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Mohammad Darawshe We're staying. Israel can call itself Jewish 1,000 times, but its reality is not only Jewish. We're staying there. We're not going to leave to make it easy for the extreme right-wing in Israel to do voluntary ethnic cleansing. And then they have no, what they call, Arab problem. They call us the Arab problem. They don't call us Arab citizens. They call us the Arab problem. And this problem is going to continue sitting on their chest forever. (....)
Sanam That's Mohamed Darwasha, my guest this week on If You're in Charge. With me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. Welcome, everyone. The show is brought to you by the Robert Bosch Academy and my organization, ICANN, where for 20 years we've been working with women peacebuilders on stopping wars and violence around the world. Each week I talk with other doers and imaginers about the tough issues they tackle, from extreme capitalism to biodiversity. And obviously last week and this week the focus has been on the Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine. And my conversation with Mohamed comes on the back of my conversation last week with Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger. Mohamed is the director of the Center for Planning, Equality and Shared Society at the Givat Haviva Educational Center in Israel. He's been involved in Israeli politics and academia. In 2009, he was a member of the National Committee, which drafted a policy on coexistence and education. He's a man of many hats, but at the core of his work and what's motivated him, I think, throughout his vocation and his career is the search for a shared society of equal coexistence and equality under the law for Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel. (..) So it's kind of a mirror or the other side of my conversation with Hanan and the similarities I hope you'll hear in terms of how important it is to have face-to-face, real-life, visceral experiences of seeing the other as an equal, as another human being, not just as somebody who is poster child of whether it's hate or polarization, but as someone who's actually like you and for those of us maybe who live in Europe or in the U.S., it's hard to believe that you could be living in the same neighborhood or in a small country with people that you never really encounter in school or in social events. You live parallel existences. And so what does it mean to actually bring Israeli and Palestinian kids together for them to see what life is like? And also to deal with the many barriers that Palestinian citizens of Israel face, barriers that, again, we don't really often hear about. So that's my conversation coming up. I hope you enjoy it and see you on the other side. Bye. (...)
Mohammad Darawshe Good to meet you, Salam, and good to be with you, Leshosh.
Sanam Thank you. Good to have you with me. I wanted to talk to you because as part of the sort of series that we're doing on this, if you were in charge, what we're looking at is people who are really at the forefront of tackling really difficult issues. So they're actually doing the doing, but then also kind of being able to lift our heads and imagining, you know, if you were in charge, what else would you do? So it's kind of this two-level aspect of the conversation. And when it comes to what's going on in Israel right now, vis-a-vis both inside Israel, but also vis-a-vis what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza and in the West Bank and in Lebanon and so forth, it's so complex. It's so fraught with trauma and pain and anxiety on all sorts and existentialism, if you want. I thought that it would be better to have two separate conversations. From both angles, it's people that are working for peace. So I wanted to ask you, first of all, what is it that you do? What, you know, you're a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel, right?
Mohammad Darawshe Yes.
Sanam How do you cope with what's going on as a peace activist? What does your daily work mean? What have you sort of dedicated your life to? (..)
Mohammad Darawshe So there are two levels that I operate in. One is what I call the vertical discourse, you know, the political changes that need to be made in order to create better conditions for peace and for cooperation between people. That is why during elections period inside Israel, I become a political creature and I try to get out the vote and urge people to participate in elections and to vote for political parties that might be willing to engage in a peace process and negotiations to bring about the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think the massive majority of people know that the solution that needs to be placed is a two-state solution. That's maybe not the best solution, maybe not the best just solution, but it's the most practical solution that anyone has invented for the last 100 years. And I think that, at least from my role as an Israeli citizen, I want to make sure that we try to get a government negating the existing government that comes with maybe at least willingness to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians and hopefully deliver the needs of the Palestinians by ending occupation and bringing about freedom for our people. On the other end, you know, it seems, as we all experience, peace is not an easy target. And that's why I look at the horizontal aspect, not just the vertical, and there I call it pieces of peace. You know, how can we create programs that move us forward, even if it's one step every single day? You know, it's not the whole one mile that we need to run to get to the peace process and peace agreement, but the small pieces that make the reality much better for human beings on the ground. And here I focus most of the work on creating partnerships between Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens, so people can not just envision peace, but can even practice it. And maybe with those, what I call islands of success on the horizontal level, maybe ultimately we can create enough magnitude that will impact the political scene as well. (.)
Sanam What does that look like? What does it look like if someone doesn't understand the reality?
Mohammad Darawshe Yeah, let's start with education. One of the main problems I have identified is the segregated educational system. Jewish kids go to Jewish schools and they never meet a Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, or even Christian.
Sanam Even if they live in the same neighborhood?
Mohammad Darawshe Even if they live in the same neighborhood.
Sanam And so there is no such thing as a, I don't know, national education system that, you know, you go to your neighborhood school and that's it. There's a, everybody learns the same language.
Mohammad Darawshe There is a national education system which is segregated. Only private sector organizations such as my organization and a couple of others have created private mixed educational schools. We have nine mixed schools out of 5,000. The remaining government educational system is segregated by political government decision. So we try to create those by national bilingual schools where Jewish and Arab kids come and study in Arabic. This is the long-term solution that we're looking for. We want all the 5,000 schools to be mixed integrated schools and humanize the other. You can break stereotypes and you can engage in building a shared society based on growing up as the same civic creature as everyone else. In segregated educational system, you have stereotypes growing. You have racism growing. You have fear. And it's always the othering. Looking at the other side, there's the complete other who's the enemy most of the time. Although you get maybe the same kind of curriculum, but you live in separate towns and villages. 92% of Arab citizens live in separate towns. And even those that live in mixed cities, the 8%, they usually live in separate neighborhoods and go to separate schools. So the atmosphere, the environment that formulates your perspective, it's the teachers, it's the fellow students, it's the parents' committees, it's the cultural activities that are created, it's the news, it's the politicians. And the curriculum doesn't really handle this. The curriculum does not try to make you a common citizen. Jewish citizens grow up to be very patriotic Israelis, and Palestinian citizens, you know, they say, okay, if Israel says it's the state of the Jews, then what's my state? So they look to the Palestinian identity to try to fill that gap that is created. So the Palestinian citizens in Israel go through two processes. One is called, I would call it, Israelization and re-Palestinization, while the Jewish citizens go through Israelization and Judaization. So there is a gap, there is a gap that keeps growing with time, especially at age 18, when Jewish graduates of high school go to the military. So when they go to universities at age 21, after three years of militarization and traumatization, sometimes 40% of Israeli Jewish university students today served in Gaza in one capacity or another. And they come to sit in the same classroom at university with a Palestinian Arab citizen that says, I am Palestinian, Israeli Jews. The only Palestinians they've been meeting in the last 13 months is on the other side of the gun, on the other side of the tank.
Sanam In that time that the Jewish Israeli kids go off to the army, what are the Palestinian kids doing? Like, do they go to university at an early age? What happens to them in that time? (.)
Mohammad Darawshe Well, 20% go to university, almost half of them outside Israel. They don't feel comfortable in Israeli universities. Many go to Palestinian universities. But most of the others end up, unfortunately, pumping gas, construction and agriculture, low-paying positions. They get stuck in the lower echelon of economic economics. And I must say that this is a result of a lack of government investment in good educational system. Also, lack of accessibility to academia in Israel. Till now, Israel has not allowed the creation of one single Arab university for 21% of its population or Palestinian Arab. And your options are either to study in Israeli Jewish school, teaching in Hebrew, in your second language.
Sanam Again, so you go to school, you're learning Arabic, you're not really learning Hebrew.
Mohammad Darawshe You learn Hebrew, but it's clearly not sufficient enough for academia.
Sanam To go to university. Okay, so you're basically, from the beginning, there's a huge barrier.
Mohammad Darawshe Yeah, linguistic gap, cultural gap. The Hebrew becomes a barrier to pass the exam because you're tested in your second language.
Sanam 21% of the population of Israel, excluding the West Bank and Gaza and Golan Heights, the Israel sort of boundaries, is Arab-Palestinian. Exactly. And of that 21%, in total, how many end up in tertiary education?
Mohammad Darawshe About 26%. In comparison to many other countries, relatively, it's good. But not all the degrees are what the job market needs. For example, we have about 18,000 teachers that are unemployed. People that finished educational degrees, and they can't get a job because the market is saturated with qualified teachers that went to study. And there's not enough clients because entering to become a teacher in the Jewish community is very, very, you know, very difficult. We've managed to have 2,000 Arab teachers to teach in Jewish schools, but they're only science teachers or Arabic language teachers. They will not take you to be a history teacher or economics teacher or sports teacher. They only take Arab for very crucial topics for Arabic language and sometimes, sometimes sciences, only when they are in dear need and there's no Jewish candidate to fill that position. So, the job opportunities in education or philosophy or even in economics and business management, the percentage of Arab employees in the finance industry is less than 1.5%. The percentage of Arab employees in the high-tech industry is less than 5%, and while being 23% of the engineering students. So, you can graduate with an engineering degree, but that does not guarantee that you're going to get a job because when you want to, when they interview for a job, they ask, have you done military service? And we have a very simple answer, no, it's the shortest word in English, two letters, no, we did not, we did not do military service. We will not do military service because the military has a mission which does not stand with our moral values. It is occupying our Palestinian people, preventing the creation of an independent, free Palestinian state, and we will not be part of this kind of activity. So, this is used to prevent the entry of Arab citizens in many arenas in the job market or to work for civil service, to work for the government, and sometimes even to be able to get an apartment in a Jewish town if you want to work there or if you want to study there.
Sanam Okay, so you have this problem about education segregation and then, as you say, the job market and so forth. So, in your work, you mentioned that you have established independent schools that are mixed, but it's a draw, it's, how many schools, nine schools, you said?
Mohammad Darawshe Yeah, but, you know, I personally am very proud of the nine schools. I do not ridicule the number because I think they serve as an icon of what can be done. It's maybe the ultimate best solution, but I don't think it's enough. And that's why I went for a faster route, and the faster route, which I found, was to what I call to bus Jewish teachers to teach in Arab schools and Arab teachers to teach in Jewish schools. And today, we are operating in almost 20% of the educational system in both the Arab and the Jewish schools. That's about 2,500 cross-sector teachers that we have. And for 93% of the kids, 93% of the kids, Salam, this is their first ever meaningful encounter with the other. 93%.
Sanam And at what age, what age does that start? When do you start that? (.)
Mohammad Darawshe Kindergarten to high school. We have a presence in all the educational system. But for 93% of the kids, this is their first ever encounter. For 65% of them, this encounter changes their perspective about the culture of the other from negative to positive. So, the program works. I'll give you a story about a young Palestinian Arab student. Her name is Aya, and we took her into program. We call it high-tech seats. We identify Arab kids who are very good in mathematics in eighth grade, give them academic courses in computer science, and the hope is to integrate those kids into the high-tech industry. And the concept is very simple. Create capacity of very high caliber, and then challenge that capacity and offer it to the Israeli high-tech job market. She is today 21, and she's doing her PhD in computer science at an Israeli university called Beersheba University. And she has a Jewish mentor, professor, that thinks the world of her and has made her a teaching assistant. She's 21, doing her PhD, teaching Israeli Jewish students who are 22, 23, older than her. They come for their undergraduate degree. They see her as the icon of success. Those are the same students that served in intelligence units, and they were seeing Palestinians as their security subjects that need to be controlled. And Aya, who's younger than them today, is their professor, is their teaching assistant at university. This is a kind of success that makes us really feel that you've done something. The problem is size, you know, scale. Now we are 20% of the system. There are certain educational streams, such as the Haredi ultra-religious schools, that will not allow this kind of program to even start. Some schools put conditions of who's the teacher, how many hours they cut. So it's a battle. It's an uphill battle, Salam. But we are successful until now. You know, we've made this now the biggest cross-sector educational activity ever in the field of Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab relations. We touch about 400,000 kids into this program. No one in history has ever been able to create a program with this magnitude. But I must admit, we're not there yet. We are not reaching the 100%. The last two years have been very difficult. We are at some kind of a freeze because we operate under the worst government that you can think of, but also under the worst social, political, economic, security conditions since the October 7th war started.
Sanam Since October 7th, how have things changed for you and your colleagues and these teachers? What's going on with everybody?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, first of all, I would say our subject matter, our problem doubled. 81% of Israeli Jews today say that they fear Palestinian citizens of Israel and mistrust them. And almost 70% of the Palestinians, Palestinian-Israeli citizens fear and mistrust Israeli Jews. It means that we need to create different capacities. So instead of training 20 facilitators every year, this year we trained 75 facilitators. We're hoping that the day after the war, there will be a better opportunity. But we need to come with three, four times the capacity with the staff that is able to do the work. We change the way we operate because in some places there is a sense of urgency. At universities, as I mentioned, 20% of the student population is Palestinian, 40% of the Israeli male population served in Gaza, there is a potential for explosiveness. So we're active in 11 campuses today, one to work with the university administration to set up rules of what's allowed, what's not allowed, so that students don't take matters to their hands. We train professors to de-escalate tension that might erupt into a classroom. We create dialogue groups on campuses between Jewish and the Palestinian students that still want to debate and argue and manage the situation so that the encounter does not become an explosive type of encounter. We do a lot of what we call uni-national programs, work with the Jewish students alone, work with the Palestinian students alone. Sometimes if you bring them when they're not ready for an encounter, you might get negative results. The last school year, we brought to our campus 17,774 high school students that came for three-day type of encounters, a program which we call Children Teaching Children. They spend time together, we pair two classrooms to keep meeting once a month, usually for a period of three years. So the challenges are much, much bigger, the difficulties are much, much bigger, but we've been in this since 1949. So we've perfected the capacity, we won the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education, so we know the techniques. The most successful programs is when students come to programs for at least seven times in their life. Kids that come once and leave, the impact evaporates very, very quickly. They get sucked back into the home environment of stereotypes.
Sanam And what happens to them once they graduate school, and as you say, the Israeli-Jewish kids go off to the army? So have you tracked the ones that came to you systematically and then went off to the IDF and came back? What's happened to them?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, there's an index which is called the Racism Index that's done by Professor Efi Yar from Tel Aviv University. The index shows that they get hardened in their political perspectives between the age of 18 to 21, which is being at university or working hard labor, if you're an Arab or Israeli-Jewish and going to the military. 65 percent, age of 21, have racist views against Arabs. And 57 percent of Arab kids have racist views against Jews. Very hard stereotypes. But if you've gone through our programs, the racism rate is about 12 percent, and it's sustained. (.)
Sanam 12 percent, so it's gone down significantly, yeah.
Mohammad Darawshe Dramatically, not just significant. Dramatically. And it is sustainable. We've done some long-term evaluation, even 10 years later, and you see that maybe they're not active in this work, because, you know, these are the professional years and the educational years. People try to build their capacity in their 20s, academic or economic capacity. So maybe they're not very active, but they still have it in the back of their mind that what's right is right, what's wrong is wrong. And we see a return back in people's 40s. Once they go into their second career, they feel more comfortable, maybe economically, and they're more stable socially. They come back and they want to be more involved. And actually, now, we're in the process of setting an alumni program to try to organize thousands of people that are coming back and say, we want to be involved.
Sanam And since October 7th, has that increased? Or did you see a dip and a rise? Or how is it going?
Mohammad Darawshe That actually has, within our graduates of our programs, that did increase. Although what they want mostly is to talk and not to be active, most Israeli-Jewish society still stands behind the military effort of this government. And they are not willing to engage in debate with the government. I think they're still stuck in the trauma of October 7th, and they are not able to even see the trauma caused to the Palestinians. They're blocking that, and they're basically saying, let's talk. And I think it shows confusion, mostly. Many people in Israeli society that have supported the war are not not supporting it. They continue to support it. But I think they're beginning to show, one, maybe fatigue, and the second is confusion. And I think that the next few months, if we're able to activate or reactivate people that have that willingness to be involved, I think we might start seeing different phenomenas in Israeli society that might challenge the government.
Sanam You're working inside Israel with Jewish Israelis and Arab and Palestinian Israelis. (..) What's the relationship between your work and what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza? And also, how do they perceive you guys now? Like, Gideon Levy, the journalist, was speaking recently, and he said there are three governments. There's the government for the Jewish Israelis. There's a government for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. And then there's a militarized government that is, you know, the occupation force, which is in the occupied territories. Do you agree with them? Do you think that there is a distinction in terms of how the government treats these categories of people? (.)
Mohammad Darawshe Absolutely. Israel defines itself as Jewish and democratic state. And I would say that, by large, it is democratic towards the Jews and Jewish towards the Palestinians. And towards the Palestinians, they'd say it does not even attempt to be democratic. It only attempts to be Jewish.
Sanam Even for you, who are a citizen there?
Mohammad Darawshe Yes, absolutely.
Sanam And are you able to say how that, what that means? Like, what does that look like for you or how you, how you experience it?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, first of all, legally, there are 28 discriminatory laws against Palestinian citizens of Israel, crowned by the nation state law, which was passed on the 19th of July, 2018, that says Israel is the state of the Jewish people. And the Arabic is no more an official language. And the state can discriminate in certain activities, especially in housing and settlement activities in favor of Jews. There is the citizenship law, which does not allow Palestinian citizens to naturalize a spouse from outside Israel if they have any Palestinian, Muslim, Arab background.
Sanam So let me again, so if you're a Palestinian-Israeli and you decide to marry, I don't know, a Norwegian, in principle, you could naturalize a Norwegian wife or husband.
Soleh Correct.
Sanam But if you marry a Palestinian who is not of Israeli citizenship but comes from West Bank or has been living in Jordan, they're not allowed to be naturalized.
Mohammad Darawshe Correct. If the same person marries a Norwegian that her grandfather was Syrian or Iranian, the likelihood of getting naturalized is zero. Then there's the Nakba law, which prevents Arab schools from teaching about the Palestinian narrative, which is allowed to be taught in Jewish schools. There's the acceptance committees law, which gives power to 800 Jewish towns to create acceptance committees that can decide who can buy, rent property or lease property in those towns. And they're basically committees that prevent Arab citizens from buying, renting and leasing properties in about 67% of the territory of the state of Israel.
Sanam This is just overwhelming. I mean, it's just exhausting listening to it. I think that just people, I mean, in the sense that when you live in a place where you can decide, I want to go buy a place here, I want to sell that property, I want to marry whoever I want to marry. (..) And in principle, we have equality of some sort. This just seems so many barriers. How do you deal with it on a daily basis?
Mohammad Darawshe I mean, the first way to deal with it is to put your end game. Our end game is we're not leaving. We're staying. Israel can call itself Jewish 1,000 times, but its reality is not only Jewish. We are Muslim, you know, 83% Muslim, 8.5% Christian, 8.5% Druze. Because we're staying there, we're not going to leave to make it easy for the extreme right-wing in Israel to do voluntary ethnic cleansing. I think that's what they want. They want us to get to the level of exhaustion so that we can make it easy and leave. And then they have no, what they call, Arab problem. They call us the Arab problem. They don't call us the Arab citizens. They call us the Arab problem. And this problem is going to continue sitting on their chest forever. Holding on is critical. But also the question is to prevent people from despair, you need to give them better reality. And the better reality is better jobs, education, trying to make sure that people have something that is worth protecting. And that's why empowerment activities are critical to the Arab community, to bring people more to academia so that they have a better potential despite the discriminatory reality. Third, look for the Israeli Jews that are liberal and democratic in their nature. I don't think all Israelis are racist. I don't think all Israelis are religious Zionists in their mindset. I would say maybe 40% of the Israeli Jewish population are liberals and democrats and are worth and able to work with us. And the goal is to reach out to those and try to make them become our allies, not just socially. Socially, we're able to create those contacts, but also politically. Ultimately, that's how we can create the political change. My help is in elections time, I take out, I take two months off, I go volunteer, I do my job as much as I can to help because I think it's critical. The top-down is critical, but it happens once every four years. What do you do with the remaining three years and 11 months? My job in that period is to create those islands of success in capacity building, but also in equal integration in the Israeli job market, academia, and social and educational arenas. Then we will be in a much better capacity to engage and maybe even better capacity to heal from the difficulties that we are accumulating every single day.
Sanam Again, as you're speaking, it reminds me of the situation in Iran where the politics is the politics and actually the international and sort of imposition of sanctions and stuff in a way keeps the extreme forces in place. And so the public has done its own thing. You know, when you see the movements, the Women in Life Freedom Movement and others, it's the social and economic, you know, girls going to university, changing within families. And it's like a sort of, once the mindset changes, it's really hard to go back to that original mindset. So what you're doing makes a lot of sense. What's the relationship between Palestinian Israeli citizens and your cousins, your family, I mean, friends and relatives, whoever they may be in the occupied territories?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, first of all, they are our people and we need to care for them. Our social, economic, political reality is better than their social, economic, political reality, which puts a big burden on us to be the big brother in this case. Although we are smaller in size, but we have responsibilities, especially now, to provide the different types of support. We are busy every single day collecting food and collecting medications and trying to find ways to send it to Gaza and to the West Bank. You know, I don't call it humanitarian. When you're helping your brother and you're helping your sister or your cousin, whether it is first or second or 10th degree cousin, that's a duty. We see that as a duty and not humanitarian support. The second is political support. And the political support is within the Israeli scene. Unfortunately, we're facing a lot of anti-democratic, McCartist actions from the Israeli government that's trying to silence the Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel. More than 1,200 Arab students have been arrested, put in legal processes since October 7th for speaking out. One of them was my daughter. But we are not going to stop. You know, we're not going to be silenced. And there is a price to pay.
Sanam What do they do to these students? What do they do to the girls and the boys?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, I mean, the fact that you have a file opened against you, it means that when you're into the system, the faith recognition system will pick you out, for example, in a coup to enter Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray or to go to a public event. And they will prevent you from entering such an event. They relate to you as potential danger for public calm and safety. They, you cannot get the job for in civil service. You cannot become even a bus driver. You cannot become a taxi driver. You're in the system just by opening that file against you.
Sanam And does the file ever close? Do you have any chance?
Mohammad Darawshe It depends on how they close it. I mean, with my daughter's situation, they want to close the file based on lack of evidence. I mean, they accused her of support for a terror organization. They couldn't bring in any evidence. So, if they close it based on lack of evidence, the file continues to be, I mean, she's still in the system. We need to close the file based on lack of crime and not lack of evidence. And that's when you're clean. If it's closed based on lack of evidence, you're stuck for the next seven years at least. And they continue to look for evidence to tie you in support for terror organization, which means you cannot open your mouth. You cannot put anything on social media. Anything you do, you are under immediate watch. And that limits your capacity to behave as a normal human being. And that's why I sent her for the last month, she's in the United States, just to be able to breathe with her hands, just to allow her some breathing time and try to rethink the situation and try to go with the legal processes in a way that will clean air and allow her to be back without having to be under surveillance and being the suspect all the time. But it's an intimidation, it's a collective intimidation, not for the 1,200, but for the all 2 million citizens to say, watch it. If you open your mouth, if you say something which negates that collective mindset of Israeli Jewish society, then you should, you will be punished. That is McCarthyism. That is fascism, actually. And I think that this government is going to continue in this process to even more deeper. Most, many people avoid taking violent actions, although 18 incidents have taken place since October 7th till now, of Arab citizens that got fed up and they took desperate actions against Jews. Our leadership does not endorse that, does not accept that, always calls for nonviolent support to the Palestinians, which is short of what certain Palestinian groups want. Hamas wants us to be, to open another front, physical front, in Arab towns and villages, similar to the West Bank. And our leadership says, no, we're not going to do that. We have much more to lose than the average Palestinian. The day after, when the dust settles, and hopefully very quickly, we will still be Israeli citizens going to the same workplaces, riding the same buses, having the same governments, that will, and any action will have generations of impact on us.
Sanam And presumably, if that were to happen, that would be yet another excuse to try and ethnically cleanse everybody and move, move everyone again. I mean, that, that's, that's another huge risk, right?
Mohammad Darawshe That's why Ben Gvir is actually making those arrests. I think he's trying to provoke the Palestinian citizens in Israel to get into violent reaction. So that is argument of saying, you see, they're part of the enemy, they're fifth column. And as such, let's get rid of them completely and find a way to do that ethnic cleansing plan that is definitely very deep in his heart and mind.
Sanam You mentioned, you mentioned, once we were speaking, and you mentioned that the relationship with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli and Palestinians in citizens of Israel, it feels sometimes like it's sweet and sour. I don't know whether you remember that, that sort of refrain. What, what did you mean by that?
Mohammad Darawshe I mean, it's sweet because of our compassionate relationship. They're us and we're there as, as, as, as humans, as, uh, families, as, uh, as people who, but they expect from us much more than what we can give. And that creates that kind of sourness. You know, they, they, we are, it puts us on the margins of the Palestinian national effort. We're not engaged in violent actions as they wish us to be engaged in. Some of them would take position as far as saying, oh, if you accept living in the state of Israel and you accept Israeli citizenship, this counts for treason because you are now accepting the identity of the enemy. So some take it that far, which creates that bitterness and sourness in, in, in the relationship.
Sanam And how do you respond to that?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, my response is that if staying home is treason, then count me as such. Staying home, my grandfather's decision to stay home, I think, was the highest act of patriotism and not treason. Most Palestinians were forced to leave, but some did choose to leave. And those that chose to leave are still refugees till today. And if my grandfather would have taken the decision to leave in 1948, I assume I was still living out of handouts of food from UNRWA and welfare agencies. I think that the fact that the decision of my grandfather's generation to stay was courageous, maybe not popular, maybe not understood. I don't, I don't even think he understood what he was doing. He just was thinking of wanting to live another day close to his olive orchards and close to his 28 goats that he had and two cows that he had. He didn't know, he didn't know what to do and I think they just wanted to live one, you know, a day at a time and not to go and choose to leave if they were not forced to leave.
Sanam Yeah. And people, I mean, you can't go back in that time, but it's so many people assume that maybe they were just leaving for a week and coming back or something like that. //S01: Exactly.// That always happens.
Mohammad Darawshe He didn't understand 76 years later what kind of political impact this will have. So I think that, that, that decision, if it's called treason, then fine, it means that whoever is saying it is, does not really understand, one, that dynamics of that moment of 1948 and did not, does not understand what does it mean to be a refugee. Our suffering, although it's, we're facing a lot of difficulties, but it definitely is not as close to the suffering of Palestinian refugees and maybe some of them look at us and say, well, you benefited from history. I don't know if being treated as second-class citizens in Israel is a benefit, but yes, it is better than being refugees and that creates a debate that I hope that, you know, ultimately will be solved when also there will be a solution for the Palestinian refugee problem. And then they, then they can see us as the supportive, generous brother that is only there to try to provide help for the rest of the Palestinians.
Sanam So, so this brings me, you know, in a way to the, to the big question that you've talked about all this work that you're doing at the heart, at the horizontal level, you know, the, the piece by piece piece, and then the politics being the bigger picture. But if you were in charge, if you could make decisions right now and, or if there was a, a willingness to have a national dialogue within Israel, with, you know, within Israel in parallel to what was happening in Palestine, which as a peace builder is what I would say should be happening. If you had that kind of a national dialogue and you had, and you could shape and inform policy, what, how do you envisage what could happen? What would you do if you were in charge?
Mohammad Darawshe Well, if I was in charge, I would, first of all, create a coalition that will be based on the liberals and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the liberal Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel, which happened twice in history. During the Rabin period, that was, he was dependent on support of the Arab political parties, and that's why he engaged in the peace process and the Oslo agreements that progressed very well until he was assassinated. I would repeat that segment of his story. This will happen only if we increase the political participation of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and create that partnership with the Israeli center-left. So that's one, that's one area. The second, and I just spent a couple of days in Washington, D.C. last week, and talking to people in the administration, the final status agreement of the Palestinians, no one has invented anything better than the Oslo process. And I think that what we need today is to ask the international community to step in and impose a solution. So let's work on the 97% of agreed land that will be Palestinian, yeah, and for negotiations for the next 5, 10 years or 20 years or on the remaining 3%, let's shrink the conflict and not keep working on the 100%.
Sanam And the 97% that you're talking about, unfortunately, now includes an awful lot more settlers, right? So the number of settlers, especially in the West Bank, but also in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights, has gone up significantly. And the way that they have built the settlements and kind of the Bantustans that we hear about, I've seen it in the times that I've come, the changes and just the physical geography. What happens to the Jewish settlers in this solution that you're thinking about?
Mohammad Darawshe The 97% was not taken out of, you know, the air. It was basically looking at the 3% territory, which is heavily populated by Jewish settlers. And that will be some kind of a land swap between Israel and the future Palestinian state. Less than 10% of the settlers live in the deep heartland of the West Bank, and they were sent there to disconnect Palestinian towns from each other. Those kind of settlements have to be taken out of, and they were sent for strategic political security matter, and they need to be evacuated. But that's evacuation of only about 10% of the settlers. The rest of them, the 90% of the settlers live in that 3%, which will fit into the land swap. I would look for empty territory that is of similar quality and value, but that needs, that serves the Palestinians' best interest. I mean, one of them, for example, around Gaza, Gaza is very highly populated and needs a little bit more territory. There's enough territory around it that does not have a residence or very, very minimally populated. Maybe a couple of kibbutzim around it, and I think that if you need to evacuate a thousand or a couple of thousand people to make Gaza a bit more habitable, that can be done. I mean, there has to be a price for peace. Israel needs to be able to step backwards and say, okay, we will give something. It cannot be only that the Palestinians have to accommodate that reality. And I do not think that the Palestinians should be asked to give anything more than 78% of the land of Palestine for Israel. That's already very generous. So when the Palestinians accept the Palestinian state on 22% on the origin of Palestine, they're doing their share.
Sanam In your work, if money wasn't an object, if there was a billionaire who wanted to come and help, what would you suggest that they do?
Mohammad Darawshe You know, I believe in education. I'm an educator, so instead of if I have the financial means, I will hire 7,500 teachers tomorrow, but I will need 7,500 salaries a month and not count on the goodwill of the existing government. I would give every Arab student that wants to study in university scholarship, especially those that belong to the 46% below poverty. There's a lot of potential of people that are able to go to university. They have the brains, but they don't have the means. And this is institutional poverty. These are not people that are lazy, but people that they lost all of their assets when their land was confiscated. And their father turned into becoming a day laborer that barely brought enough food to the family and could not send their kids to school. You know, I will look for more training, more women to go to the job market so that you build capacity for people to get themselves out of trouble. And you just work with them for two or three years and not for all of their life. And also put every Jewish and every Palestinian kid in some educational encounter that will allow them to want to recognize the humanity in each other, reduce stereotypes, realize the other side doesn't have a horn, doesn't have a tail. They have different political perspectives. We have different political narratives. We can argue those narratives, but in an administered, managed way that does not produce more hatred, but in a way that reduces the tension between the two sides. This is how you create maybe a generation of people that are more willing for peace in the future. (.)
Sanam Thank you. I don't even think you need a billion for that. I think a few hundred million and it's taken you for many, many years.
Mohammad Darawshe Probably the price of one fighter jet.
Sanam Exactly. The question I always ask is, what gives you hope? Especially now, especially with what's going on still in Gaza, what gives you hope?
Mohammad Darawshe Two things. One is the fact that I know I have Israeli-Jewish partners in this, that we're not screaming in the darkness, but there are real people with whom we're working. (.) And second is that I see that the younger generation didn't give up. They did not surrender their will to radical groups, and they're still trying to fight the right battle. I see about 300 kids that come to our campus every week. We can unmake racism. We can unmake stereotypes. That gives me hope. You know, it's not the scale and magnitude that makes change within a day, but that's the nature of education. It's a slow process. There's a rule that we use in our institution. It's called TTT. Things take time. But if you bring me that billionaire, instead of 300 kids a week, we can work with 3,000. We can work with 50,000. We know how to do the work. We need the scaling. The scaling comes usually by one of two ways. Either you get the right government, and we do not have the right government today, or you get the resources. This is what happened in Northern Ireland when the international community came with the resources. This is not happening in the Israeli-Palestinian country.
Sanam Thank you. Thank you for that, Mohamed. And really good luck with everything. I think what you've shared is so important because it just shows what is really possible. At a time when everybody is assuming that nothing is possible and that nothing is going to be possible, actually not only you're saying it's possible, you're seeing it happen. So thank you so much for what you're doing.
Mohammad Darawshe We're making it happen.
Sanam You're absolutely making it happen.
Mohammad Darawshe Wonderful. Thank you so much. (.......)
Sanam Good morning, Sos. How are you doing? Are we awake this morning? Just about. Just about. I'm not going to ask you about the bacteria. I'm just going to say I'm excited about coming up to Cambridge to do the debate soon on the UN.
Soleh I'm excited, too. I hope you crush the opposition. Crush the opposition. We'll see. Yeah.
Sanam Anyway, listen, we're having a conversation about our latest episode, which was with Mohamed Darwasha. What did you think, having listened to Hanan Schlesinger on what he was saying about settlements, Jewish perspective, if you want, what was your reaction to Mohamed's conversation with me about the Palestinian experience and what he's doing? What was your sort of aha moment?
Soleh I think the first thing that was really kind of striking was all of the laws that he was talking about and all of the kind of discrimination that was enshrined in actual law that he faces or that as Palestinian citizens of Israel face. I knew a little bit that that was the case, but I didn't realize how many different barriers were put in place, even for people who are actual citizens and not just like, you know, Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Sanam You know, it's interesting. Baba used to say that Israel was sort of the democratic country in the Middle East or the least undemocratic country in the Middle East. And I think that people often forget that when we say Israel is a democracy, it's a democracy with full rights for Jewish citizens.
Soleh He had a really good turn of phrase there. I think that he said that it's a democracy for Jews and then for Arabs, it's a Jewish state.
Sanam Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then the three tiers, right? So the Jewish citizens, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, and then the occupied territories, which basically have very little rights or no rights whatsoever. Yeah, it's hard to, I had the same thing, that it's really hard to explain to somebody living, you know, in Europe or in the US, the sort of structural barriers, you know, who you can marry and what kind of rights they might have depending on where they come from. And, you know, from, you know, all these sort of your personal life, your political life, your economic life, everything is kind of controlled in some sort of way or discriminated against, right?
Soleh Yeah, I mean, clearly starting from the schools, which is where he's trying to make the change, I suppose. (.) It's just indoctrination, basically, right? Seems like that's what he's saying. Similar to what the rabbi was saying last time, it seems so simple, like, the kind of initial steps of what they're doing. Um, and I loved that, like, his answer to what would you do with a billion dollars was, like, hire tons and tons of teachers. Um, and then his comment at the end is like, oh, it's probably just the price of a fighter jet. That was kind of depressing, but yeah, true. Like, what he was saying about how this was the first encounter that so many students have on both sides, like, with either Jewish or Arab or whatever, whichever one they are not, was crazy. Because, like, it's, I guess you think that a place like that, like, it's so, and you know it's not mixed, but it is, like, everything's very close together. It's tiny, the whole area. And yet, somehow, they've gone their whole lives never encountering a Palestinian person. I also, I mean, it's also crazy that it makes so much of a difference. Like, I don't know how you measure racism, but he says that it's going down.
Sanam Yeah, it's, it, it, what's interesting is that it's not that you don't come across them. It's that, it goes back to what Hanan was saying, is you just don't notice them, right? Like, they are there. You certainly don't speak to them. Yeah, you don't speak to them as equals, right? You're not in the same level playing field in a classroom or in a, the idea that you would be living in a place, kids like you would be living in a place and they just don't see their neighbors at all is just very strange.
Soleh I thought his answer on, like, how do you deal with it? How do you keep going? How do you continue to, like, stay motivated in this struggle that seems like it's not getting better? In fact, there's probably things that recently have made it get worse. And he was very straightforward, very, you know, two answers. And he was like, well, the, you know, we're not leaving. (..) And I mean, that's kind of something you hear a lot that they're like, oh, well, this is our, this is our home. We're not leaving. So the end game has to be that we are able to stay here. What did you think about his, well, he was, he was also saying the coalition and like the Oslo agreement, like that's what we need to go back to, right? (..)
Sanam Yeah, I think, you know, this is what's interesting is that nobody, nobody says we have the perfect solution, but they say we have a solution. And the solution is creating, you know, going back to the green line of 1967 and, and having two states. (.) And then the overlap between what Mohammed says and what, what Hanan says is that, you know, there is some element of a sort of a land swap, if you want, of, you know, where people are, because as Hanan said, the settlements, a lot of the sort of more densely populated areas are places that were traditionally, were historically maybe government land. And so, you know, you kind of carve it out. And then there's another piece that you give, provided we're not moving too many people. I mean, I think that's, that's the real danger that you do a carve out and all of a a sudden you're ethnically cleansing another mass of Palestinians out of, out of Israel proper. I think, I think that would be dangerous. But the idea that you have two states and, you know, like any other country that we know, the state is the state. And if you want to be Jewish or, or Muslim in that state, or if you want to be ethnically, you know, uh, Palestinian Arab or, or ethnically Polish for that matter, when coming from, from, um, many of the Jewish communities or Russian, that's fine. But the state, the rule of the law is the, is the same for everyone. And the fact that this is not tolerable for so many of the settlers, I think is interesting. And, and, and also the other part that really I found poignant was that, you know, the struggle for Palestinian liberation or the creation of the state of Palestine and people who live in the West Bank and Gaza and so forth is one thing. And right now they're, you know, they're struggling with the sort of the weight of a military occupation, even though there's the Palestinian authorities supposedly in, in the West Bank. (.) But the idea is that for them, if, if, and when there's a state, they will have equal citizenship rights. Whereas what Mohammed was saying is that their struggle as Palestinian citizens in Israel continues. Like they, you know, right now they don't have equal rights. Even if there's a Palestinian state tomorrow, we don't know whether Palestinians in Israel will have equal rights. It's a different sort of thread of the struggle if you want. And we never, we never really hear about that either.
Soleh That it was, that it was interesting that they both pointed out that just making the coalition or two state solution is not enough. Um, you also need to like change people's mindsets and all that. If not, you're just going to continue with the same like underlying problems, particularly for people like him who are Arab citizens or Arab citizens of Israel. What did you think of his answer about his interaction with people in the occupied, like Palestinians in the occupied territories and like how their fights go together, but are also, I guess, slightly separate?
Sanam You know, a, we don't often hear about the sort of the specificity of the Palestinian experience in Israel. Right. So, and, and, but as he said, they have their own issues, but they're still better off economically, politically, socially than their cousins or their, you know, their counterparts in the occupied territories. And so that question of, you know, is it bittersweet or sweet and sour or whatever, whatever that sort of duality was, was, was, was, was really interesting. And then his point about how their community in, in Israel has been really critical in mobilizing to get humanitarian aid into the West Bank. Like they, they've been really central to sort of collecting whatever money, you know, food, (.) whatever that, that needs the people, medicine, medicine, I guess, to the extent that it can be delivered in. So that, that I thought was, was really important. And then, and then his point about, um, you know, if they accuse us of being traitors, the only, you know, my grandfather was a traitor because he didn't, uh, leave, that was really for me touching because it's, it's exactly, you know, it, it was very personal. I mean, it's, it's like what happened with the revolution that, you know, some people left, some people didn't. And, and for me anyway, you know, my dad, Baba didn't, Baba didn't leave. Why didn't he leave? It was kind of haphazard and, and, you know, but something in him, um, uh, didn't necessarily think he should pick up and, you know, leave at the end of 1978 or 79. Um, or, you know, or other, others of our relatives, like, uh, you know, the Eskander, Uncle Eskander, who was jailed, but even after he was jailed, he didn't want to leave, you know? So that connection to saying, I'm not going to go, I think, I think is a really powerful message despite all the burdens and, and, and the pain that it, that it causes because it's, you know, um, fractures families and things. So I, I thought those comments were really, um, interesting and, and again, important because I imagine it must be, it must be quite fraught and quite tense and difficult sometimes when, when you're thinking about the, the different communities. Um, and, and probably, you know, if we have time either in this series or next series, I will definitely want to interview somebody who's coming from the occupied territories, right? To have that perspective as well.
Soleh His description of, like, the, how they use the surveillance techniques and it's just like a collective intimidation process fits in to our conversation next week with Meredith, the CEO of Signal.
Sanam Again, that, that question of what does it mean to be under such surveillance all the time, right? Maybe, maybe, you know, sitting in London or in Cambridge, we are also, and we just don't realize it, but when it, when it's turned and it becomes for political purposes, it's, uh, it's pretty frightening because you just, you know, I, and in fact, I wish I had asked him that, that, that to what extent does self-censorship just become normalized or not, right? Like, do you, do you get to a point where you don't care what you say or, or is self-censorship so baked into the DNA that you just don't say things, but, but he seems pretty brave. I mean, he seems to, he seems to say an awful lot. So, so I, yeah, so it's kind of a different, you know, what, what happens to, to people in terms of their fear or their courage. It's going to be interesting talking to Meredith Whitaker, who's the CEO of the Signal Foundation, the Signal app, and the importance of privacy because, you know, where we live in, in the UK or in the US, we'll see what happens in the US, but on some level, people just don't take their privacy that seriously. They, they, you know, people like, we don't care. But when you live in authoritarian states, yeah, when you live in conflict areas, it can be a matter of life and death for you or your family, right? So, so it takes on a whole different connotation. And there's a sort of sinister, insidious aspect to the surveillance question and then the importance of privacy. Interesting to come on the back of this. (..) Okay, bye. (...) Go get some coffee, says. Get some coffee. (.........) This is an Africa digital audio production. My executive producer is Pierce Lynch, and it contains original music by Little Monster Media. Remember, you can catch a new episode of If You Were In Charge every Tuesday. A huge thanks from me to the Bosch Academy for making these conversations possible, and to my own organization, ICANN, for allowing me the time to explore these big issues with my guests and spend some time with my daughters. If you want to get in touch, you can find all our social media links on our website, and the link is in the description of the episode. So that's it for If You Were In Charge. I'm Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini. See you next time. Bye.