Peace Research Institute in the Middle East

The Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) is coordinated by
Sami Adwan, a Palestinian academic, and Dan Bar-On, an Israeli academic.
Here we have an instance of Palestinians and Israelis working together. What
they concentrate on are "peace building" projects. You can read descriptions
of these projects at http://vispo.com/PRIME and in the just-published PRIME
2001-4 newsletter at http://vispo.com/PRIME/news2004.htm . These tend to be
quite interesting, such as the creation of books for Israeli and Palestinian
school-children that tells each tribe something of the other's story, gives
an indication of the pain of the other, the humanity of the other.

Of course, Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On have been working in pretty difficult
circumstances the last few years and they have asked me and Sid Tafler to
publish very little in the last couple of years on the site. So it's great
to get something from them, to see that they are still carrying out their
important work of peace-building projects. Here is an excerpt from their
newsletter describing two of their projects:

Shared History Project: Since January 2001 we held thirteen (13) meetings of
a group of 6-7 Palestinians teachers, and a similar group of Israeli
(Jewish) teachers led by Prof. Adnan Massalam and Prof. Eyal Naveh (as
history experts). We met first at the New Imperial Hotel in East Jerusalem,
but lately, as the Palestinian teachers do not get permits anymore to stay
overnight, we started to hold our meetings at PRIME. We held two summer
meetings abroad: in 2003 in Turkey and in 2004 at the Eckert Institute in
Braunschweig, Germany. We developed till now one booklet of three historical
events that the teachers chose (1917/Balfour declaration, 1948 war,
1987-93/first Palestinian Intifada) in which there are two parallel
narratives (an Israeli and a Palestinian) accounting for the same event. The
second booklet will soon go to print (three additional events: the 1920th,
the 1930th and 1967 war) and the teachers work now on the third booklet (the
1950th, the1970-1980, and 1993-2000). The teachers tried the first booklet
with some of their students. We will also develop a teacher guide and try to
conduct an evaluation of this method, in comparison to a single narrative
approach. The first booklet has been translated into Hebrew and Arabic,
English, Italian and French, and will soon be translated also into German,
Spanish (Catalan, etc.) and Portuguese. Of course all the texts are yet
experimental and will need additional revisions before published in the
final book. Shoshana Steinberg and Summer Jaber-Massarwa are observing and
documenting the process. This project was funded by the Wye River and the
Ford Foundation.


The "localized" refugees-immigrants project: We chose a region in the South
of Israel (Beit Jubreen area). Sami's team (headed by Shibli) interviews
Palestinian refugees who originally come from that area and live in refugee
camps near Bethlehem. Dan's team (headed by Julia and Nitai) interviewed the
Jewish immigrants who settled in this region prior or after 1948. The
interviews are videotaped and we would like to create a database and perhaps
a museum based on these two sets of interviews. In December 2003 we held a
workshop in which two families of each side, three generations in each
family, shared their stories for two days, in Talitha Kumi. A Palestinian
team filmed this meeting and we hope to have soon a film of that encounter.
Also this project is funded by the Wye River. As part of this project Dan
conducted interviews in Haifa with Jews and Arabs who remember Haifa from
before 1948 and Sami conducted interviews with Palestinians who live in the
West Bank and come originally from Haifa. There are two short films, which
describe some of these interviews.

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