It was cold at the meeting in the youth movement den in the Arab town of Fureidis in the foothills of Mount Carmel last Thursday afternoon. The 36 members of the group, age 15-16, sat huddled on their plastic chairs. Most were boys; the eight girls sat in a separate group some distance apart from the boys.
Two of the girls wore traditional Islamic head scarves. Adnan Mar'i, the den leader, decided to warm up the kids a bit. He started with a game of musical chairs. Ten minutes later, the boys and the girls were sitting together, out of breath. They were ready for the next phase of the meeting: values education.
Mar'i handed out pieces of paper on which he asked each participant to draw a picture of everything that he or she loved. Then they were asked to place the drawings into a small circle in which there was not enough room for all of them. "Now each of you has to learn to give up something you love," he told them. "Cut out of the page what you can give up in order to make room for your friend."
There are 700 members of the youth group in Fureidis, a town of 9,500. "Teenagers in Fureidis have three options for evening activities," Mar'i says. "To sit at home and watch TV, to join another movement, with the only alternative being the Islamic Movement, or to come to our meetings. We don't have a community center and the local authority's youth club is not operating."
To explain the importance of the youth movement to his charges, Mar'i, 24, goes back to the events of October 2000. Most of the young people of Fureidis went out to demonstrate and blocked the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway. Police opened fire and wounded three of them. "I was 20, a former member of the youth movement, and I saw my friends on the road, together with hundreds of teenagers. I understood that only if the youth movement was revived, would these events be avoided in the future."
The first months after October 2000 were not easy. The movement, Hanoar Haoved ve Halomed (Working and Studying Youth), is affiliated with the Histadrut labor federation and usually twins an Arab group and a Jewish one. The first meetings of the Fureidis den, with Jewish teens from nearby Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael and the town of Zichron Yaakov, were very tense, Mar'i recalls. But things seem to have gotten better since then. At the meeting on Thursday, one participant, 16-year-old Mahmoud Marana, says with satisfaction that the movement is the only chance he has to do things together with Jews.
Out of almost 100,000 members of Hanoar Haoved veHalomed, about 20 per cent are Arab," Tony Nasser, head of the movement's Arab Youth department, says. It's the only movement that integrates Jews and Arabs (In the Scouts, for example, Arab and Jewish troops are separate.) "Activity in the Arab sector started small, with the opening of a den in Haifa." Nasser says. "Today there are 25 branches in Arab communities," and according to Nasser there are many requests for new groups to be formed.
The largest Arab den is in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarah. With 1,500 members, it is also the largest den in Israel. Nasser explains that Arab parents in the capital send their children to a youth movement that is essentially Zionist out of a desire to maintain a link with West Jerusalem. The desire to become more involved in Israeli society is a common reason for bringing a new den to a community, Nasser says.
The most significant change in the Arab department of the youth movement is the involvement of girls. The last young counselor’s seminar was made up, for the first time, of 30 per cent girls. The kids only started going away on overnight trips about three years ago. Some girls from the Arab communities of the area known as the Triangle in central Israel went on the trip, but the Fureidis girls stayed home. "I imagine it will take a year or two more," Nasser says. "It's not easy for a Muslim father to allow his daughter to sleep in a sleeping bag on a trip with boys." The involvement of girls was not an unmitigated success. The city of Umm al-Fahm subsequently ordered its branch of the movement shut.
The movement found that it had to make changes in some of its values education. "There are some Zionist values that can't be emphasized in an Arab environment," Nasser says. "Instead, we highlight the humanist values that are part of the movement's credo. We fully admit that we are part of the Palestinian people and support the establishment of a Palestinian state, but we also teach that we are Israeli citizens and we work very intensely on strengthening the bond to the state, respect for neighbors, and tolerance. We will bring these values to the fore in two months, when 25 of our members will travel to the death camps in Poland," adds Nasser.
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Source: Ha’aretz, January 12, 2004
Visit the Ha’aretz website at http://www.haaretzdaily.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service.
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