Text & Photos: Lydia Aisenberg

Earlier this year a group of international students from the London School of Economics reading Politics and International Relations participated in a Givat Haviva International Department seminar incorporating aspects of the work of Givat Haviva and toured Wadi Ara & Barta’a with Lydia Aisenberg.

The students had come to Givat Haviva on the last day of their 2-week program arranged by Kol Voice Seminars of Jerusalem during which they had met with leading personalities in the area of politics, media and NGOs dealing with peace education and more.

One of the LSE students, Aimee Reise of London, spent  a month of her summer break interning at PEACE NOW in Israel together with fellow Brit and student at St. Andrews University Ben Carroll.  Ben hails from Glasgow and last year was in contact with Lydia when he volunteered at Kibbutz Ein Gev in the Galilee.

Together with PEACE NOW Israel Project Coordinator Lee Wilson who is also originally from London, Ben and Aimee returned recently to Givat Haviva to spend a day sifting through the archives of The Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center researching a wealth of material connected to PEACE NOW activities over the years since the foundation of the movement.

Both Ben and Aimee are looking to enhance their knowledge of the movement they are hoping to become more involved with in the UK when they return to studies in the new academic year and when Aimee will be taking over as president of the Israel Society at the London School of Economics, a university with a stormy past with regard Israel related activities held on campus.

Aimee will also be taking back to the UK with her a copy of the Givat Haviva publication CHILDREN WRITE for PEACE, a book of prose written by Jewish and Arab children that can hopefully be used as a basis for discussion on campus.

Lee Wilson discovering in a Yad Yaari archive Peace Now file an article published in HaAretz in August, 2003 and photograph she had taken

Whilst searching through one of the files, Lee Wilson suddenly let out a loud “wow” when she came across a HaAretz cutting from 2003, the photograph of Israeli and Palestinian personalities appearing with the article taken by Lee  when she was working as the coordinator of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Coalition.

“After the outbreak of the second intifada and the breakdown at Camp David Dr. Yossie Beilin set up this coalition to bring Palestinian and Israeli politicians together to try and overcome their differences and go back on the path to Oslo.  The coalition eventually became the Geneva Initiative,” explains Lee.

“The Norwegian government had invited the coalition members to come for a long weekend to Oslo to try and hash out their differences and restart cooperation and negotiations.

The meetings were always very tense and recriminating - this photo was taken at a lunch break, a moment of relaxation in Oslo between rivals when ex- MK Ophir Pines sat between Yasser Abed Rabbo and Saeb Ereket.  I took this photo because the ice had broken at that point,” she reminisces.

“That the photo now reminds me of how close we were to reaching an agreement and how in those months after the end of Camp David you could really taste the possibility of an agreement.  Sadly this seems so far away,” comments the Peace Now Projects Coordinator who lives very close to Givat Haviva in Binyamina.

Searching through a pile of orange colored files, Ben Carroll stopped from time to time to make notes in his laptop or jotted down a few comments from across the table directed at him from Lee and Aimee.

“Givat Haviva is a great organization as it is so important to preserve the past and it has been fascinating chatting to those working in the Givat Haviva archives.  It has been great to be given the opportunity of seeing how the organization has evolved, ranging from the many successful campaigns they have run to the vast press coverage they have always had.  All in all, it is clear from looking through the Peace Now archives here in Givat Haviva exactly what was the impact the organization has always had on Israeli society and Israeli politics,” said the St. Andrew’s University intern.

“I don’t think there could have been a better summer to come out to Israel and become involved in the political situation here.  With the uncertainty of what will happen after the Palestinian statehood bid to the U.N. in September, in addition to the social protests sweeping across the country and finally the security crisis after the two terror attacks in August, I have had a summer that has been filled with interesting discussions enabling learning a great deal about a number of aspects of Israeli society and the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” said Ben who is involved with the JSoc (Jewish Society) at St. Andrews who is also an ardent blogger where he also writes about Israeli current affairs and plans to write about his internship when he gets home mid-September.

Ben’s blog can be found at http://onebigbagel.wordpress.com/

SEPTEMBER, 2011