. She praised the school for its approach, guiding the students to delay conversations about the conflict. “When we were ready and when we knew each other, it helped us to hold a more grown-up conversation.”

A year later, the school’s Oct. 7 commemoration ceremony made a deep impact on both new and old students. The event, organized by a committee of students and staff, included personal narratives from the day of the Hamas attacks and the ensuing war, prayers sung by international students in their native languages and a silent exhibition honoring individuals who had lost their lives, with personal stories shared to commemorate their legacies.

“One year ago, I didn’t know how I could handle it,” Hila reflected. “And at this ceremony, I had my friends who are Palestinians and Israelis and international and it didn’t matter. We just shared our pain.”

Calming the flames

Sella, who accuses extremist elements in the Israeli government of trying to provoke violence in Arab society, considers it a quiet triumph that the flare-up that many feared — and that far-right politicians warned of — did not materialize, not only within Givat Haviva’s own ecosystem, but also in the wider Israeli society.

“There were a lot of arrests of young Arab citizens just because they liked something on Facebook or they shared something on Facebook, and it was this process of, first of all, of silencing the Arab community, but also leaving them very, very scared to say something, feel something, share something, like something,” Sella told JI. 

Givat Haviva worked together with regional leaders from the Jewish and Arab communities, including mayors, education department heads and principals, to work together in their regions. A few days after Oct. 7, Givat Haviva hosted a meeting for regional leaders “just to make them talk to each other, know each other … So if something happens, if we have any kind of violence, they will be ready to, first of all, communicate between them and try to take the flames down, because that was our main fear.”

“I really feel that was a little victory, a silent victory of Israeli society, the fact that we managed to stay very firm in front of our government and not deteriorate to violence,” Sella emphasized.

Mohammad Darawshe, director of strategy at Givat Haviva, convinced Israeli President Isaac Herzog, with whom he has had a long friendship, to convene the heads of 36 academic institutions at the President’s Residence before the opening of the academic year. Darawshe warned Herzog that the meeting could be explosive and they must “engage in reduction of potential violence at universities when they reopen, so that the universities do not become a battlefield between Jews and Arabs.” 

Together, the education leaders developed a strategy of engagement to reduce tensions on campuses, including regulations, training professors how to handle flare-ups in the classroom and holding dialogue groups on campuses. 

These efforts to reach elements of wider society that Darawshe said they “typically do not touch” have continued into this year. 

Last year, for the first time, Givat Haviva moved its annual conference, usually held onsite, to Tel Aviv in an effort to engage with mainstream society. The conference, which Herzog addressed, mainly targeted business leaders with the participation of Arab and Jewish Israeli politicians, including Knesset members Mansour Abbas, Ahmad Tibi, then-war cabinet member Benny Gantz and Interior Minister Moshe Arbel. 

Darwashe praised the speech Gantz gave in support of shared society, which Darawshe believes, “had a very significant calming effect on the mainstream Israeli society that Jews and Arabs in Israel should not drift into violence. We have something to protect — the success stories that we have in the medical industry, in the transportation industry, in the workplaces, in universities. We have, I call it islands of success. Let’s protect these islands right now. Let’s not collapse into the meltdown that is happening and we have something that is worth protecting.”

Darawshe also sees the participation of Arbel, a minister from the Haredi Shas party, as an accomplishment. “When more people in Israeli society are drifting more to that right, we want to bring our work more to the center. Our work has to be a more central message that also talks to people in the right wing.” 

Givat Haviva also worked with 73 representatives of large corporations that have significant percentages of Arab employees, providing them with training in how to manage tensions within their companies. 

Closer to home

Givat Haviva needed to invest in its own staff to ease new tensions in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — some of which did not emerge immediately. Immediately after the attacks, Sella said Givat Haviva’s Jewish and Arab staff shared similar feelings. But several months into the war, Sella said Hebrew-speaking staff were largely unaware of the scale of devastation in Gaza due to limited Hebrew-language coverage, while Arab staff, who were following Arabic media and social channels, were acutely aware of Palestinian suffering.

“The gap was so severe that we worked very hard to keep the team together, but I think luckily — we’re education experts — so we have the tools to bridge these gaps,” she said. “But some of the new programs that we have for leadership [programs] came from the way we needed to approach our team and to take care of ourselves.” 

“Oct. 7 and 8 and 9 and onwards continued to be a very harsh challenge from the perspective of what do we teach for and how do we teach it in our educational institution,” Darawshe said. “And our ecosystem is — some might say collapsing, some might say it’s more challenging — it’s like a moving target all the time. And we’ve seen these kinds of challenges happening a few times already. Every mega event that has happened has put Givat Haviva in some kind of a test of reexamining the relevancy of our work towards that big story.”

Through the decades of his work at Givat Haviva, Darawshe has experienced moments of feeling like a drop in the ocean. “And then you need to ask yourself a question, how big of a drop are you, and are you a critical and essential drop, or is your time up?” 

Darawshe recalled such feelings in 2001, in the early days of the Second Intifada, when he was serving as Givat Haviva’s spokesperson. “I went to the director and explained, ‘Our world is collapsing, and I don’t believe we’re doing enough. Here’s my resignation.'” The director proposed an alternative: “There’s a group of 200 kids here, 100 Jewish and 100 Arab kids that haven’t lost hope. Bring me their story.” Darawshe spent three days with the children, an experience that inspired an article he wrote for The Jerusalem Post titled “200 reasons to come back to work tomorrow.'” 

Reflecting on this, Darawshe said, “If those kids are not giving up, who am I to give up? And this has become a topic that I always discuss with our staff.”

Grief and grace

In addition to keeping shared society afloat, Darawshe had to cope with his own personal tragedy following Oct. 7. His 23-year-old cousin Awad Darawshe, a paramedic working at the Nova music festival, was killed in the massacre after defying orders to evacuate in order to try to save the lives of others.

Darawshe felt that “even telling his story here [in Givat Haviva] in the first few weeks was not accepted by all Jewish staff members.” In a staff WhatsApp group, he said, “Every time I would raise something about him, you would hear two, three staff members that would say, ‘We don’t feel that we’re dealing enough with the Jewish pain.’” 

“They wouldn’t speak against what I wrote, but the timing of their defense for the Jewish pain would coincide with what I would share something about my pain — when I would share my story,” he explained. Awad Darawshe’s heroic story garnered significant media attention, including being spotlighted by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that Darawshe shared in the staff group; he said the immediate response was, “‘Where is the Jewish pain? No one talks about it.’ … as if we were confiscating the story of the death and killing and victimhood of the 1,200 Jewish victims.”

This experience raised difficult feelings and questions for Darawshe: “Are you my colleagues, my co-workers? Do we share the same values? Do we share the same citizenship? Is our pain of equality? Is our citizenship of equality?”

“From one end, I had that personal tense period, tense feelings, but at the same time, I had the organization’s responsibility of trying to bridge that gap between the Jewish and Arab staff.”

But this time, Darawshe didn’t think of quitting. He decided to swallow his pain and pride for the greater good of the organization.

“You have to be more compassionate, especially if you have a management role … I had to downsize my personal painful story and the way I express it within the organization, and give more recognition to even secondhand pain that was expressed by Jewish colleagues. It wasn’t easy.”

Near and far

Givat Haviva’s mission reaches across oceans thanks to its international school. Era, an 11th grade Muslim student from Kosovo who joined the school this academic year with very little knowledge about the Arab-Israeli conflict, has found her experiences at the school eye-opening. Reflecting on the Oct. 7 commemoration ceremony, she said, “It was so overwhelming, because the whole time I was just thinking people outside don’t know that this is happening.” Peejay, an 11th grade student from Liberia, said that during the ceremony, he saw that “we are all the same people,” despite their different backgrounds and cultures.

But Sameer, an Arab Israeli from Nazareth, also underwent a perspective shift at Younited, hearing for the first time the experiences of Jewish Israelis. “When I came to the school, I talked to a lot of people that were affected by what happened on Oct. 7, and I just understood a lot of things that didn’t click into my mind before,” Sameer said.

Oran, a Jewish Israeli 11th grade student from Burgata, was fearful that new friendships he had formed before the war would unravel. Instead, they held and drummed home the importance of talking to “the other side.” “The biggest change of opinion I had from this school is that perspectives are not only built on your experiences, they are built on other people’s experiences and perspectives too,” he said.

Even the most emotionally fraught issues were reconsidered in new light. Salma instantly held empathy for the hostages, but her view of the army was more complex. “Because what I see is that’s the cause of the horror and pain that’s happening in Gaza,” she explained. Being surrounded by classmates constantly worrying about their loved ones serving in the IDF was a game-changer. “I started thinking about my family and my dad or siblings in the army … it’s easy to be like, this is the villain, and that was the biggest change that I had, where I started to gain a deeper understanding of the army.”

Soliman concurred, noting that one of the people honored at the ceremony was a cousin of his classmate. “Everybody felt the same type of sympathy for the people, the relatives and the loved ones who are in the army for example, and the hostages. This was an important thing that helped me switch my perspective.”

Students also found their perceptions of language and symbols shifting in unexpected ways. Shaked, for instance, shared that the words “Allahu Akbar” until recently had evoked fear in her — a phrase she, like many in the West, associated primarily with terror attacks. But the words, which mean “God is great” in Arabic, are a central part of Muslim prayer and daily expression. That understanding hit home when Salma, Shaked’s good friend and a theater student, put on a solo performance and recited the words in prayer. “All the baggage that I had for these words melted away, because I could see in her eyes what it meant for her and I could see that it reflects cultural meaning and identity and language,” Shaked said, words that visibly touched Salma, who was sitting beside her during their interview with JI. 

As the war has dragged on, the country has fractured along deepening lines. In January 2024, an annual survey presented by Givat Haviva found that 62% of Jews mistrusted the majority of Arab citizens of Israel and 28% of Arab Israeli citizens mistrusted the majority of Jewish Israeli citizens. This year’s survey found that the feelings of mistrust had deteriorated further: 72% of Jews mistrust Arabs and 43% of Arabs mistrust Jews. The survey also found a reduction in willingness between Jews and Arabs to have social relations. 

Meanwhile at Givat Haviva, numbers of participants in its various shared society programs are growing, hitting a record 28,327 people in 2024. 

And the students of Younited have found themselves doing what much of society does not: sitting with discomfort, listening across divides and acknowledging each other’s pain. 

The students’ willingness to lean into each other’s stories — to shift, however slightly, from where they began — is a reaffirmation of the school’s founding beliefs. As Darawshe says, shared society “does not ignore difficult conversations but embraces them as necessary for building a truly just and equitable future — one where both groups participate as full and equal partners rather than merely existing alongside each other.”