The Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between People, together with the
Israeli Jewish-Arab youth movement Reut-Sadaka and the Swedish organization
PeaceQuest are organizing this educational program. This program, starting
with its first seminar this week, aims at educating young people about working
towards coexistence, both within their own society as well as between different
societies.
The project has two stages aimed at two different age groups:
The first stage is about 6 month long during which people between 20-26,
with previous or no experience in the fields of stereotypes, democracy and
conflict resolution, will be trained locally, regionally and internationally
to improve their skills in these areas.
The second stage will start in the autumn of 2000 and is aimed at a younger
group of participants (high-school age mainly 16 years old) with no previous
experience. During one year, they will have a similar educational program
as in the first stage, and will be trained by some of the participants from
the first group.
The Seminars will be held here in Palestine and Israel and in Sweden as well.
The first group will get a training for trainers program in which they will
be able o train other younger students.
What Has been done so far?
The preparations for the Project started about one year ago when three of
PeaceQuest coordinators came to Palestine in the summer of 1999. two coordination
meetings were held in Sweden. One on October 1999, where the coordinator of
Rapprochement "George N. Rishmawi" went to Sweden for a week along with the
Coordinator of Reut "Nadim Nashef" to meet with PeaceQuest coordinators "Cecilia
Helderyd and "Kicky Hallen" and others of the PeaceQuest organization.
In this meeting most of the basic issues were clarified and the proposal
was prepared already to be submitted to the Funding Organization that is the
Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) through the umbrella organization
ForumSyd.
A second coordination meeting was held in Sweden in November 1999, which
was a continuation for the first meeting where the other a representative
of PCR "Wisam Salsaa" and coordinator from Reut "Ameet Pierlson" attended
this meeting together with the PeaceQuest coordinators. In this meeting they
arranged some of the technical issues and stated to prepare for the practical
steps of the program.
In February 2000, a group from PeaceQuest visited the country. They had a
tour in the hot areas in Palestine and Israel. They Visited Jerusalem, Hebron,
Haifa, Tel Aviv and Bethlehem Area. Of course their visit to the Palestinian
areas was not a tourist visit rather than a Political one. Especially that
their visit included visiting Deheisheh Refugees camp and some Palestinian
organizations. In Hebron, the group was briefed about the conflict their and
they visited the problematic areas such as the Tomb of the Patriarchs (The
Abrahimi Mosque) and H2 zone (Al Shuhada Street) and visited the Synagogue
there.
During this visit, we organized a meeting for the coaches who will be training
the participants in all the stages of the program. The meeting was held near
Haifa which lasted for three days. In this meetings the concepts of the training
were discussed and some practical ideas were set for the training process.
Besides, we decided on main policies and explored the best ways to work together.
Some coordination meeting were held between the coordinators and the coaches
from Reut and PCR to arrange for the first Seminar. where it was decided to
have it in Beit Sahour.
First Seminar in April 2000 in Beit Sahour