Neve Shalom - Administrative Structure

Administrative Structure

The community is run by a steering committee or secretariat which, like its subcommittees, is elected by an annual democratic vote. The head of the secretariat effectively serves as the mayor of the village. In addition there are several internal committees to run the various activities of the village. A numerical balance is consistently observed between Jewish and Palestinian Arab representatives. Rotation however is not observed, and since 1995 the village administrator has always been a Palestinian Arab. Jewish Classes in the village school each have both a Jewish and an Arab teacher, but this does not extend to the curriculum, where maths, for example, is taught to children in their respective native languages. When matters of principle are on the agenda, a plenum, made up of all full members of the village, is constituted to deliberate, and its final decisions are binding on everyone. Since the adult Jewish residents are not equally fluent in Arabic,. the minutes of official deliberations are taken down in Hebrew and workshops are conducted in Hebrew to account for what Rabah Halabi describes as a large gap between "proclaimed policy and the actual situation," and Feuerverger, using the theories of Paolo Freire, illustrates that language issues refract problems of power.