In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human. — Pirkei Avot 2:6

Page under development. This is a first draft for review. Dates, place, cost and links will be added as they are confirmed.

A companion to the film Children of Peace

Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam

The village behind the film

A small village of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, founded in 1970 on the idea that people can choose to share a life, and still working out what that means.

The village today

Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam is still a small community. According to its own 2025 annual report, the village primary school had 205 children and the School for Peace had 350 participants. The village council completed five new homes, but its chairman says the council has not made real progress on getting approval to expand. The school has also found it hard, for several years, to keep a balance of Jewish and Palestinian students, and, the village reports, in August 2026 it needed the Ministry of Education's permission to open its first-grade class.

That raises a fair question for any community that hopes to be a model: what happens when it cannot easily grow?

After October 7, residents have said, the village met first as separate groups, Jews and Palestinians each on their own, and then all together. People describe the conversations as hard. They also describe a decision to stay together and keep talking.

Can a small intentional community be a model for a wider society if it cannot easily grow?

A short history

The 1960s. Father Bruno Hussar, a Dominican brother born to a Jewish family, begins speaking with the monks of the Latrun monastery about a community for peace on monastery land.
1970. The village's association is authorized, and a small group settles on a barren hilltop on long-term loan from the monastery.
The name. "Oasis of Peace" comes from a line in the Book of Isaiah about a people dwelling in an oasis of peace. In Hebrew it is Neve Shalom, and in Arabic Wahat al-Salam.
1984. The village opens what it describes as the country's first bilingual, binational primary school. The first pupils are the village's own children, the generation the film is about.

Sources give different founding years (1969, 1970, 1972 and 1978). This page uses the village's own account.

Some ways in, from the village itself and from outside writers.

How to read these links. The village is a peace-education organization with its own public positions on the conflict, and its pages describe it in its own words. The other links are news, essay and review. Most of what we found is sympathetic to the village. People with other views exist, and this list does not try to represent them.