As a national minority the Palestinian citizens of Israel suffer from a long history of discrimination, marginalization, and violation of human rights, lack of resources and poverty as a result of the state’s oppressive policies and lack of development in the Arab localities. The Palestinian people are constantly under the threat of house demolitions, land confiscation, police brutality, and a general lack of security in their towns. Moreover, there’s a notable neglect of Palestinians by government ministries in the fields of housing, planning, education, welfare and other industries. These factors create a stressful environment for the Palestinian citizens of Israel and as a result, the community, especially the children, are more susceptible to the effects of trauma, have a weakened resilience, suffer more from poverty and neglect.

Another facet of this neglect is the police’s unresponsiveness to crimes committed in the Arab community. That is, police are slow to respond – and sometimes do not respond at all – when called for a crime committed, which means criminals get away with their crime. This is a calculated and a systematic disregard done to get Palestinians in Israel to keep fighting and killing each other; thus, eradicating the Palestinian presence in the country. Indeed, the number of those killed in each year is in alarming increase, which causes unrest among Palestinian citizens and raises anxiety rates. On a larger scale, also, the wars in the past year and a half have largely affected our community and impacted everyone’s mental health, especially the children.

Therefore, this project aims to increase the resilience of children, the most vulnerable group in our society, in this stressful environment, through the empowerment of their mothers, caregivers and educators. We also aim to strengthen cultural and heritage knowledge through the distribution of kits containing resources to be utilized with children, such as storybooks, games, and materials on child development and trauma. In addition, we published, in the frame of this project, new children’s books to strengthen acceptance of differences, social solidarity and responsibility. We selected 10 locations and customized the working sessions to meet the needs of each location, concentrating on increasing the knowledge and skills of adults living and working with children on their mental and physical well-being. We also enriched these adults on the use of the tools we provided, which enables them to take an active role in fostering resilience, as the name of the project implies, and implementing these strategies with the kids in their vicinity.

Our project empowers key individuals in the children’s lives to adopt the role of a leader when in crisis; a leader who has the tools and knowledge to also empower the children in their lives. Thus, the active engagement of parents and educators in shaping the future of their communities will lead to stronger, more resilient, generations capable of overcoming adversity and contributing to societal progress.