3,500 Jewish and Arab Youth Will Meet in a Unique Project at Givat Haviva
by Orit Prague
The Jewish-Arab Center for Peace at Givat Haviva is expanding to a project large in dimension during which 3500 youth, high school students in the 11th grade, will meet for a two-day seminar on the Jewish-Arab topic at Givat Haviva this year. The project expansion was made possible due to an anonymous contribution to Givat Haviva.
Every week some three encounters take place and at the end of December, says Shachar Yanai, the educational director Givat Haviva, there will be over 1000 students who will partake in the seminars (during the month of December). Yanai is co-director of the Face to Face project together with Farhat Agbaria. He states that these kinds of numbers of youth in a project of this sort have not taken place since October 2000 when the bloody events began, during which 13 young Arabs were killed.
Prior to the two-day encounter at Givat Haviva the students undergo a process of uni-national clarification in their schools, and following the encounter a processing workshop takes place in each school. The encounter is constructed of workshops for mixed groups with joint facilitation (a Jewish facilitator and an Arab facilitator for each group). During the encounter subjects discussed include circles of belonging widening from the personal to family, community, culture and nationality. The work in each circle of belonging relates both to the joint elements and to the differences. In order to examine the rate of success, questionnaires are distributed before each encounter, immediately after and some time later.
Yanai admits that the program is very short. Therefore the preparatory program exists, and they are seeking ways to create a follow-up program. One of the bodies assisting in the follow-up activity is the Center for Peace Education at Haifa University headed by Prof. Gaby Salomon, in the framework of which are some 700 students; it also serves research needs. The Peace Center at the University assists in the questionnaires which examine the rate of success of the project and will this year research a sample of 1200 students.
"We do not claim to create friendships," says Yanai, "that is something which is impossible in two-day encounters, but we do want to create preliminary acquaintance, around the complex topics which exist between us, the stereotypes which are created in every group and the reasons for our fears of each other, and for the problems connected with discrimination and lack of equality in a democratic Jewish state.
"The students do not always return with a smile on their lips after these encounters. But they do provide food for thought, and the questionnaires definitely point to a rise in the desire to meet with the other side. In the end, the goal of the encounters is to bring the participants to an optimistic outlook, towards the possibility of living together based on mutual respect between Jews and Arabs, in a reality of complexity and lack of agreement."
Published in HaDaf HaYarok [The Green Page], 15.12.2005
