Jewish and Arab educators and teenagers from the Galilee, travelling to Cape Town together — to see with their own eyes that a society built on division can choose a different future.
Galilee Dreamers exists to build long-lasting relationships, connections and a shared society between Jewish and Arab teenagers in the Galilee — the most religiously and culturally mixed region of Israel.
Founded almost a decade ago and directed by Oranim College, a leading teacher-training institution in the north, the programme runs through high schools across the Galilee. Teenagers are chosen and guided by their own teachers and principals. Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze young people learn together, argue together, and slowly build the vocabulary to talk about the things that separate them.
After a year of activity at home, the Dreamers travel abroad together — to the United States, Canada, Germany and South Africa. Being in a foreign country changes everything. Away from the geography of the conflict, teenagers who might never have sat at the same table find themselves sharing a room, a bus, a meal and a long argument that ends in friendship.
It is the founding insight of Galilee Dreamers — and it holds as true for teachers as it does for the teenagers they teach.
Of all the places a delegation from the Galilee could go, Cape Town offers something no other destination can.
South Africa is a standout example of a nation that moved from a seemingly intractable, hopeless situation to a constitutional democracy with equal political rights for all — and did so within a remarkably short space of time. For visitors from a region where the conflict feels permanent, that is not an abstraction. It is evidence.
Conversations that are almost impossible inside the "pressure cooker" of Israel and Palestine become possible eight thousand kilometres away. Delegates repeatedly describe the relief of being outside the war zone — not as escape, but as the condition under which rational, honest conversation can finally happen.
Cape Town's Muslim, Christian, Jewish and township communities carry their own histories of exclusion and their own hard-won lessons about living together. The delegations meet all of them — and, in doing so, bring South Africans into rooms with each other that they would not otherwise share.
Galilee Dreamers in South Africa is a ring-fenced project run under the auspices of the Jewish Democratic Initiative.
JDI is the legal entity that carries legal, compliance and financial responsibility for the programme in this country. The arrangement works because the values underpinning the two organisations are the same: a belief in equal rights and human dignity, in democracy as the mechanism that makes shared society possible, and in the stubborn idea that people on opposite sides of a divide should be talking to each other.
In practice the two are closely woven together. The volunteers who manage Galilee Dreamers in South Africa are largely drawn from JDI's executive, and JDI's administrator provides the administrative backbone for each delegation. The result is a small, entirely voluntary Cape Town team that designs the programme, hosts the visitors, opens doors across the city's communities, and stays in contact with the Galilee long after the plane home has landed.
The programme's other essential partner is in Cape Town itself: a long-standing collaboration with the team at the Castle of Good Hope and the Cape Heritage Museum, which provides both a physical home for each delegation's core sessions and a trusted framework for bringing the city's different communities into the same room.
Four delegations, one interruption, and a programme that refused to stop.
Jewish and Arab teenagers from the Galilee travelled to South Africa together for the first time. The experience was significant enough that it was repeated — and significant enough that its lessons shaped everything that followed.
A second student journey confirmed the model. Reviewing both trips, the organisers concluded that future visits needed to go wider: beyond Jewish schools alone, into Muslim and Christian schools, youth movements and community organisations across Cape Town.
After the catastrophic events of 7 October 2023 and the war that followed, the delegation planned for early 2024 became impossible. Security concerns and the sheer weight of the moment made travel by school students unviable — and left the programme with a hard question: what can be done now, so that student journeys are possible later?
The answer was to send the teachers. Eight Galilee Dreamer educators — four Arab, four Jewish — spent a week in Cape Town in July and August 2025. For most of them it was a first visit to South Africa. It was the first time Galilee Dreamers were welcomed into Muslim schools here, and the first time the delegation's programme deliberately gathered Cape Town's own educators and young people across communal lines. All eight reported it as both deeply enjoyable and a profound learning experience.
In July and August 2026 a larger delegation of around twelve school principals and senior teachers — again half Arab, half Jewish, and including Christian, Muslim and Druze educators — returned to Cape Town for an expanded programme. Cape Town remains the only Galilee Dreamers destination in the world offered to educators rather than students.
Eight days, built with obsessive attention to detail — balancing site visits, hard conversations, school classrooms, art, food and unstructured time.
The journey opens where every visitor's does — Table Mountain, Hout Bay, Simon's Town, the long drive up the West Coast. Beauty first, and the beginning of a group learning how to be a group.
A guided walk through the museum and the empty ground where a community once lived. Forced removal is not a foreign concept to anyone in these delegations. The silence in this room is always the loudest of the week.
A walkabout through the oldest surviving Muslim neighbourhood in the country, its bright houses and cobbled streets — and a conversation about how a community holds its identity when the city keeps trying to price it out.
A walkabout through Cape Town's oldest township: the Dompas Museum, the Four Pillars, a community food garden, an arts centre and a drumming circle. Delegates who arrived braced for hardship leave talking about welcome.
The prison that produced a president. For a delegation asking whether reconciliation is realistic, few places answer more directly.
Africa's first Holocaust centre, which links the Shoah to genocides before and since, and to the consequences of prejudice in all its forms. A workshop here sits at the emotional centre of the week.
The delegation's home base. Facilitated dialogue sessions with Cape Town's Muslim, Christian and Jewish educators and community leaders happen here — and it doubles as a decompression space when the day has been heavy.
Muslim, Christian and Jewish schools across the city — Crestway High in Retreat, Trafalgar High in District Six, St Cyprian's in Oranjezicht and others. Delegates sit with principals, teachers and learners and watch how South African schools make room for dialogue and student voice.
A women-led, community-based organisation that has worked in Cape Town's townships for more than sixty years, staffed almost entirely by people who live in the communities it serves. A masterclass in what "empowering from within" actually looks like.
A youth workshop run by the Institute for Healing of Memories, where young South Africans tell their own stories with startling honesty. Watching it — and taking part — showed the visiting educators exactly how facilitated storytelling moves people past their labels.
A guided visit to the Zeitz MOCAA and a non-verbal creative workshop, deliberately placed near the end of the week: a way to process an overwhelming experience without having to find words for it first.
Delegates stay together rather than in separate homes, and it matters. The late-night debriefs, the morning arguments about coffee, the shared Shabbat table, the joint shopping expeditions — participants consistently name the unstructured hours as the ones that built the group.
Reflections gathered after the delegations returned home. Names withheld.
One Cape Town participant — an older Jewish woman — enjoyed being among so many different kinds of people from her own city that she cancelled her plans for the following evening in order to come back for more. One delegate kept his educator's hat on for the entire week, turning every site visit into a lesson plan he shared with the group. Another was moved to tears twice in a single day.
Sending teachers instead of teenagers began as a workaround. It turned out to be a strategy.
A student delegation changes the lives of the students on it. An educator delegation reaches every year group that teacher will ever teach — plus their parents and their communities. Educators are the multiplier.
In the Galilee, Arab and Jewish educators work in separate school systems and almost never spend intensive time together. A week of shared travel does what a decade of parallel employment does not.
Every educator journey is also reconnaissance. Delegates test which sites, conversations and formats will work for a future student delegation — and come home able to prepare their learners properly.
Participants from the 2025 journey have stayed actively involved in Galilee Dreamers back home, becoming advocates and organisers for the delegations that followed. The relationships formed in Cape Town keep working inside Galilee schools.
The delegations act as a catalyst for social cohesion in this city. South African participants repeatedly report that the greatest value was meeting other Capetonians — from communities across town — whom they would otherwise never have encountered.
Delegates arrive from a place where the future looks closed and spend a week inside the proof that it need not be. Small drops of hope, as one summary put it — which, combined and carried home, amount to something.
Each journey ends with a debrief, and every debrief produces the next journey's design.
The priorities that have emerged are clear enough. Delegates want more room for personal storytelling — the chance to be known as individuals, not as representatives of a side. They want deeper, more structured engagement with South African educators, and better use of the professional expertise sitting inside every delegation. Preparation before departure and follow-through afterwards, both easily run over video call, would extend a week into a relationship.
Beyond that, several longer-term ideas are in play: joint creative projects linking young people in the Galilee and Cape Town; a monthly reading group of teachers from both places working through shared cultural texts; a delegation of student teachers — the Arab and Jewish educators of the next generation; and a reciprocal journey taking South African participants to the Galilee to see the schools and communities the programme serves at home.
And the original ambition remains. When circumstances allow, the Dreamers themselves — the teenagers — will come back to Cape Town. Everything being built now is groundwork for that.
Galilee Dreamers in South Africa depends entirely on volunteers, on institutions that open their doors, and on donors who make the journeys possible. Our thanks go to the Mauerberger Foundation Fund, to the team at the Castle of Good Hope and the Cape Heritage Museum, to every school principal, teacher and learner who has hosted a delegation, and to the museums, community organisations, activists and elders across Cape Town who give their time freely because they recognise what is at stake.
Galilee Dreamers is directed in Israel by Oranim College. You can learn more about the wider programme at galileedreamers.com.
Every delegation is planned, hosted and funded by people who believe a shared society is possible. Join them.