Support Palestinian& Jewish Youth Leaders in Jaffa

We are now about halfway through our activity year, and have begun to witness our Community in Action participants developing awareness, gaining knowledge and familiarizing themselves with different social issues in Jaffa, including the reality of the schools where they are volunteering with Jewish and Palestinian youth.

Last month, the program participants went on a tour in Jaffa, which is a traditional part of the program. However, unlike in previous years, this time the tour was planned and organized by the participants themselves. For the Jewish participants, this meant conducting independent research and dealing with complex concepts, such as gentrification, which challenged some pre-conceived notions about residency and power. The fact that they were in charge of transferring the knowledge rather than simply consuming it enabled the Jewish participants to process the information more efficiently. For the Palestinian participants, the learning and guiding process was more personal: one of them turned to her grandfather to hear more of his memories from Jaffa during the Nakba, and another participant from Jaffa's Ajami neighborhood had the chance of sharing the neighborhood's history and her own life experiences with the group.

During their weekly binational meetings, participants go through workshops and deal with issues such as identity and language. In a recent workshop, where they were encouraged to examine different aspects of language usage, one Jewish participant was questioning the importance of increasing the Arabic language's presence in the public sphere. Through facilitated dialogue in which Palestinian participants explained that for them speaking Arabic is a part of the struggle to overcome inequality, he eventually said: "in the beginning of this discussion I thought that I would want Hebrew and Arabic to be represented equally [at a planned school event], but [now] I feel that it is my duty to speak Arabic and make it more present in public spaces". Along with Sadaka-Reut's staff, Jaffa residents and friends, Community in Action also joined our first public Jaffa Community Event of 2018, where we discussed the politicization of the Arabic language in Israel with Dr. Yoni Mendel, an expert on language and Jewish-Arab Relations. Following the conversation, a Palestinian participant said that she was happy this conversation further clarified the importance of speaking and teaching Arabic separately from the security context.

All this is possible because of the many generous donations Sadaka-Reut received from you.

Thank you for supporting our project and helping Palestinian and Jewish youth to create a more equal and just society in Israel!