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Avishai Berman was born and raised on Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak, just outside of Tel Aviv. A married father of two, Berman spent eight years in the IDF—three as an infantry soldier in an elite combat unit, and the remaining five as an officer—before beginning his university studies in Jewish philosophy and business management, a combination that serves him well in his position as director of the newly-founded Arava Leadership Academy in the Arava. Now in its third year, the academy has already graduated 50 students.
How did you end up as the director of an army-preparatory program?
Towards the end of my army service, I realized that Israeli society was in the midst of a crisis - a war no less vital to Israel’s survival than the one I was fighting on the battlefield. It was a fight over our national identity, over the idea that all Israelis – religious and secular, right and left – are really part of the same collective, and share a common purpose.
The only way to ensure this unity, I believe, is the preservation of a Jewish and democratic state—with equal weight given to both elements. But this state of affairs won’t happen by itself. Even though the vast, if silent, majority of Israelis is Zionist, and does want Israel to continue to exist as the state of the Jewish people, it is simply too caught up in internal conflicts to take the steps necessary to meet this goal. That’s where young-adult education comes in. If we can get to Israeli youth at the formative stage in their lives, we can convince them that, through whatever field they choose to pursue, they can have a real impact on the future of the Zionist project. We can encourage them to turn the idealism that comes with youth into something meaningful and concrete, before it’s lost for good.
Why the Arava? If your goal really is to heal those rifts in Israeli society, wouldn’t Tel Aviv, for example, have been a better place to establish your academy?
We view the desert as the ideal “greenhouse” for the kind of Israeli culture we want to cultivate. Our relatively isolated location, the stark scenery, the lack of distraction—all these help us to focus our students minds on their studies and their experiences at the academy. Of course, there is also the inescapable presence of the natural environment, which to the early Zionists was a critical part of their project: Building and being built by the land. We want our students to feel that their work at the academy is similar in spirit to the work in which the early Zionist pioneers engaged. They too are building up their country, creating new paths for the future.
How has the Arava Leadership Academy succeeded in affecting Israeli society for the better?
For starters, there’s the fact that most of our graduates choose to serve in elite (fighting) units. In addition, most go on to be commanders and officers in the army—in this very tangible way, they’re saying that they want to contribute to their country above and beyond the minimum requirement. But we also see that our graduates have internalized the belief that education is the critical path to influencing society and addressing its problems. One student, for example, graduated from Arava and went on to serve in the IDF’s armored corps (tank unit). On the one day a week on which his unit was not involved in field training, he arranged for it—soldiers and officers alike—to spend an afternoon at the academy, where they learned Jewish and Zionist texts. He single-handedly created a community of individuals engaged in thinking about the challenges confronting Israeli society today.
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