Daniel sent us this one — he wants to talk about Neve Shalom, the intentional coexistence community in Israel where Arabs and Jews live side by side, and what we've actually learned from these experiments. He's also asking about Hand in Hand, the Yad b'Yad bilingual school network, and the broader question of whether manufactured coexistence spaces can really scale beyond their own walls. And there's a deeper thread here about language — who learns whose, and what that says about power.
Neve Shalom is one of those places that gets cited constantly but understood barely. It's been around since the early nineteen seventies — actually founded by a Dominican priest, Bruno Hussar, in nineteen seventy. The name literally means "oasis of peace." And it sits right on the Latrun corridor, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. About seventy families now, split roughly fifty-fifty between Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel.
Seventy families is tiny.
But it's been running for over fifty years, which is longer than most intentional communities anywhere. And it's not just a symbolic village — there's an actual governance structure, a binational primary school that draws kids from surrounding towns, and the School for Peace, which has run encounter workshops for tens of thousands of participants since nineteen seventy-nine.
What does "coexistence" actually mean in practice there? Are we talking about people who share a grocery store but go home to different worlds, or is there real integration?
The integration is genuine, but it's also structured. Every family has its own home, but the village is physically integrated — no Jewish neighborhood and Arab neighborhood. The community administration is deliberately binational. The school inside the village teaches in both Hebrew and Arabic, and every classroom has two teachers, one Jewish and one Arab. The kids are fully bilingual by the time they leave.
That's the detail that jumps out at me — two teachers in every classroom. That's expensive.
It's expensive and it's also philosophically radical. The idea is that no child hears their language or their historical narrative only from an outsider. A Jewish kid learns Palestinian history from a Palestinian teacher. An Arab kid learns about the Holocaust from a Jewish teacher. And they're in the same room while this is happening, hearing each other's questions.
The classroom itself becomes a microcosm of what the village is trying to be.
And it's also where the tensions become most visible. Because you can share a swimming pool and a community center and still never actually confront the hard stuff. But when your kid comes home from third grade and asks why the other teacher was crying during the Nakba lesson, you can't avoid it anymore.
That's where the "manufactured" part of the prompt comes in, right? The village is designed to force these encounters. It's not organic.
Right, and that's been the critique from the beginning — from both sides. On the Palestinian side, there's a strong anti-normalization current that says coexistence projects are basically a way of laundering the occupation. The argument goes: if you create these little bubbles where everyone gets along, you're normalizing the idea that the broader structural inequality is somehow just a matter of interpersonal misunderstanding.
From the Jewish side?
The critique tends to be that these projects are naive, that they're creating artificial conditions that don't reflect the real security concerns and political realities. That you can't scale the village because the village doesn't have to deal with checkpoints, or the fact that most Israelis and Palestinians don't actually want to live next to each other.
Both sides are basically saying the same thing from opposite angles — this isn't real.
That shared critique is almost the most interesting thing about it. You've got Palestinian activists saying "stop pretending the conflict is about interpersonal feelings" and right-wing Israelis saying "stop pretending the conflict is about interpersonal feelings." They agree on the diagnosis and disagree on everything else.
Like two people agreeing the restaurant is terrible but for completely opposite reasons, and one of them still owns the place.
actually a pretty good way to put it. But let's talk about Hand in Hand, because that's the other major model, and it's different from Neve Shalom in important ways. Hand in Hand started in nineteen ninety-eight — it's a network of bilingual, binational schools. There are now six of them — Jerusalem, the Galilee, Wadi Ara, Haifa, Jaffa, and Kfar Saba. About two thousand students total.
Two thousand students across six schools. That's bigger than one village, but still... it's not a movement.
It's not a movement, but it's also not nothing. The Jerusalem school in particular has been running for over twenty-five years now, and it's grown steadily. What's distinctive about the Hand in Hand model is that it's integrated into the public education system. These aren't private schools — they're public schools that operate within the Israeli Ministry of Education, which means the state is effectively funding a binational, bilingual educational experiment.
Wait — the Israeli Ministry of Education is paying for classrooms where Palestinian teachers teach Palestinian history to Jewish kids?
And that's a tension that's never fully resolved. The schools teach the standard Israeli curriculum, but they also teach Palestinian narrative and history. The Ministry tolerates this, but it's always a negotiation. Every few years there's a political flare-up — a minister says something, or there's a complaint from a parents' group, and the schools have to defend themselves all over again.
What happened after October seventh?
This is where it gets really instructive. I read a New Yorker piece about Neve Shalom after October seventh, and the village basically went into a kind of shock. You have Jewish families whose relatives were killed or taken hostage, and Arab families who are watching the destruction in Gaza and terrified for their own communities inside Israel. And they're all living in the same tiny village, running into each other at the grocery store.
That's the stress test, right? The whole premise is that you've built relationships strong enough to survive the worst possible moment. So did it?
It survived, but it was brutal. The School for Peace had to completely rethink how it ran dialogue sessions. Some of the Jewish residents were furious that their Arab neighbors weren't showing enough empathy in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Some of the Arab residents felt they were being asked to perform grief in a way that erased their own community's suffering.
The same thing that was happening across the country was happening inside the village, just compressed.
Compressed and inescapable. In a regular town, you can avoid your neighbors. In Neve Shalom, there's no avoiding anyone. And that's both the strength and the horror of the model — it forces you to stay in the room when staying in the room is the last thing you want to do.
There's something almost claustrophobic about that. The village as a kind of inescapable dinner party where everyone's fighting.
Yet — and this is the part that doesn't get enough attention — the village didn't fall apart. The Hand in Hand schools didn't close. In fact, enrollment at some of the Hand in Hand schools actually increased after October seventh, because there were parents who looked at what was happening and decided that the alternative — complete separation — was worse.
That's counterintuitive.
It is, but it makes sense when you think about it. The people who are attracted to these projects are already self-selecting for a certain worldview. The crisis didn't change their values — it intensified them. They looked at the polarization and thought, "This is exactly why we need this.
Let's talk about language, because the prompt raised this and it's the part of these experiments that I find most revealing. Hebrew is the dominant language in Israel, and Arab citizens of Israel are overwhelmingly bilingual. Something like eighty-five percent of Arab Israelis speak Hebrew at some level. The rate of Israeli Jews who speak fluent Arabic? It's abysmal.
It's around eight to ten percent, and most of those are either Mizrahi Jews from Arabic-speaking families or people who learned it in the military. Among secular Ashkenazi Jews, functional Arabic is practically nonexistent.
You have this asymmetry where one group has a strong instrumental reason to learn the other's language — economic access, education, navigating institutions — and the other group has almost no practical incentive.
That asymmetry maps directly onto power. The Arab citizen who doesn't speak Hebrew is locked out of the economy. The Jewish citizen who doesn't speak Arabic loses nothing. So bilingualism in Israel isn't actually bilingualism — it's a one-way linguistic assimilation.
These coexistence projects are trying to flip that.
They're trying to create an environment where Arabic isn't a second-class language. In Hand in Hand schools, Arabic is a language of instruction, not just a subject. Jewish kids are learning math in Arabic. Palestinian kids are learning literature in Hebrew. The goal is genuine mutual bilingualism, where both languages have equal status.
How's that going?
It's hard. The Jewish kids struggle with Arabic in ways the Arab kids don't struggle with Hebrew, and part of that is because Hebrew is everywhere — on TV, on signs, in the culture. Arabic is much less present in the broader environment, so the Jewish kids are learning a language they don't hear anywhere else.
Even inside the manufactured equality of the school, the outside world keeps leaking in.
And the teachers talk about this — the Arab kids often end up translating for the Jewish kids when they're outside the school environment, which subtly reinforces the hierarchy the school is trying to undo.
That's almost worse — you've created a situation where the power dynamic is being reinforced through the very mechanism that's supposed to dissolve it.
This is why some critics of bilingual education in asymmetric contexts say it can actually deepen inequality if you're not extremely careful. You have to actively work against the gravitational pull of the dominant language, and that requires constant vigilance.
Like trying to hold a beach ball underwater.
And the beach ball is Hebrew, and it really wants to float.
Let's get to the core question from the prompt — does the manufacturing of these defined spaces actually frustrate the ability to extrapolate the model into broader society? Is the very fact that these are intentional communities a limitation?
There's a real tension here, and I think honest proponents of these projects would acknowledge it. The argument for manufactured spaces is that you need a controlled environment to prove something is possible. You can't demonstrate that coexistence works in a context where all the structural forces are pushing toward separation. So you create a bubble where those forces are temporarily neutralized, and you show that when the conditions are right, people can live together.
The counterargument is obvious — you've just proved that coexistence works when you remove all the reasons it doesn't work.
And that's not nothing — it's a proof of concept — but it's also not a solution. It's like proving a drug works in a petri dish. Great, now what happens inside an actual human body?
There's a phrase for this in policy circles, isn't there? The "external validity" problem.
Internal validity — does the intervention work under controlled conditions? External validity — does it work in the real world? Neve Shalom and Hand in Hand have strong internal validity. The external validity is the open question.
What's the actual theory of change? If you're running one of these projects, what's your story about how a village of seventy families or a network of six schools changes a country of nine million people?
There are a few different theories. One is the ripple effect — you create a model, you demonstrate it works, you train educators and facilitators, and gradually the practices diffuse into the broader system. The School for Peace has trained thousands of facilitators who now run dialogue programs in other contexts.
You're basically running a teacher training program disguised as a village.
That's one way to look at it. Another theory is more political — the idea that these projects create a constituency for coexistence. The kids who graduate from Hand in Hand schools become adults who have a different baseline expectation for what's possible. They go into politics, media, civil society, and they carry that experience with them.
How many graduates are we talking about?
Hand in Hand has been graduating classes for about fifteen years now, so we're still talking about a relatively small number — maybe a few thousand alumni. It's not a demographic force yet. But the first cohorts are now in their late twenties and early thirties, starting to enter professional life, and there's some interesting research tracking where they end up.
Where do they end up?
A lot of them stay in the coexistence ecosystem — they work for NGOs, they become dialogue facilitators, they go into peace-oriented professions. Some of them reject the whole framework and become activists in more confrontational movements. And a significant number just... live their lives. They have friends from the other community, they're comfortable in both languages, but they're not necessarily trying to change the world.
That last group might actually be the most interesting. The idea that the outcome isn't activism but just...
Normalcy is the radical thing here. The whole point of these projects is to make coexistence unremarkable. If a Hand in Hand graduate grows up and has an Arab friend and a Jewish friend and doesn't think of it as a political statement, that's arguably the biggest success possible.
That's also the hardest thing to measure. You can count how many dialogue sessions you ran. You can't count how many people just quietly stopped hating each other.
This is the evaluation problem that plagues these projects. Funders want metrics. They want to know that their money is producing peace. But peace is not really a measurable outcome in the way that, say, graduation rates are. So the projects end up measuring process indicators — number of participants, number of workshops, number of schools — and hoping those correlate with impact.
Which is how you end up with an entire industry of coexistence that's very good at producing workshops and very hard to evaluate in terms of actual societal change.
That's the cynical read, and it's not entirely wrong. But I think it's also incomplete, because some of the most important social changes in history started with small, intentional communities that seemed completely irrelevant to the broader society until suddenly they weren't.
Give me an example.
The kibbutz movement. At its peak, the kibbutzim never accounted for more than about seven percent of the Israeli population. But they had an outsized influence on Israeli culture, politics, and the military. The early political leadership of the country was disproportionately drawn from the kibbutzim. So a small, intentional community can have a catalytic effect.
The kibbutzim were also ideologically aligned with the dominant political project of the time. They were building the state. Neve Shalom is trying to build something that's in tension with the dominant political currents.
That's exactly the difference, and it's crucial. The kibbutzim were swimming with the current. Neve Shalom is swimming against it. That makes the scaling problem fundamentally different.
Let's talk about the anti-normalization critique more directly, because I think it's the most serious challenge these projects face. What's the actual argument?
The anti-normalization position comes mainly from Palestinian civil society and its supporters. The core argument is that "normalization" — normal relations between Arabs and Jews — should not happen until the structural injustices of the occupation and discrimination are resolved. The concern is that coexistence projects create a false equivalence, presenting the conflict as a symmetrical problem of misunderstanding between two equal sides, when in reality there's an occupier and an occupied.
The Hand in Hand classroom with two teachers, one Jewish and one Arab, is presenting a symmetry that doesn't exist outside the classroom.
That's the argument. And it's not just an abstract critique — there have been organized campaigns against these projects. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, BDS, has specifically targeted normalization projects. There was a controversy a few years back when some Palestinian activists called for a boycott of a Hand in Hand school event.
From the other side?
From the Israeli right, the critique is different but it converges on the same point — that these projects are delusional about Palestinian intentions. The argument is that coexistence can only happen after security is established, not before, and that these projects essentially pretend the conflict doesn't exist or that it's just a matter of misunderstanding.
You've got the left saying "you're ignoring the occupation" and the right saying "you're ignoring the security threat," and both are basically accusing these projects of the same thing — denial of reality.
The projects are caught in the middle, trying to say "we're not ignoring reality, we're trying to build a different one." But that's a hard message to sell when rockets are falling or when there's a military operation in the West Bank.
It strikes me that the most resilient part of these experiments might actually be the schools, not the village. A village requires people to uproot their entire lives. A school just requires parents to make an educational choice.
That's a really important distinction. Neve Shalom requires total commitment — you have to move there, you have to raise your kids there, you have to buy into the entire package. Hand in Hand is a school choice. You can live in your regular neighborhood, have your regular life, and send your kid to a bilingual school. The barrier to entry is much lower.
Which means the potential for scaling is much higher.
And Hand in Hand has been growing — they've added schools, they're planning more. But they're still tiny relative to the Israeli education system, which has something like two million students. Two thousand kids in Hand in Hand schools isn't even a rounding error.
What's the constraint? Is it demand or supply?
Both, but mainly demand. Most Jewish Israeli parents don't want to send their kids to a school where half the students are Arab. Most Arab Israeli parents are more focused on educational quality and economic opportunity than on bilingual coexistence. Hand in Hand has to attract families who are ideologically committed, and that's a small pool.
The schools are also more expensive to run, right? Two teachers per classroom, bilingual curriculum development — this isn't cheap.
They rely heavily on philanthropy. The Israeli government funds part of it because they're public schools, but the extra costs — the second teacher, the special curriculum, the facilitation — that's all donor-funded. Which means they're perpetually fundraising, and that's not a stable basis for scaling.
The model is fragile in multiple ways — politically, financially, demographically.
Yet it persists. That's the thing that I keep coming back to. These projects have survived wars, intifadas, political shifts, funding crises. They're not growing rapidly, but they're not dying either. There's something stubborn about them.
Stubbornness as a survival strategy.
Sometimes that's all you've got.
Let's get back to the language question, because I think it's the most concrete thing we can pull from these experiments. The prompt mentioned that creating a shared linguistic environment is only part of the experiment. What's the rest?
The rest is narrative. Language is the vehicle, but the content is historical memory, identity, grievance. A bilingual school where both languages are used but only one historical narrative is taught would be a failure. The hard part isn't teaching kids Arabic — it's teaching them that the story they heard at home isn't the only story.
That's where the discomfort comes in.
Hand in Hand schools have had moments where Jewish parents were upset that their kids were learning about the Nakba in a way that didn't present it as a tragedy for Jews. And Arab parents were upset that their kids were learning about the Holocaust in a way that didn't connect it to their own experience of displacement. The teachers have to navigate this constantly.
Is there a curriculum for this? Or is it just teachers improvising?
There is a curriculum, developed over many years, and it's constantly being revised. The approach is generally to teach both narratives side by side, not to synthesize them into a single "objective" story. The idea is that kids should understand that different communities have different memories of the same events, and that those differences are real and legitimate.
That sounds reasonable, but it also sounds like it could easily slide into a kind of moral relativism — "both sides have their perspectives, and who's to say which is right?
That's the tightrope. And it's a criticism that comes from both directions — that the schools are either too even-handed about fundamentally asymmetrical violence, or that they're subtly tilting toward one narrative. The teachers I've heard speak about this say the goal isn't neutrality — it's multipartiality. You're not saying "both sides are equally right." You're saying "both sides have experiences that matter, and we're going to take both seriously.
That's a word that probably doesn't survive first contact with a grieving parent.
It doesn't. And after October seventh, a lot of the careful pedagogical frameworks just collapsed. Teachers were crying in class. Kids were asking questions that had no good answers. The Hand in Hand schools basically had to improvise a trauma response while still trying to maintain the binational framework.
Did they manage it?
There were incidents. There were parents who pulled their kids out. There were also moments that the staff describe as almost miraculous — Arab and Jewish kids holding each other while their parents were fighting in the parking lot. It's messy, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What's the actual lesson here? If someone wanted to apply the coexistence model more broadly, what would they take from fifty years of Neve Shalom and twenty-five years of Hand in Hand?
I think there are a few things. First, intentionality matters. You can't just put people in the same room and hope for the best. The structure — the two-teacher model, the bilingual requirement, the facilitated dialogue — is what makes the encounter productive rather than just tense.
The manufacturing isn't a bug, it's a feature. You have to manufacture the conditions.
You have to manufacture the conditions, but you also have to be honest about the fact that you're manufacturing them. The mistake would be to pretend that what works inside the bubble can be directly transplanted outside it. The bubble proves something is possible. The next step is figuring out what conditions in the broader society would need to change for the bubble to become unnecessary.
That's a much harder question.
And it's not a question the coexistence projects can answer on their own. It's a political question. It's about power, not pedagogy.
Language asymmetry is a proxy for power asymmetry, and you can't fix the language problem without addressing the power problem. Teaching Jewish kids Arabic is important, but if Arabic remains a marginalized language in Israeli public life, the classroom gains will erode the moment the kids leave school.
The language project is actually a political project in disguise.
It's not even in disguise. It's explicitly political. The Hand in Hand founders will tell you that — they're not trying to create bilingual kids, they're trying to create a different kind of society. The bilingualism is a means, not an end.
Resilience is a function of relationships, not structures. The structures — the schools, the village governance, the dialogue frameworks — are important, but what actually holds these projects together during crises is the fact that people know each other. They've shared meals. Their kids are friends. When the political situation explodes, the personal relationships are the shock absorbers.
Which is both inspiring and kind of depressing, because personal relationships don't scale.
They don't. You can't personally know everyone in a country of nine million people. So at some point, you need a different kind of mechanism — institutions, laws, norms — that can do the work that personal relationships do in a village of seventy families.
That's the gap, isn't it? Between the micro and the macro. The village proves that coexistence is humanly possible. The country proves that it's politically nearly impossible. And bridging that gap is the entire project.
That's why I think the honest answer to the prompt's question — "does manufacturing these spaces frustrate the ability to extrapolate?" — is yes and no. Yes, because the manufactured conditions are so different from the broader society that direct replication is impossible. No, because the manufacturing is what allows us to see what's actually needed. It's a diagnostic tool as much as a solution.
Like a wind tunnel for social relations. You're not going to fly the wind tunnel, but it tells you what shape the wing needs to be.
Neve Shalom is a wind tunnel. Hand in Hand is a wind tunnel. They're not the airplane.
The question becomes whether anyone in a position to build airplanes is actually looking at the wind tunnel data.
The answer to that, right now, is mostly no. The political leadership on both sides is not interested in the lessons of coexistence projects. The Israeli government has been moving rightward for years, and the Palestinian leadership is either authoritarian or fragmented. Neither side is looking to Neve Shalom for policy guidance.
The projects exist in a kind of political vacuum, doing work that the broader society isn't ready to receive.
That's been true of a lot of social movements throughout history. The work happens before the conditions are right for it to be adopted. You build the model, you train the people, you develop the knowledge, and you wait. Sometimes for a very long time.
That requires a certain kind of patience that's hard to sustain.
And the funding model doesn't help — donors want impact now, not in thirty years. So there's constant pressure to demonstrate results, which pushes projects toward measurable outputs rather than long-term transformation.
Which circles back to what you said earlier about the evaluation problem. The things that matter most are the hardest to measure.
The people who do this work know that. They're not naive. They understand that a single village or a handful of schools isn't going to solve the conflict. But they also believe — and I think there's evidence for this — that you can't solve the conflict without the kind of human infrastructure these projects are building.
I like that.
It's not as visible as a road or a power grid, but it's infrastructure nonetheless. People who can speak both languages, who have relationships across the divide, who know how to facilitate difficult conversations — that's a resource. And when the political window eventually opens, if it opens, that resource will be there.
Assuming it hasn't been completely burned out by then.
That's the risk. Burnout is real. The people doing this work are exhausted, especially after the last couple of years. The emotional toll of holding a binational space during a war is enormous. Some of the best facilitators have stepped back. Some of the most committed families have left.
The infrastructure is decaying even as we're talking about it.
In some places, yes. In others, it's holding. Hand in Hand actually saw an increase in applications after October seventh. There's a counter-current — people who looked at the polarization and decided they needed to be part of something different.
Which brings us back to the self-selection point. These projects attract a very specific kind of person. Is that a strength or a limitation?
Both, always both. The self-selection means you're working with people who are already committed, which makes the work possible. But it also means you're not reaching the people who actually need to be reached — the ones who are hostile or indifferent to coexistence.
The people who would never set foot in Neve Shalom.
Those are the people whose views would need to change for anything to shift at scale. The coexistence projects are basically working with the choir, and the choir is lovely, but the choir isn't the problem.
What would it take to reach beyond the choir?
That's the million-dollar question. Some people argue that the only way is through political change — that you need leadership from the top that creates incentives for coexistence rather than polarization. Others argue that you need economic integration — that if people's livelihoods depend on cooperation, the attitudes will follow.
Others argue that none of this works until the occupation ends.
And that's the elephant in every coexistence workshop. You can build all the shared spaces you want, but if one group lives under military occupation and the other doesn't, the asymmetry is going to overwhelm the best-designed program.
Where does that leave us? What's the honest summary of what fifty-plus years of these experiments has taught us?
I'd say this. Coexistence is possible. Not easy, not natural, not self-sustaining — but possible. The conditions that make it possible are specific and hard to replicate: intentional structure, linguistic equality, narrative pluralism, and sustained personal contact. These conditions can be created in small spaces, and when they are, something genuinely different emerges. But the gap between the small space and the broader society is vast, and bridging it requires political changes that the coexistence projects themselves cannot produce.
The projects are necessary but not sufficient.
That's the cleanest way to put it. Necessary but not sufficient. You need the human infrastructure, but you also need the political will. And right now, the political will isn't there.
That's a sobering place to land.
But I'd rather be sober than delusional. The people I admire most in this space are the ones who are clearest-eyed about the limitations. They're not selling a fantasy. They're doing what's possible in the space they have, and they're honest about how small that space is.
There's something almost heroic about that — building a model you know might never be adopted, because it's still worth building.
Or maybe it's just stubbornness.
Same thing, sometimes.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the late sixteen hundreds, an Icelandic scholar named Thorlakur Skulason built a device called the "wind-gauge of Snaefellsnes." It was a wooden box filled with precisely thirty-two puffin feathers, suspended from a church beam. Thorlakur believed that the feathers' trembling intensity could measure not just wind speed but the moral quality of the weather — calm air indicated divine favor, while agitated feathers suggested the presence of unconfessed sin in the parish. He kept a daily log for seventeen years and once refused communion to a farmer whose barn had burned down, citing "irregular feather agitation" on the day of the fire.
...the moral quality of weather.
I have so many questions and I want exactly none of them answered.
Thank you, Hilbert.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, and to everyone who keeps listening to this strange little show. If you want more episodes, you can find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a review if you're so inclined — it helps.
Until next time.
