Second Annual School for Peace Alumni Conference

“For me, this conference was like filling up with gas, water and food before going back off on a long trek in the desert,” said Dov, a conference participant.

“It was really significant,” said Nava Sonnenschein, former director of the School for Peace, who facilitated one of the dialogue groups. “Dialogue is more important than ever in these times.”

Sliman, another participant added: “I now live outside the country, but I’m really happy to know there are rational people like you here who are working for justice.”

As in the previous year’s Alumni Conference, around 100 alumni from the entire range of professional courses and years attended the conference. Some reconnected with friends from the courses they had attended; many made new connections.

Despite the fact that the conference took place over one short weekend, the work was intensive. The focus this year was on dialogue groups, and each group met four times. On Friday morning, the group members got to know one another and touched upon their group’s subject, each from their own perspective. The next set of discussions took place in uni-national groups, and then the groups came back together on Friday afternoon for binational discussions. Finally, on Saturday, the same groups met once again to try to reach conclusions, talk about turning their insights into action and to present some of the dozens of excellent alumni projects that had been proposed for the competition.

The four groups were:

• Power relations in collaborative work and activism;
• Struggle together or separately? Jews and Arabs right now;
• The role of young people in activism and intergenerational relations;
• The “democracy” crisis in an occupying state.

One significant upgrade this year was the addition of simultaneous translation, with translators who had completed the simultaneous translation course offered by the SFP the previous year.

In between dialogue sessions, conference participants attended a panel discussion with Dr. Nasreen Hadad Haj-Yahya and Avraham Burg. Hadad Haj-Yahya, a researcher on Palestinian society, presented some figures on present-day Palestinian society in Israel that revealed the shocking gaps between Jews and Palestinians in the country. Despite the numbers, which suggest the gaps are widening, organized crime is on the increase and their education is falling behind, Hadad Haj-Yahya is an optimist who believes the tools are in place to improve the situation. Burg professed to being an optimist as well, and he described a new political party he is forming, based on equal rights for all and separation of church and state.

It was not all dialogue around the crisis, however. Friday evening, after an emotional goodbye to long-time coordinator Harb, who is moving on to other things, the participants were treated to a medley of songs from the Lebanese group Mashrou’ Leila, sung beautifully by Adan Wakim – an alumna of the dialogue course taught in Tel Aviv University, who is studying to be a neurosurgeon. Stand-up comic Noam Shuster, who grew up in Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom, came straight from Geneva to get the audience laughing despite themselves, including discovering, to her delight, that one of the participants shared a name with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, to whom she had jokingly proposed on a podcast.

The next morning, participants found themselves in a guided political imagination session, in which they dreamt of a peaceful future. While ideas for turning those dreams into reality were harder to conceive, they did remind everyone that hope and dreams are important, no matter what is taking place outside the grounds of the village.

As the conference wound to a close, there was frustration as well as hope. Palestinian feelings of exclusion and isolation were higher than ever; Jews felt overwhelmed and lacking the means to make real change in the current climate. But if one thing arose from the various dialogues, it was the realization that giving in to despair and hopelessness are not options. Though those who envision a state that embodies complete equality may be a small minority, but we all still have the ability to influence and effect positive change.

Alumni projects: Film, Stage, Greens and Parks

The final session was given to presentations of the alumni projects that received grants this year. Faten Abu Ghosh, of the SFP, guided the winning projects and she led the session. The project receiving the Nava Sonnenschein was called “TirA PlaceMaking.” Led by Yasmin Shbeta, an alumna of the SFP Architect and Planners course (2019). This is a plan for greening the city, converting waste areas and an abandoned parking lot to parks. She is working with a group of volunteers to advance the project.

Other projects that received grants were: A film that imagines a future in which national identities don’t matter, with flashbacks using documentary footage of meetings between settlers and Palestinians in the ODT; a project using recycled building materials to create planting beds and hydroponics systems in schools; and a theater project in which the actors will receive files from the national archives and investigate, on stage, the facts behind the stories we are told.