HOLY LAND/ Is it up to children to bring Muslims and Christians together?

They call it a "price tag", the price to be paid. This is what is claimed by the most radical face of Israeli society, or rather of the world of the settlements, the communities of Israelis that moved to occupy the West Bank during the war of 1967. These radicals are now rebelling with vandalism and threats against any attempt to curb the illegal settlements.

The news tells us about this most extreme fringe of the settlers. In a few weeks, starting last December, five mosques have been vandalized, defaced with insults to Muhammad and his followers and with threats like "The only good Arab is a dead Arab". In Jerusalem, a Muslim place of worship was burned, which also happened to another mosque in October, when racist graffiti against Arabs appeared in two cemeteries in Jaffa, one a Muslim cemetery, and one a Christian cemetery. Christians are not exempt from the provocations of extremists. Last week the Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem became a target of insulting writing. The latest episode is that of "Hand in Hand", a school in which Jews and Arabs study and teach together, and whose mistake was that of telling their kids about the "Nakba" (catastrophe), the Palestinian point of view on the loss of land and houses that followed the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948.

According to the Office for the Coordination of International Affairs of the United Nations, in 2011 the attacks by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank grew by 50 percent compared to the previous year.

This is a series of events that obviously does not exhaust the makeup of a complex society that contains many voices that disagree and condemn, and also many voices that see these events themselves as the extreme expression of a problem that is much less localized and that has its roots in the inability to accept the Arab, the Palestinian, the other.

"We are a country that lives in fear, and we suffer from a chronic fear. How can we even think about sitting down to negotiate peace when we are not able to look at our neighbor as someone who has our same concerns and our same desires?", says Meir Margalit, a Jew from Argentina, who has lived in Israel for years and is now a Councilor of the Jerusalem Municipality. This is another side of a world in which it is a widespread attitude (on both sides) to give space only to the negative, but where one can also find voices and actions of those who, starting small, live a life of meetings and openness. For example, the experience of some schools shows that the strongest incentive to remove suspicion of the other comes from the need to give answers daily.