At the School for Peace, we believe that our biggest assets are the amazing graduates of our past courses. In the coming months, we aim to launch a forum for our graduates from a variety of different courses and professional backgrounds to be able to meet with each other and develop further personal and professional connections in order to further binational and cross-professional cooperation.

One of the traditional cornerstones of the School for Peace programming have been our experiential and theoretical conflict resolution university courses Tel-Aviv University and Haifa University. In the near future, we seek to expand our programming to more universities and colleges in Israel, particularly, course at Ben-Gurion University starting in October 2012. Our courses aim to immerse the students in the conflict through experiential dialogues between Arabs and Jews and lectures on group conflict theories, psychology and history. Our university courses have been successful for 20 years and we seek to bring this education to more colleges in Israel.

The School for the Peace is also in the process of formulating a program, called Arab and Jewish teachers: an alternative approach to teaching history and human rights. The program will target high school teachers in civics and history teachers to teach their students about sensitive historical events, such as the Holocaust and the Nakba, tactfully, justly and accurately.

Another project which the School for Peace is attempting to launch is called New Leadership for a New Jerusalem. The program would bring Palestinians and Israelis together to dialogue about future peaceful solutions for the city of Jerusalem. Our hope, is that if we can, as a result of this encounter with Palestinian leaders, give a new perspective to the Jewish leaders of the new immigrant, ultra-orthodox and right-wing communities, we can help to foster a more conciliatory consensus on Jerusalem‘s status in negotiations.

The School for Peace would like to develop courses for the professional groups that we‘ve had the most success with in the past, particularly with Architects, Civil Engineers and Urban Planners; Mental Health Professionals; Lawyers; and Environmentalists. In the same time we also would like to work with new groups like the business sector and artists and educators as well as others.

The School for Peace is also set to publish a collection of interviews with graduates of SFP courses for facilitators, Change Agents and university students. We seek to evaluate and qualify the long-term impact that our courses have had on the personal and professional lives of our graduates and their activist ambitions.

Finally, The SFP would like to launch three day weekend encounter workshops for religious Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel and conduct a meaningful dialogue between them. We came to the conclusion that we need to reach those populations that have never had the opportunity to meet with the other side. The School for Peace has trained several facilitators who are religious themselves, who would be well situated to mediate such an encounter, and we are ready to start now!