A Face to Face encounter
By Lydia Aisenberg
October 25, 2009
Dedicated to creating a genuine change among Jewish and Arab high school students in Israel, the Face to Face (Encounters) project at Givat Haviva welcomes new co-director, Ro'ee Peled. Ro'ee has taken over from Shachar Yanai.
One can say that Ro'ee Peled has literally grown up with Givat Haviva being as he was born and educated at the neighboring Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutz Ma'anit – a kibbutz sharing a common fence with the educational institute, named after one of that community's former members, Second World War Israeli and Slovakian heroine, Haviva Reik.
Only a flimsy fence separates Ma'anit from Givat Haviva. Until recent years, a back gate was always left open between campus and kibbutz creating the impression that both the kibbutz and campus were an integral part of each other - as indeed they are in community spirit and consciousness, awareness of and working toward, co-existence with the Arab citizens of Israel.
"As a kid we would ride our bikes around Givat Haviva as if it really were just an extension of our home, there was no fence at all in those days and we were also used to seeing all sorts of people, not connected to our community, strolling around Ma'anit during their breaks from seminars and courses", reminisced 34 year-old Peled as he began to get settled in to his not exactly unfamiliar new workplace.
"When I was a teen and active in Hashomer Hatzair I attended movement activities here, and also remember coming to concerts and other cultural performances that were open to the general public", said Peled, who spent a year working for the Hashomer Hatzair movement in the Negev high-school of Mevot HaNegev prior to serving in the IDF.
Taking time off to travel, as most young Israelis do between army service and settling down to serious studies, Peled went off to South and North America, spent two years in Los Angeles as an emissary for the Habonim-Dror movement – and then hit the books, attaining a B.A. in sociology and political science at Tel Aviv University before tackling an M.A. in Sociology of Organization at the Hebrew University.
While studying and living in Jerusalem, Peled worked for the Jewish Agency screening potential emissaries and also spent six month