Building a Culture of Peace

Our flagship project for over twenty years, ‘Building a Culture of Peace’ brings together Palestinian and Jewish teenagers in a 2-year educational process which seeks to deal with the consequences of the Arab-Israeli conflict on Israeli society.

With the majority of Palestinian and Jewish youth physically segregated from one another (in separate communities and schools) and fears, racism and prejudice the result, we look to build alternative models for interaction between the two groups. The ‘Building a Culture of Peace’ program seeks to create a space in which both Palestinian and Jewish youth may feel equal, respected and recognized as individuals and as national collectives.

This is achieved through an education approach based on a combination of long-term uni-national and bi-national work, delivered through weekly meetings, weekend seminars and our intensive summer program. This blend ensures that our youth go through in-depth processes enabling them to deal with the respective needs of each national community, something necessary given that the two groups are not symmetric. Moreover, it creates the grounds for a bi-national encounter capable of challenging the segregation and alienation at the base of Israel’s reality.

The uni-national meetings permit us to deal with inner-community issues such as gender, socio-economic statuses and power relations. In addition, it provides a secure space in which participants can explore the Jewish-Arab conflict and has proved fruitful ground for local action.

The bi-national meetings, providing equal grounds, are implemented according to the following principles: bi-national facilitation at every stage, a legitimate space for both languages and joint ownership over the contents and the agenda of the meetings.

The educational process upon which we base our work gradually moves through the conflict and its sources, beginning with personal acquaintance and identity, followed by the examination of those power relations inherent within each national group, right up to the tackling of those issues at the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – including but not withstanding land ownership, 1948, the Occupation, distribution of resources and minority-majority relations. We believe that it is crucial that discourse on the Arab-Jewish conflict be at the core of the relations between our youth. Our underlying belief is that the conflict affects and influences all aspects of the reality in which we live, and that only by dealing with it directly will we be able to fully grasp its impact on youth and the forms of oppression they are subject to as consequence. This process is built in order to free the youth from the shackles the conflict has imprisoned them in, from the different roles they are expected to play in its context, and to encourage them to take active responsibility in creating a positive alternative.