"Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices." - Laurence J. Peter

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Due to being swamped, I nixed the planned extracts from my favourite periodical, but here's some good stuff about those nice-sounding but ultimately useless initiatives:


Israel and Palestine | Still campaigning for co-existence

"There is still no shortage of Israeli-Palestinian co-existence projects, but serious activists are more sceptical of them than they used to be...

PEACE between Palestinians and Israelis is not a problem; anyone can make it. This summer alone, a group called the June 5th Initiative ran a series of “peace days” and conferences in Israel, the West Bank and several other countries. The Sulha—reconciliation, in Arabic—Peace Project held a three-day new-age-style festival. A thousand young Jewish and Arab would-be football stars competed in a “Mini World Cup”.

Countless others went to peace camps and summer schools in Israel and abroad. An 86-year-old Californian Jew donated 12 surfboards to Gaza and called it “Surfing for Peace”. Previous attractions have included a “hip-hop sulha” by Arab and Jewish rappers; an olive oil blended from the produce of Israeli and Palestinian farmers; and an Israeli-Palestinian comedy tour. Add in long-established projects such as the Jerusalem peace circus, Fighters for Peace (Israeli ex-soldiers joining up with Palestinian ex-guerrillas), a host of mixed Jewish-Arab villages, schools, youth groups, environmental bodies, magazines and websites, a peace phone line, two peace radio stations and much more besides, and the churlish might ask: if so many people are intent on making peace, why hasn't it happened by now? Or more fairly: do such “co-existence” projects actually change anything for the good?...

Plenty of philanthropists—usually Jewish ones—are still happy to fund Israeli-Palestinian get-togethers “based on the mistaken European assumption that every conflict is based on a misunderstanding”, as the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, a reluctant beneficiary of many such events, recently put it. Plenty of people are happy to take their money. But the more serious donors have been shifting their approach.

The start of the intifada, says Amnon Be'eri-Sulitzeano, the director in Israel of the Abraham Fund, was “a big bang in the co-existence world. Many activists realised that just bringing people together isn't enough.”...

Another big donor, the New Israel Fund (NIF), has also largely dropped co-existence. Once, “Arabs were happy to be in any kind of dialogue with Jews,” says Bruce Temkin, in the Fund's New York office. “Now they want real results.”...

A study earlier this year by Israel's Haifa University found that a seven-month peace-education programme for teenagers did very little to change basic attitudes about each other, and any changes were lost again a few months later...

It doesn't take much prompting for activists to start sniping at one another's methods and ideologies. But when asked whether their own work influences anyone beyond the participants, they often fall silent; such things are impossible to measure."