Program Overview

Mutual understanding and awareness among Palestinians and Israelis is an essential approach to mitigating conflict. USAID supports this effort through the Creating Change Advocates Program, which promotes this idea between Israeli and Palestinian professionals. The aim is that these people can spread their influence among other professionals and consequently have greater impact towards peace-building. The program brings together specialists in law, mental health, and civil planning from the Palestinian Authority and Israel as leaders in their respective communities. Sessions for participants facilitate bi-national dialogue and offer training programs on how to address the root causes of the conflict together in ways relevant to particular fields of expertise. Through these people-to-people encounters, professionals gain a new lens through which to focus their future work in building a foundation for reconciliation.

The Creating Change Advocates program is run jointly by two organizations enlisted by the American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam: School for Peace (SFP) at Neve-Shalom/Wahat al-Salam and Hewar Center for Development and Peace.

Three 14-month courses for Israeli and Palestinian professionals were successfully completed by the summer of 2009 in spite of a very tense year. Each course had 40 participants – 20 Jewish and Arab Israelis, and 20 Palestinians from the West Bank. Mental health professionals, lawyers, architects, engineers and urban planners were brought together in training sessions on the conflict, followed by empathizing dialogue that aimed to promote individual action.

Goal

• Develop a professional workforce that can directly mitigate the conflict by becoming change advocates

Successes

• The issue of the conflict became much more central in the lives of all participants, and many drastically changed their assumptions about “the other side.”

• Participants have spoken out against racism, oppression, the occupation, and human rights violations within their respective professional communities and among their family and friends.

• Participants have now formed a network for future communal projects and activism.

Highlights from each professional group

Lawyers
• Most of the participants hold strategic positions in human rights law offices, NGOs or in academic departments where they work to protect the human rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

• Other lawyer participants have contributed their skills in protecting Palestinian farmers & residents who are not allowed to enter their land because of the separation wall.

Mental health professionals
• Participants using the principles learned during the course in their therapy sessions are reporting a real improvements in their practice.

• Many have implemented training activities on multiculturalism for the staff in their clinics and have already seen deep changes in the way their colleagues interact with patients from the “other side.”

• In the past year, participants have organized a series of conferences, for about 300 social workers and psychologists addressing the role of the social and political reality these fields.

• During the war in Gaza, participants initiated a protest event, which gathered 300 people in Jaffa.

• A group of participants is now publishing recommendations to the mental health professional community.

Architects, civil engineers & urban planners
• All participants are now fully aware of the way planning can be a tool for discrimination and dispossession against Palestinians, and how this can inflame the conflict.

• In consequence, most of them now refuse to take on planning projects in the Occupied Territories, and commit to keep Jewish and Palestinian rights on an equal basis when it comes to planning and construction.

• One participant is publishing an in-depth report on the distress of housing in Jaffa.

• A Palestinian participant is documenting the Muslim architectural heritage of Acco and is suggesting an alternative approach to the policy of Judaization led by the city.

• Palestinian and Jewish participants are working together to map the land ownership of Jayous to help in future urban planning.