The second session of the activist community of mental health workers from graduates of School for Peace / Psychoactive change agents courses

We met on Friday, April 10, 20 in an online Zoom meeting.

Despite the distance we felt a lot of human warmth and the joy of meeting again. Our human need to connect and feel part of a community connects us.

The first part was dedicated to touching base and finding out how we are fairing in the days of the Coronavirus.

We invited people to say a few words on this. Some 56 people participated in the meeting. Though not everyone spoke, others engaged in text chat. From their words we could feel how people were seeking for an opportunity to share and express their concern about the worsening political situation in Israel.

People said the pandemic gave us new opportunities for getting acquainted with online communication tech for activism.

In the second part, we heard Dov Hanin’s lecture titled “What to do in the pandemic and the outlook for beyond the current crisis.”

Dov Hanin addressed the Coronavirus crisis from a broad historical perspective: what we can learn from the past and what happened in other countries following economic crises, epidemics or world wars. A crisis generates questions and politicians need to provide responses. Countries give different answers: Thus, the economic crisis of the 1930s brought Germany into the Hitler era while in the US Roosevelt created mechanisms to correct the hyper-capitalist system then dominating the economy.

In Israel, we have been imprisoned in a prolonged and genuine national crisis for seventy years, framed by a consciousness that sees the Palestinians as our existential threat, through settled conservative processes.

The social agenda needs to be redefined as the center of activity. Peace organizations that do not address social aspects or social movements that do not relate to the occupation – need to make the connections between their struggles. Hanin declared that he is “red” and “green”: and therefore must pay attention to both the environmental crisis that is larger and more dangerous than the Coronavirus crisis and can lead to solidarity and a renewed framing of the enemy against which we must act.

The third part was devoted to projects

Harb Amara participated in a nascent School for Peace graduation project to create a northern branch. During the pandemic, they sought out how to support disadvantaged populations and identified the needs of Arab youth at the time. They created one-off national support groups, according to the SFP’s group work model.

Michal Fruchtman participated in the activities of the “Parents Against Child Arrests” group. During the pandemic, for fear of contagion, all entry by lawyers and families to the prisons has been prevented. Together with other human rights organizations, a petition was filed with the High Court demanding that a permanent option be given for telephone calls. The petition was accepted and the IPS is now obliged to allow telephone calls once every two weeks.

Ahlam and Amir Ajah told about their traumatic failed attempt to live in the Jewish Galilee village of Kfar Tavor. They signed a contract to buy a house in the community, invested time, money and prepared for it excitedly with their children, and then the seller canceled the deal. Although he did not explicitly state the reason for this it is probably due to community opposition to his selling the house to Arabs.

Ahlam and Amir invited us to consider together with them how to leverage their experience in order to promote cooperation between Jews and Arabs: perhaps a campaign to change the consciousness regarding the possibility for Jews and Arabs to live together in the same community; perhaps a new Jewish-Arab settlement in the Galilee … all ideas were welcome.

At the end of the meeting, we invited people to join one of our proposed projects as well as send ideas for additional projects. We promised to help connect between people, and provide mentoring for each project from WASNS. We asked for group leaders for each project.

Thank you to everyone who joined us. We all seem to have been recharged with positive energy!

Till our next meeting,

Nava, Harb, Tova