Dikla Tomer Kaial: Director, Jewish-Arab Center for Peace Education Department

Feature Stories Intro

Behind every educational program, intercultural meeting, and cultural festival at Givat Haviva is a team of individuals deeply committed to our mission, not just as educators or organizers, but as living models of shared society.

In this series, we’re getting to know the people behind the work—who they are, how they found their way here, and what keeps them motivated during challenging times. Each month, we’re spotlighting one team member, because understanding Givat Haviva starts with understanding the people who shape it. [you can read last week’s feature story on Jenan Halabi from Through Others’ Eyes here]

 

Dikla Tomer Kaial:

Director, Jewish-Arab Center for Peace Education Department

Dikla Tomer Kaial didn’t need a policy paper to understand that Israel’s education system was failing. She experienced it as a young teacher on a school trip to Jerusalem, when her teenage students began chanting in Hebrew: “She’yisraf lahem hakfar”—May your village burn down.

Comments like this were not unusual for Kaial. She grew up in Nili, a Jewish settlement just across the Green Line, and was active in the Revisionist Zionist Beitar youth movement, which promoted a militant, nationalist vision of Zionism. In her school textbooks, Arabs appeared primarily as enemies in war. She cannot recall a meaningful encounter with an Arab peer or adult until her mid-twenties.

That distance narrowed in an unlikely way when Kaial fell in love with and married a Muslim man, and later became the mother of three boys. “It changed me,” she says. “I started noticing how common racism was—among students and among teachers. There was a kind of conformity: you could say really nasty, racist things, and it would sound okay to everyone. That was really hard for me.”

She recalls a year when the Ministry of Education selected The Other is Me as a guiding curricular theme. One afternoon in the teachers’ lounge, a middle school math teacher walked in and announced, proudly, “I just taught my students that the only good thing to come out of Islam is algebra.”

“How can you teach children empathy, care for the other, and then go into the teachers’ lounge and speak that way?” Kaial asked herself. “That was my breaking point.”

Not long after, Kaial moved her family to Haifa. She redirected her teaching skills from the public school system to a program that brings Palestinian and Jewish students from East and West Jerusalem to study together. Her children also began attending binational, integrated Hand in Hand schools.

“The deeper I got in, the more I understood how far apart we are. We fear each other and don’t know how much we have in common,” she says.

In 2021, Kaial joined the staff of Givat Haviva as a trainer and facilitator for encounters between Israeli Arab and Jewish youths. Today, she directs the Education Department at the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace. Through summer camps, school-based programs, mentoring, and workshops, the center brings Jewish and Arab students together to learn, argue, and grow.

“I’m really happy that I work in this field because I feel like I walk the talk. I do every day what I believe in—at home and at work,” she says.

This year, the department is engaging more than 23,000 Arab and Jewish students, but Kaial maintains that confronting intolerance in education requires more than working with children alone. Her department also works with teachers, school principals, and community leaders. “If you want real change, you have to change the language of the school,” she says.

One example is the Hebrew Language in Arab Society program, which Kaial describes as a “win-win-win.” Arab students learn Hebrew to gain employment opportunities, but for many it is also the first time they learn with a Jewish teacher, “someone who smiles at them, asks for their opinion and about their family.” At the same time, Jewish teachers placed through the program are immersed in Arab schools, an experience that often reshapes their assumptions and challenges their biases.

Asked whether these programs mostly attract like-minded people, Kaial doesn’t hesitate to point out that “preaching to the choir is even more important than looking for those who don’t believe in what we do.” Without sustained support, even committed participants can retreat under social pressure and fear, she says.

A major challenge is a dynamic Kaial calls “Getting Back Home Syndrome.”

“You go home and say you had a great time meeting Mohammad, that you didn’t realize how much you had in common,” she explains. “And then your father says, ‘Sit down—let me tell you about the Muhammads of the world.’”

Because of this fragility, Kaial focuses not only on students, but also on their surrounding circles—families, schools, and communities. “Everyone has to have these joint experiences to understand you,” she says. “And everyone has a right to their own opinion, but I want people to form their opinions after they meet each other.”

Even as a young teacher, Kaial saw how exposure, more than persuasion, could unsettle fixed views.

“My students knew I was married to a Muslim man,” she recalls. “One day, while teaching Tanakh, we talked about the Israeli law that a Cohen cannot marry a divorced woman. They were shocked—‘What if my last name is Cohen and I fall in love?’”

Then the questions became personal. “They asked me how I married my husband, who is Muslim, and I told them we aren’t married by law, because we’re not allowed to be.”

Their reactions surprised her. “They yelled, ‘Then let’s go stand at the junction with signs.’ I didn’t tell them the law was wrong, and I didn’t ask them to protest. I just exposed them to a reality they weren’t aware of.”

“No matter how anxious young people feel, or how much they think they hate each other, once they meet—once they talk and laugh—you see it,” Kaial says

“Barur she’efshar”—Of course it’s possible.

 

Sami Jinich recently moved to Israel from Maryland, working as Assistant to the Director of Strategy in Givat Haviva and as a Community Educator at the Younited International School, with support from the New Israel Fund’s Shatil Social Justice Fellowship.