Towards A Culture Of Tolerance And Coexistence

This is one of our few “joint” projects with Israelis. Funded by the European Union under their “Partnerships
for Peace”, the project is now in its third and final year. The partnership is between MEND and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (the Harry S. Truman Institute for Peace Research, the Gilo Centre for Democracy
and the Minerva Centre for Human Rights) and has flourished despite all the increase in political tension. On
October 17th there was a very productive  meeting with all the partners with presentations of their results
so far, essentially the curricula each has developed for the appropriate and effective teaching of
democratic values, and the feedback of the workshops with pilot groups of teachers and children
concerning these curricula.

The project began with a year of research into the values of each society, especially in relation to
democracy and to views of the self and of the “other”. On the Palestinian side there were various tensions
that emerged, such as the tension between the individual and the collective in relation both to identity
and to responsibility, and that between religion and freedom of opinion and women’s rights. Fakhira
Halloun, the coordinator of the project, who has a strong background in conflict resolution, brought
together a team of leading experts in curriculum design and educational psychology, taking into account
the need for geographical diversity among the team to reflect the variety in attitudes. She organized
workshops with children from among our Menders groups in Ramallah, Tul Karem, Jerusalem and Hebron,
and also with teachers from all over the West Bank. This is very difficult to organise in any case due to the
obstruction of freedom of movement. It is also extremely difficult to engage people young or old from
most parts of the West Bank in a project which has an Israeli counterpart, but due to our reputation and the
quality of our workshops, the project has been a huge success. We have all the participants eager for more
such workshops, teachers who would love to work with the curriculum in their schools, and the Palestinian
Ministry of Education expressing a keen interest in continuing with the project.

The curriculum is almost finalized and will shortly be published, and all that will then remain will be to
distribute it and to plan the follow-up stages and, if possible, to bring the youth from both sides, (the Israeli
and the Palestinian) together for a joint camp in the summer.