Common Ground News Service: by Mike Prashker
Ramle – Two weeks ago – before the current explosion of violence – I travelled down to Beersheba, the largest town in Southern Israel, to speak with a group of Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Israeli teachers about educational strategies that can help improve inter-group relations between young Jewish and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. These young people, even in the best of times, live in the long shadow of the on-going regional conflict.
Beersheba Mosque
The teachers, drawn primarily from local Jewish and Arab Bedouin communities, were participating in a “conflict-mitigation” workshop organised by the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development.
I had come to introduce the shared citizenship educational model developed by MERCHAVIM, an organisation promoting shared citizenship in Israel. When talking to the teachers, I stressed the critical importance of building a program that can help their students transcend their mutual fears and deep disagreements through the identification of overlapping identities, shared values and common interests. I also spoke about the inherent deficit of trust that makes this task so very difficult.
Categories: Arab World, Israel, Middle East