Peacebuilding entities engage in a variety of initiatives meant to enable their members, participants, or students to develop the aptitudes, skills, and behaviors necessary for going beyond conflict and living peace. The focus of activities is on young people; peace education; sensitive development; human security; the environment; gender and women’s rights; health and counseling; human rights, justice, and legal aid; mediation and conflict transformation; interfaith encounters; reconciliation; culture and media; and research. Hidden or missing in most of these activities, and which need to be prioritized, are healing and the cultivation of habits of peace, mainly a wider perspective, a long-term view, dialogue, compassion, forgiveness, nonviolence, and reconciliation.
Peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian Context
Ned Lazarus defines peacebuilding in the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations as “voluntary civic engagement in organized non-violent social or political activity aimed at transforming perceptions, policies, and/or structural/sociopolitical relations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs with aspirations to contribute to longer-term resolution of intergroup conflict” (Lazarus, ←7 | 8→2017, p. 18). The current field of peacebuilding, according to him, has 164 active organizations in Israel and Palestine, which are engaged in peace, conflict resolution or cross-conflict, and human rights. Categorizing these organizations by the identity/citizenship/residency of the target populations of peacebuilding initiatives, he finds out that 68 (41.46%) active initiatives pertain to cross-border (Palestinian and Israeli Jews), 61 (37.20%) to shared society (Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel), 19 (11.59%) to Jerusalem (Palestinian Jerusalemites and Israeli Jews), 14 (8.54%) to primarily internal Israeli/Jewish, and 3 (1.83%) to mainly internal Palestinian (2017, pp. 18–20).
Sheila H. Katz writes of a century of joint nonviolence, also variously known as “coexistence, people-to-people programs, second-track diplomacy, citizen action, peace building, advocacy, solidarity, co-resistance, or simply work for equality and to end occupation” (2016, p. 3). She enumerates 500 initiatives, arranged into 14 categories: the arts; civil society, human rights, and democracy; communications; community activism; dialogue; economy and business; educational activism and research; political activism; political negotiations, parties, and policy; religious activism; science, environment, medicine, and mental health; sports and physical activism; women’s activism; and youth activism. Other sources have listed far less initiatives or organizations, principally because they are dealing with the current period. For example, Peace Insight, the leading online resource for local peacebuilding around the world, includes 88 peacebuilding groups, arranged into 15 categories, including conflict prevention; human rights; mediation and dialogue; peace education; transitional justice and reconciliation; and women, peace, and security. The Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP)—an organization consisting of non-governmental organizations that promote reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians and between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East—has 111 members, with most of them being peacebuilding groups.
This book considers 56 Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding entities, with some involving both Israelis and Palestinians. Peacebuilding is not limited only to peace promotion in each individual society, but also includes relations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, whether they happen to be Israeli citizens or not. A friendly modification of Ned Lazarus’s definition, therefore, views peacebuilding as “voluntary civic engagement in organized non-violent social or political activity aimed at transforming perceptions, policies, and/or structural/sociopolitical relations in each of Israel and Palestine, as well as between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in support of peace.”
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The roots of peacebuilding in Israeli-Palestine relations actually go back to when Arabs and Jews lived in historic Palestine, first toiling under Ottoman rule (1516–1917) and then under the British Mandate (1920–1948). It took time for these roots to take hold, and now the leaves of peacebuilding are starting to sprout. Chapter 1 provides short narratives of Arab-Jewish/Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Meantime, peace scholars and practitioners have identified phases through which peacebuilding evolved. Walid Salem and Edy Kaufman, in their historical perspective on Palestinian-Israeli peacebuilding, elaborate on three main phases (2006, pp. 12–26), while Ned Lazarus recognize five historical turning points.
As per Salem and Kaufman, Phase I (late 1870s–1948) saw daily interactions between Arabs and Jews in neighborhoods, joint organizations, and at work. Jewish organizations, such as Hashomer Hatza’ir, Canaanite Movement, Brith Shalom, and Kedma Mizraha, advocated for coexistence, cooperation, or dialogue. Palestinian parties, such as the National Party, Farmers Party, Village Cooperation Society, Islamic National Society, Al-Ahali Party, National Bloc Party, Defense Party, Reform Party, Arabic Palestinian Party, and Independence Party, entered into negotiations with the Jewish leadership or pursued nonviolence to achieve their goals. This happened even though there were continual tensions between Arabs and Jews, especially during the British Mandate.
Phase II (1948–1967) experienced little peacebuilding activity as the Arab states and Israel erected physical and psychological walls between them, having gone through their first war in 1948. While there was some domestic Arab-Jewish rapprochement within Israel, there was no interaction between the Arab and Israeli civil societies. “Given the shock and despair of the Arab world, it would have been … an act of treason for any well-intentioned citizen to come to the Israelis with a message of peace” (Salem and Kaufman, 2006, p. 19).
In Phase III (1967–1993), intensive interactions between Israelis on one hand and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip on the other developed, with some focused on various approaches to peacebuilding. As Israel consolidated its military presence and increased its settlements, particularly in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, tensions rose and reached a crescendo in the First Intifada (1987–1993). But there were also peacemaking moves between Israel and its Arab neighbors as in the Geneva Conference (1973), Camp David Accords (1978), Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty ←9 | 10→(1979), Madrid Conference (1991) and Oslo Accords (1993). These and other factors encouraged the growth of peacebuilding initiatives within both Palestine and Israel. They also engendered various peace approaches between Palestine and Israel (e.g., Track II diplomacy), with each having its own traits and stamp of approval. As Salem and Kaufman argue, peacebuilding was seen as “an oppositional activity and, in the best case, the formation of the peace camp.” In the Palestinian environment, it was “an activity that was approved from 1974 onward by the first leadership of the Palestinian people (i.e., the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization])” (2006, p. 25).
As for Lazarus’s historical turning points, he begins with Israel’s founding in 1948 until the late 1970s. For him, this time had “no civil society peacebuilding sector, ‘peace movement’ or ‘peace camp’ to speak of” (Lazarus, 2017, p. 31). The second turning point focuses on the emergence of the peace camp from around 1977 with the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister of Israel and the historic visit of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem until the start of the First Intifada. The third turning point covers the First Intifada. It was during this time that leading Israeli officials and intellectuals became engaged in informal and unofficial backchannel or Track II diplomacy with PLO representatives or Palestinian personalities. The fourth turning point addresses the Oslo era, which “transformed a handful of activists and initiatives into an Israeli/Palestinian