Tova Buksbaum: From the First Change Agents Course to Now

“It was a truly eye-opening experience,” says Tova Buksbaum, who participated in the first School for Peace’s Change Agents Mental Health Professionals course in 2006-2007. “I had considered myself progressive, but there was so much I still had to learn about what my colleagues on the ‘other side’ were going through.”

That course was ambitious in its scope, including mental health workers from Gaza as well as Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. The first meeting took place in Istanbul, a mid-course session in Aqaba. Between, in those pre-Zoom days, the meetings took place separately, including the uni- and bi-national sessions with facilitators that are the foundation of the dialog method developed in the School for Peace.

For Buksbaum, a clinical psychologist, the experience had a profound effect on her professional as well as her personal life. She and a group of like-minded mental health professionals, including a number of SFP alumni, founded a group they called PsychoActive, to combine peace activism with a deep understanding of the mental health toll that conflict inflicts on both sides. She incorporates her insights into her practice in the Galilee, where she treats Jews and Palestinians from all walks of life, and she has become active in the School for Peace as a facilitator and as a lecturer.

She is also involved in the creation of the SFP alumni hub, and she is excited about the first Alumni conference, taking place Thursday and Friday, March 3-4. “It will be not just binational, but completely interdisciplinary as well as bringing together people from different regions,” she says. “Our hope is that we can use the familiar dialog method to create totally new kinds of collaborative initiatives and new dialog between mental health professionals, environmental activists, planners, journalists, political players, artists and more.”