Bruno Hussar (5 May 1911 – 8 February 1996) was the founder of Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam ("Oasis of Peace"), an Arab/Jewish village in the no man's land between Israel and Palestinian territories, dedicated to coexistence.

He saw in the foundation of the state of Israel a step towards the fulfilment of a Christian salvific plan and was charged with establishing a Centre for the Study of Judaism in the Israeli sector of Jerusalem in 1953.

[5] Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, together with its occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza spurred Hussar with a sense of urgency to develop a process of reconciliation that would unite Jews, Christians and Muslims.

This vision, according to Chiara Rioli, is to be distinguished from that of most Christian Zionist evangelical advocates like John Hagee, in that the event is not understood to foreshadow the apocalyptic Second Coming of Christ.

[5] He originally proposed setting up a new interfaith centre, an "oasis of peace" modelled on the kibbutz, on the slopes of Kiryat Ye'arim by Abu Ghosh, but decided to settle on larger grounds, some ten hectares (25 acres), owned by the Trappist order of the Latrun Abbey, on no man's land according to the 1949 armistice lines, and equidistant from the three cities central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ramallah,[dubious – discuss] implying thereby the 'equal proximity to the three Abrahamic religions of the Holy Land.

"[4] An earlier attempt had been made by two families of the St. James Association to build a Christian kibbutz, on land provided by the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion in Ein Kerem in the 1950s.

Hussar, assisted by letters to the Pope written by Rina Geftman, sought not patronage, but formal authorisation for his projected Yishuv Neve Shalom from the then Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Alberto Gori (1949–1970), who was opposed to the plan.

[citation needed] NSWAS - the name came from a phrasing in Pope Paul VI's address bidding Israel's then-president Zalman Shazar farewell on January 5, 1964[8]- began to be developed on 400 dunams of land, under harsh pioneering conditions, by some ten members of the same group in 1970, though the first families only arrived in 1976.

With the advent of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab[dubious – discuss] families after 1976, and the moral and financial support of Friends of NSWAS in France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, the community began to grow.

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.

This land is their home too.”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).

[9] In his later years, Hussar withdrew there, returning to his foundational notion of a place where prayer and meditation would play a formative role within his community, as the point of conjunction between the three Abrahamic faiths.

[9] He was to break his retreat into silence on hearing of the news of the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which struck him as putting an end to illusions created by the peace previously envisaged as a result of the Oslo I Accord.