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Advocates of Israeli-Palestinian peace face a season of soul-searching as the second decade since the Oslo Accords passes without the key deliverable: the final status treaty originally scheduled for signing in the twentieth century. The present research coincided with the rise and fall of another round of peace negotiations, led this time by US Secretary of State John Kerry. Initiated to modest fanfare in August 2013, the “Kerry Process” ended in deadlock nine months later, with no publicly visible progress or prospects for renewal. This failure has, for the moment, vindicated the skepticism of Israeli and Palestinian publics regarding the prospects of a negotiated peace, while setting the stage for fifty days of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, a rising tide of intercommunal violence and speculation about a third Palestinian intifada, or mass uprising.
Journalists have responded with a predictable proliferation of autopsies of the peace process, most concentrating exclusively on violent attacks and futile negotiations.In the Israeli-Palestinian context, Track Two and Three peace efforts are perennially overshadowed in the public eye by action – or the lack thereof – on Track One. In July 2014, for example, Haaretz convened an incongruously-timed “Conference on Peace” in the opening days of “Operation Protective Edge.” The event, which earned public attention primarily for being evacuated due to rocket fire, featured but a lone voice from civil society among a legion of parliamentarians, pundits and plutocrats.
Yet while official final status talks have occurred in fragments, comprising a handful of the twenty lost years since Oslo, a core of determined grassroots and civil society peacebuilders have been at work on the ground, day in and day out, through the traumatic rupture of the second intifada and the diplomatic stagnation that has followed in its wake. These Israelis and Palestinians have not waited for peace to trickle down from above; they have built organizations, networks and programs steadily over time, revised methods and strategies to incorporate critical feedback and to adapt to abrupt shifts in context; they have both innovated and persevered.
Too often, grassroots and civil society peacebuilding is evaluated through the lens of current affairs in the official peace process. Occasionally portrayed as promising during interludes of Track One negotiation, “people-to-people” work is frequently framed as futile during periods of violent escalation or the “new normal” of prolonged stalemate.5 Such blanket assessments typically make scant effort to convey the complexity or diversity of the actual Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding field, and little if any reference to empirical research.
This paper aims to challenge this Track One-centric framing by highlighting the contemporary work of four veteran organizations, all of which have continued throughout the tumultuous times initiated by the interim agreements. Two are jointly-led Israeli-Palestinian initiatives: Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) and the Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF).6 The others focus on Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel: The Abraham Fund Initiatives (TAFI) and Hand-in-Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel (HiH). After years in the field, their names may be familiar; the cutting-edge aspects of their current work, however, merit further attention. This report will highlight specific projects and overall organizational strategies that can provide models for inspiration and potential adaptation for peacebuilders in other global contexts of unresolved conflict.
For even as the Israeli and Palestinian Ministries of Education omit the historical perspective of the other side from their national curricula, Arab and Jewish teachers at the integrated Hand in Hand bilingual school network work together every year to teach and commemorate five Israeli and Palestinian “national” and memorial days in a period of six weeks, with all the complexity and controversy entailed. Even as the unequal allocation of West Bank water remains a source of division between the Israeli government and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, FOEME enlists dozens of Palestinian and Israeli communities in partnerships to build capacity and infrastructure, mitigate hazards, reduce pollution and protect the ecosystems that both populations share, regardless of barriers or borders.
Even after the Israeli government shelved the 2003 Or Commission recommendations for policing reform, aimed at preventing the recurrence of the tragic violence of October 2000, TAFI engages the leadership of the Israel Police and Palestinian minority citizens in a long-term process of implementing community policing and violence prevention approaches from other deeply divided societies.
Even as Israeli legislators advocate demoting Arabic from its current status as one of the country’s official languages, TAFI’s Ya Salaam project is changing the way Arabic is taught to Israeli Jewish students, bringing Palestinian teachers to teach spoken Arabic with a dynamic, interactive approach that has elicited enthusiastic responses from principals, parents, teachers and students at schools across the country.
Even as leading Knesset factions attempt to ban public recognition of the Palestinian tragedy, bereaved Israeli and Palestinian members of the PCFF facilitate dialogue groups focused directly on confronting the competing core historical narratives of the conflict – bringing Israeli and Palestinian participants together to destroyed Palestinian villages from the 1948 War and to Yad VaShem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Museum, in the process.
Even as anti-normalization activists in Palestine campaign to ban Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and conventional wisdom proclaims the Israeli public utterly apathetic towards peace, PCFF members lead a multi-media campaign to “put peace back in the picture” - sharing their stories with hundreds of audiences around the country, producing and screening films in Israeli universities and Palestinian refugee camps, and establishing a thriving social media portal entitled “Crack in the Wall.”
And indeed, in recent years, while the conventional wisdom has said that Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding is all but impossible, all of these initiatives have grown.
TAFI’s Language as a Cultural Bridge projects expanded tenfold in less than five years, now reaching 23,700 students across the country. FOEME’s “Good Water Neighbors” project has grown from 11 to 28 Israeli and Palestinian community partnerships, and generated hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in local capacity and infrastructure. HiH has added Haifa and Tel Aviv-Jaffa school programs to its three existing bilingual campuses in the last two years, while building “Shared Communities” programs around each school. PCFF members have averaged nearly 1000 public presentations per annum in recent years, while facilitating seventeen “History through the Human Eye” narrative dialogue groups, among numerous other programs. These programs’ expansion is a testament that a significant number of Israelis and Palestinians continue to value meaningful opportunities for bilateral engagement and peaceful change – even if it means swimming against the tide.
Indeed, none of the achievements listed above are simple “success stories.” All of the organizations profiled have navigated episodes of failure and periods of crisis; they continue to face the formidable array of challenges inherent to intergroup work in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Yet the contributions of their efforts at personal, local and communal levels are evident, as is the remarkable expansion of their initiatives despite the daunting environment of recent years.
Their work has not, of course, been sufficient to undo the effects of stalled negotiations, 47 years of military occupation and cyclical violence, dizzying regional upheaval, and the constellation of powerful political forces opposed to resolution of the conflict – nor would it be realistic to expect such outcomes. The peacebuilders featured here are hard workers, not miracle workers. Yet as the official peace process begins its third decade without a solution in sight, it is high time to recognize the evolution and contributions of their work on the ground.
Moreover, this work has resonance beyond the contested boundaries of Israel and Palestine. The initiatives profiled here have established models and strategies for peacebuilding in a hostile context, which can serve as points of reference and inspiration to people engaged in similar struggles around the world.