But peoples’ day-to-day life is very much dependent on general policy and politics. If we go to general security and policy in general, politics is determined by the central government. “However, more and more we see that increasingly, day-to-day life decisions are dependent on the municipal government. “Currently, most of the life of the citizens in Israel are dependent on the central governments decisions,” says Dichter. Right now, according to Dichter there is no structure in place that encourages mutual beneficial activities between Arab and Jewish municipalities – and the creation of such a structure holds a great deal of potential.
In this way, resources and effort can be pooled for development that will benefit the entire area’s population: Arabs and Jews alike.
The forum will meet four times a year to direct and steer the work done by professional joint working committees staffed by employees of the local councils. This new project will establish regional forums for increasing cooperation between neighboring Jewish and Arab local authorities, and tackle issues as they arise. These forums don’t answer the acute need for regional Arab-Jewish cooperation on the municipal level where the important issues of land usage, economic development, health, environment are determined. The triangle is one of the three areas of the countries where Jewish and Arab councils exist side by side: the Galilee, the Triangle, the Negev.įorums for dialogue between Arabs and Jews in these areas exist but not at the highest levels, and focus on the social-cultural-educational aspects of the relations between Jews and Arabs.
The first stage of the pilot project will be launched in the northern section of the Triangle – in the center of the northern part of the country, a region in which 30,000 Jews and 120,000 Arabs live. The four-year project is based on a model used successfully in Northern Ireland, another part of the world where political adversaries also need to interact as neighbors and fellow citizens in a civil society.
The first Jewish-Arab Mayor’s Forum (JAMFI) will be composed of the Jewish and Arab mayors in the northern Triangle area. Founded in 1991 as a Jewish-Arab advocacy organization, Sikkuy is dedicated to mainstreaming civil society in Israel through the values of civic equality between Arab and Jewish citizens and total civic partnership, promoting the concept of citizenship as the basis for individual empowerment and shared civic identification for all citizens. Sikkuy (“a chance” in Hebrew) is a non-partisan NGO that develops and implements projects designed to advance equality between Palestinian- Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel in government budgets, resource allocation, hiring policy, land usage and more. Sikkuy has initiated this project in order to construct a shared organization structure, a sustainable and ongoing one which will allow Jewish and Arab communities to cooperate.” “When you encourage regional projects, it becomes a win-win situation. “Operating on a municipal level is an important part of encouraging Arab empowerment – if you don’t create cooperation between neighboring Jewish and Arab municipalities, there is a sense of a tug-of-war happening – what one sector gets something it is taken away from the other,” explains Shuli Dichter, Sikkuy’s co-director. To fill the need for increased cooperation between neighboring Jewish and Arab communities within the state of Israel, the organization Sikkuy: The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality has launched a unique pilot project, which that they hope will become a model that will be adopted by the government for countrywide implementation: the Mayor’s Forum for Jewish-Arab Regional Cooperation. And neighbors need to communicate and cooperate. On a national political level, the two communities rarely see eye-to-eye.īut on a local level, Israeli Jews and Arabs are not adversaries: they are neighbors. The organization is attempting to create a shared regional industrial zone in the area.The relationship between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel is a complex, difficult, and a historically rocky one. Shuli Dichter, Sikkuy’s co-director, shows a map of the Wadi Ara area to a group of residents.