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Palestinian and Israeli participants at the April 23 seminar sponsored by the Golda Meir Mount Carmel International Training Center in Acre, Israel.

Against the backdrop of the Boston Marathon bombings, the spiraling violence in Syria and the continuing conflict along the Israel-Palestine fault line, a group of 28 women (mostly Christian with a scattering of Muslims) from Bethlehem, Palestine, made a pilgrimage on April 23 to meet with a group of Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Druze Israeli women in the city of Acco during a four-day visit in northern Israel.

“I was surprised,” said Huda Salem, a Muslim social worker from Bethlehem in a telephone interview after her visit. “We always think that Jews think we’re only terrorists, but they think differently than what we see on TV.”

The women’s visit — a combination of hopeful interchanges and seemingly intractable differences — was sponsored by the Golda Meir Mount Carmel International Training Center in Haifa. Since 1995, the Center has welcomed more than 1,000 Palestinian women to meet with their Israeli counterparts for what the Center’s leaders describe as “intensive days of debate, discussion, soul-searching and friendship forging.”

During one small group’s discussion, for example, a Palestinian woman said that she wants to help people who still carry keys to their houses in Israel — which they left during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 — and “they’re waiting to go back to them.”

“If you’re waiting to take back your houses then your goal isn’t peace,” countered a Jewish woman. “My family was thrown out of Egypt in 1948. They can’t go back to their houses there, either.”

The inevitable impasse.

The women’s words hung in the air until the group moderator moved the discussion to safer ground: violence between husbands and wives. That was one subject about which all the women could agree.

“One part of me says that these kind of meetings don’t accomplish anything,” said Yael Goldenberg, a Jewish participant who lives near Acco. “But then again, it’s better to do something than nothing at all.”

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