study together. School of Peace In response to the need to educate the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian children in the village, a school was set up with a bilingual curriculum in both Hebrew and Arabic, English French before the children left primary school to enter into the Israeli state school system. The School of Peace, with input from Northern Ireland's educational system and elsewhere, established in 1979, also emerged from this paedeutic necessity. Throughout the 1980s, the NSWAS model was widely covered, both by the international and local Israeli press, for its role in promoting dialogue in the midst of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The stress on neutrality nonetheless came under considerable strain in the 1980s, during Israel's "First Lebanon War", and especially after the outbreak of the First Intifada. Hussar refrained from taking any public stand, though he did write in his 1988 book, When the cloud lifted, that the Intifada was:"a natural consequence of growing pressure on the 'territories', due to the Occupation and Jewish settlements – and it has given rise to inevitable and harsh military repression." At this time, a Nazareth Muslim resident and friend, Abdessalam Najjar, began to assume, as village secretary, a larger leadership role. As a result, the village staged a one-off, exceptional protest against the oppression in the Occupied Palestinian territories. Hussar's own dedication to Zionism did not change. He thought the Jews had a right, sanctioned by the United Nations, to live in a land of their own. At the same time, he declaredIn itself Zionism in not in any way against the right of the Palestinian Arabs to a national existence in the same region; the land is spacious enough for that. (…) No Jew who truly lives in the spirit of the Torah can be indifferent to the fate of the Palestinian Arabs and their hopes. This land is their home too.” Meditation and prayer building In 1983, NSWAS opened a huge building, later capped with a white dome and set apart, within a landscaped garden environment, called the Doumia (silence in Biblical Hebrew). Hussar made a precise semantic distinction in Hebrew between sheket (absence of noise) and dumia (profound silence), associating the latter with the 'freshet of air, the voice of a subtle silence' Elijah heard in the desert according to the Book of Kings (19:12). In his later years, Hussar withdrew there, returning to his foundational notion