Israel consistently ranks high in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) surveys on levels of health and healthcare, but for the Galilee’s half a million citizens, who are 47% Jewish and 53% Arab, life expectancy is still lower, wait times to see a doctor are longer, and there are fewer medical professionals and hospital beds overall than in places like Tel Aviv.

Shatil has been working to address this situation for a long time. In 2014, Shatil established the Northern Health Forum to improve health care in the Galilee. Through political and media advocacy, grassroots organizing, and research, the Forum has developed and implemented plans for reducing inequality between Jews and Arabs and between residents of Israel’s North and the rest of the country. Their members are both Jewish and Arab, representing the NGO sector and grassroots activists, and including medical professionals, businesspeople, academics, lawyers, and journalists from both communities.

Now, Shatil is transferring the leadership of the Forum to a new coordinator, not affiliated with Shatil, even as Shatil and the outgoing, longtime Forum coordinator Lev Aran will remain consultants.

In this moment of transition, Lev noted, it was important to remember that the origins of the Forum came from needs in the field. Shatil was approached by the management of Ziv Hospital and the medical faculty of Bar-Ilan University which are both in Safed. “They were campaigning,” he said, “for new medical facilities in the north but realized that as representatives of institutions that received the majority of their funding from government ministries, their capacity to lobby those ministries was limited. They needed a strong, independent civil society group to take the lead.”

From the start, Lev says, “it was important for us that the Forum’s membership represent the demography of the Galilee, and over time, as we began to run more trainings and lectures in Arab towns featuring Arab speakers, and were able to engage Arab members. Today, our membership is approximately half Jewish and half Arab.”

The Forum has gone through many iterations. In 2017, after several years of lobbying by the Forum and partners, Galilee residents and students from Tel-Hai College near Kiryat Shmona, opened the first radiotherapy center in the country’s north in Safed. Today, thousands of oncology patients receive treatment there instead of commuting hours to Israel’s center.

In 2021, the Forum and its partners intensively advocated for more budgets that would reduce the health gaps between Jewish and Arab citizens, and the government responded, allocating over $200 million for exactly that purpose.

After October 7, tens of thousands of Israelis were displaced from their homes, and as a result, many of them did not have immediate access to their primary healthcare provider. Back in 2017, the Northern Health Forum wrote a report that recommended allowing those living far from their local doctors to access health care services through any medical provider. And while it was rejected at the time, a short while into the war, this policy was finally put in place, increasing the access of evacuees to urgent medical care.

Now, as the Forum begins a new chapter with Shatil no longer at the helm, Lev has great confidence in its leaders. “At Shatil, our philosophy is not to remain with the same projects indefinitely,” he says. “We establish projects to assist different sectors and then give activists from those sectors the tools to lead them so that they can effect change for their own communities. The activists leading the Forum now are among the most experienced and knowledgeable in this field.”