Projects
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.