Draft:School for Peace

The School for Peace

The School for Peace (SFP) at Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam (NSWAS) is an NGO in Israel that promotes peace, equality, and just relations between Jews and Palestinians. (related: Neve Shalom)

Their programs for teenagers are the longest running in Israel since the founding of the School for Peace in 1979. The organization’s location is in NSWAS (Neve Shalom/Wahat-al-Salaam), a joint Jewish-Palestinian village built for the purpose of promoting peaceful relations between the two peoples. provides a unique setting where all participants can feel at home.

History

SFP got its name from a Jewish resident of NSWAS named Wellesley Aaron. Aaron, who was involved in the formation of Israel, had been increasingly involved in the peacebuilding process since 1967, when he began peacebuilding educational initiatives for high school students in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Aaron’s quest for peace eventually brought him to NSWAS in 1980. His grandson, famous Israeli singer David Broza, had asked him why there were only war colleges and no peace colleges. This inspired the naming of the new peace-building institution: the School for Peace.

The SFP’s activities mostly began in 1981-82. The organization’s early activities were centered around youth work with Jewish and Palestinian teenagers. These youth encounters saw Jewish and Palestinian teenagers stay in NSWAS for three nights in tents near the village. Encounters involved dialogue sessions, as well as simulation games which presented a problem relevant to the conflict and had the youth work to create a solution. The SFP conducted several youth programs throughout the 1980s and created a model for this type of work. During this period the SFP also conducted facilitator training courses, where participants met once a month starting in 1981-82.

In the 1990s, the SFP expanded its work beyond just youth encounters. The SFP had faced a financial crisis due to lack of funding and lost many staff members. Dr. Nava Sonnenshein worked with several colleagues to keep the organization afloat. Around this time, she met Ariella Friedman, a professor at Tel Aviv University. Collaborating with Dr. Friedman, the SFP began conducting university peacebuilding courses in 1991, and this partnership is ongoing. Since then, SFP has opened partnerships with more universities throughout Israel, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Ruppin Academic Center, Bezalel Arts College, and Reichman University.

In 1994, following the Oslo Accords, SFP began working with Palestinians from the West Bank as well. Several programs were held between Israeli Jews, Palestinians residing in Israel, and Palestinians residing in the West Bank.

From the 1990s until 2005, SFP had a program called Women in a Time of Change which sought to enable Jewish and Palestinian women to have dialogue sessions and lectures about feminism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2006, SFP began its change agents courses, which involved working with professional groups connected to the conflict, such as urban planners and lawyers. SFP began to prioritize. These courses promote activism and give professionals the tools to promote positive change through their work. Another goal of this is to reach Israelis and Palestinians who hold influential positions.

Until now, SFP has worked with about 80,000 participants, roughly half of them Jewish and half Palestinian. Many graduates have gone on to become leaders of peace and human rights organizations in Israel-Palestine.

2020 Arson Attack on The School for Peace

In September, on the opening day of the primary school, the village woke up to a difficult reality as the School for Peace became a target of an arson attack. During the night the main building was burned down and five of the seven classrooms sustaining heavy damage. The building in which so many peace activists had been trained, thousand of dialogue groups had met, and where the word “peace" was spoken countless times, turned into smoldering ruins. A week later, in the early morning, a second arson attack was carried out in the Fred Segal Peace Library. The building survived an event that could have been much larger and more dangerous if not for the automatic fire suppression system. Following the event the staff of the School for Peace quickly organized and moved their headquarters to Fred Segal Peace and Friendship Library and was able to continue its work without any delays.

The School for Peace was able reopen the main building and the library in 2023. The rebuilding, refurbishing and furnishing efforts were funded and supported by the Harrison-Frank Family Foundation, the Tolkien Foundation, Fondazione SanZeno, several private foundations in Switzerland and Lichtenstein, and the Swiss, American, British, German, Austrian, Italian and Swedish SFP Friends Associations, among others - 19 in all.

Methodology

SFP applies a unique intergroup dialogue method to activities that bring together Jewish and Palestinian professionals, youth, and women with the goal of promoting positive intergroup relations and encouraging activism that will lead to societal change.

Dialogue Methodology

SFP uses a unique intergroup dialogue method to guide its activities, which has since become the leading method in Israel-Palestine and has been applied to other areas facing asymmetric power relations.

This dialogue approach is based on four main assumptions. First, one’s beliefs, on which their identities and behaviors are based on, are firm, deep-set, and difficult to change. Second, the conflict is a meeting point between two national groups, rather than individuals. Third, each participant group acts as a microcosm of outside society and can be used to better understand it. Fourth, the participant groups do not exist in a vacuum and are connected to and affected by outside reality. Other assumptions include the fact that Jewish-Palestinian relations in Israel are asymmetric, with Jews being in a more privileged position, and that Palestinians in Israel constitute an integral part of the Palestinian nation, and this does not diminish their right to equality as Israeli citizens.

Much of the SFP method is tailored around this second assumption through the treatment of participants as members of their respective groups, rather than a more individualistic approach. Methods that focus on the individual, SFP believes, promote the view that participants whom members of the other group have a positive experience with are exceptions to the norms of their respective group. Instead, SFP believes this intergroup method promotes positive relations and breaks down stereotypes between groups, rather than just individual exceptionalism.

As part of this intergroup dynamic, SFP activities tend to alternate between uni-national groups (a group of only Jews and a group of only Palestinians) and binational groups (Jews and Palestinians together). This allows participants to have constructive dialogue with the other group over societal issues while also allowing them to reflect on their experience in a more comfortable uni-national setting. This also solidifies the treatment of the participants as members of their respective groups, rather than as individuals.

Another important aspect of the intergroup dynamic is the use of simultaneous translators (Hebrew and Arabic) during meetings. Since meetings take place within the societal context of power asymmetry, which extends to the role of language, simultaneous translators are used to ensure participants are able to speak in the language they are most comfortable with. This also prevents Palestinian participants from feeling they must concede to the language of the dominant group.

Main Fields of Activity

As part of its effort to promote activism and create a more peaceful, just, and egalitarian society, SFP’s primary activities include training change agents, training facilitators, academic courses, programs for women, and programs for teenagers.

Change agents courses gather professionals from Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds to create dialogue centered on their field of work, increase their understanding of the conflict and social relations, improve their preparedness to deal with social and political issues, and encourage them to promote uninational activism. Courses are primarily tailored on careers that have more relevance to the conflict, including lawyers, journalists, mental health professionals, urban planners, members of human rights organizations, politicians, and more.

Facilitator training courses aim to prepare Jewish and Palestinian participants to lead intergroup dialogue activities of their own. Such courses occur once a year with 20 Jewish and Arab participants and include dialogue and practice facilitations with peers and teachers. These courses are centered around three modules: dialogue groups, a comparative study of approaches to dialogue and conflict resolution, and practical experience in dialogue mitigation.  So far, SFP has trained over 1000 facilitators, many of whom have gone on to create societal change through their own work.

Since 1991, SFP has taught courses in cooperation with several universities. The courses aim to connect material from the dialogue course to the students’ field of study. Courses are taught by one Jewish and one Arab facilitator and a conference is held in Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam once a year. Jewish and Palestinian students generally do not study together until they reach higher learning, and even in the university setting they tend to socialize separately. SFP’s academic courses seek to address this by providing students with a safe space for respectful self-expression. Partner universities include Tel Aviv University, Haifa University, Ben Gurion University, Arava Institute, and Ruppin Academic College.

SFP’s womens’ programs focus on womens’ empowerment and increasing understanding of the connection between gender-based oppression and nation-based oppression. This includes workshops on feminism and nationality, training women to be leaders in the promotion of Jewish-Arab relations in mixed cities, and dialogue meetings. SFP also holds programs for high school seniors across Israel. Thirty students from each national group are brought to Neve Shalom for three-day dialogue meetings. This includes a simulation of peace negotiations managed by the participants themselves, with the goal of putting into writing shared principles of equal life. Every year, SFP holds a conference that brings together its graduates to discuss Israeli-Palestinian relations, issues central to the conflict, and developments in Israeli society over the course of two days. The most recent workshop took place in March 2023 and included guest lecturers who spoke on discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and the importance of Jewish-Palestinian cooperation. Group dialogue sessions then took place, including discussions on the judicial reform crisis and its implications for Jewish-Palestinian cooperation and discussions on the issues of language and translation in an asymmetric society. This was followed by a musical performance and stand-up show that encouraged cultural expression while also creating a relaxed and joyful atmosphere after a day of political discussion. The next day, participants took part in a political imagination workshop and set goals for more positive future relations and finally, the presentation of School for Peace grants to graduate projects aiming to produce societal change. These bi-annual conferences ensure an ongoing public discourse between the groups as the conflict continues to develop around them and promote opportunities to change reality.

Graduate-Run Projects

SFP gives out grants to assist graduate-run projects, the most prestigious of which is the Dr. Nava Sonnenschein prize. Organizations selected promote peace, social and political change, Jewish-Palestinian social equality, a just solution to the national conflict, and/or contribute towards ending the occupation or oppression, ideally in collaboration with SFP or in identification with its goals. This initiative increases the scope of SFP’s impact and encourages collaboration among activists.

Below are some examples of successful projects and initiatives created/supported/led by SFP graduates:

• Ahmad Mashharawi (former city council member in the Tel Aviv Municipality from the Meretz Party) initiates the naming of a square in Jaffa in honor of Dr. Fuad Ismail Dajani (2/26/2012)
• Lawyers Keren Halperin Museri and Nisreen Aylan win an appeal of a Supreme Court decision that allowed children in the Shuafat refugee camp to move to a safer school building (11/2013)
• Pilot literature curriculum created by graduates of SFP Literature Course(Two People Write from Right to Left), Aida Hamza and Iris Aviel, wins the Presidential Award for Education Initiatives in 2016 (9/12/2016)
• Graduates of the SFP course for leaders of environmental justice establish a library in Umm al-Hiran (6/8/2016)
• SFP graduate, Dan Segal, spearheads a shared Arab-Jewish Community project in Nof Hagalil called Bustan (1/2/2020)
• Graduate Ishmael Ben-Israel co-creates podcast "Arabic in Context – Spoken Arabic Podcast" (6/15/2023)[1]
• Graduate Einat Weizmann curates and creates "Dogma 4.8", an art-documentary project consisting of of 8 short pieces by Jewish and Palestinian artists inspired by archival state documents (4/7/2024)
• Graduates Tom Kellner and Seba AbuDaqa found project called the "Clean Shelter Project", that attempts to address sanitary needs in camps for displaced persons in Gaza (2/26/2024)
• Graduates Kholoud Abu Ahmad and Maoz Ynon establish sustainable Abraham AlterNarrative Tours that attempt to give participants the opportunity "to hear the stories of mixed cities from local perspectives, facilitating understanding, strengthening local economies, and promoting involvement by uncovering the repressed narratives of Palestinians" (4/2/2024)