Workshop for Students from the Rupin College

The School for Peace cooperated with the Rupin college to conduct a three-day course on various aspects of the Jewish-Arab conflict. The aim of the course was to encourage students to examine our social reality and to develop a sense of responsibility for advancing change. Participants in the program confronted some of the moral dilemmas that come to the surface in dealing with Jewish-Arab relations. Forty-eight Jewish students from the college, most of them women, took part in the course.


The course was accredited by the college as a part of the participants‘ study program. Dr. Efrat Ben Ze‘ev of the Rupin College conducted one day of the course in their classroom. The students received a list of articles that they were to read and several of the articles were discussed in class. On March 16th and 17th the students participated in a two-day workshop in Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam, facilitated by the School for Peace. The following is a description of the workshop in NS/WAS:

The workshop provided participants with a new understanding of ways in which their ethnic and national group identities influence their personal identities. We regard this kind of understanding as an essential step towards developing a sense of the roles that we play and the kinds of responsibility that we might take in advancing social change. The participants were divided into three groups of twelve. Most of the discussion was conducted within these small work-groups, and a few of the activities brought them together in the large group. Liron Tal, Uri Gofri and Yuval Tamari each facilitated discussion in one of the groups.

The workshop began with an attempt to clarify expectations and concerns regarding the work. A handful of left-wing students expressed concern about being ostracized by the group for holding unpopular opinions. On the other hand there were those who were worried that the program would try to brain-wash them with a left-wing agenda and that they would not feel comfortable expressing more conservative opinions. There was also discussion about the value of conducting discussion of the Jewish-Arab conflict in a uni-national forum. Participants asked what the Palestinians would say about the Palestinian villages that were destroyed and one student asked how the Palestinians would react to the fact that he served as a soldier manning military checkpoints in the West Bank. Facilitators, in different ways, redirected questions like these back at the participants in an attempt to turn them into their own moral dilemmas regardless of what the Palestinians might or might not say.


After the introductory session, the participants gathered to hear a lecture by Dr. Rabah Halabi on Jewish-Arab relations within Israel. They then returned to the small group forum where facilitators of each group conducted an activity which required of the participants to define their identity. Most of the participants stressed individual and professional aspects of their identities. The general attitude among the students was that questions of ethnic and national identities are no longer relevant to them. They went on to discuss questions of Palestinian identity as they understood it. Rabah had stressed the importance of group identity to Palestinians living in Israel. Some participants were disturbed by the idea that Palestinians in Israel identify with Palestinians living under occupation. Noting the difference between the Palestinians‘ and their own attitudes towards group identity, the students began to consider how they too might have stressed aspects of their group identity had they lived as a minority or had they experienced any sense of collective threat.

In the afternoon the students took part in a simulation game based on the “Future Vision” document; a document drawn up by a committee of Palestinian academics and community leaders outlining the kind of legislation and social structures that might enable Palestinians to function as equal citizens in Israel. The document had been on the students‘ list of required reading for the course. Each of the three groups divided into three sub-groups of four people. Each sub-group chose one of the following chapters of the document: “Relations of Palestinian Arabs in Israel to the State,” “Land, planning and development policy,” “Vision and strategic planning of an Arab educational system in Israel,” and “Palestinian Arab culture and the legal status of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” The participants were asked to review the paragraph that they chose and to respond to the Palestinians‘ demands as if they, the participants, were representing the State. Facilitators clarified that the participants were to put themselves in the position of authority, representing their own views. They were not supposed to pretend that they were anybody else. After studying their respective paragraphs and drawing up a response, each sub-group reported on the Arab demands that they worked with, the problems that arose and the way that they responded to them. The students then entered into lively discussion on the spirit of the document in general. On one hand they expressed empathy towards the Arabs, acknowledging the lack of equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel and the need to do something about it. However when confronting concrete demands that required of them to forfeit positions of privilege and control in the name of democracy, most of them realized that they were not quick to advocate change. They were afraid that Arabs could not be trusted with measures that would ensure minority-group rights. Cultural autonomy and the right to control their own educational framework appeared as a threat. The right of the Arab minority to veto legislation that would affect them and even moreso the Palestinian right of return was, for most of the participants, out of the question. The discussions and conclusions in each of the three groups were very similar to each other. In responding to the demands of the Palestinian leadership for a more just and democratic society, the participants faced the contradictions between their behavior when faced with concrete demands as opposed to their original claim that group identity is not important to them and that their values are humane and universal.

In the evening the group watched Dalia Karpel‘s documentary film “Yomanei Nahmani” (Nahmani‘s diary). Yosef Nahmani played a major role in promoting and executing the policy of evicting Palestinians from their houses and land in 1948. And he was an Orientalist who admired Arab culture and who expressed shock at the Israeli soldiers‘ treatment of the Palestinians; treatment which included murder and instances of rape. The film dealt with the absurdity of Nahmani‘s declared moral positions and admiration of Arab culture along side of the work that he invested in expelling Palestinians from the country. The film evoked reactions of shock and even awakened the normally taboo comparison with Nazis. But this time the comparison was addressed in the room without the usual resistance. Some participants tried to justify Nahmani by seeking examples of Palestinians‘ prior aggression. A few participants also made comparisons with soldiers‘ behavior today at the military checkpoints and in the occupied territories in general. Two men argued with each other over whether or not the situation today under occupation is comparable. One of them claimed that if soldiers behaved that way at military checkpoints it would be because of the quality of the soldier and not because of the nature of military checkpoints. This led to discussion of racist cultural explanations vs. structural explanations of human behavior.


The following day began with a tour of the site of Emmaus, a Palestinian village not far from NS/WAS which, together with two other villages, were erased by the Israelis in the 1967 War. The tour was led by Eitan Bronstein of the Zochrot Association. Eitan described the villages and he discussed Israel‘s decision not only to destroy them but to do what could be done to erase all memory of them. A park was planted in place of the villages and signs were placed describing ancient sites that are found there. No mention is made on any of the signs about the recent existence of Palestinian villages or about their destruction. Eitan described the work of Zochrot in raising awareness of destroyed Palestinian villages by marking them with signs and conducting educational work. The participants commented on their previous ignorance of the destruction of villages and on how their schools succeeded in teaching history without addressing the Palestinian side of the story. Several of the participants discussed how this should be changed in the educational system. There were also participants who spoke of the risks of raising public awareness about the destruction of Palestinian villages. They feared that raising such awareness may negate their own right of existence, appearing to suggest that silencing the memory of the Palestinian villages might not be a bad idea.

Returning to the small group forum for summary discussions the participants noted the change in their understanding of group identity. They examined the dissonance between their declared values and their positions regarding the Arab minority. Contrary to their initial attitudes towards identity they began to realize how their group belonging influences their perceptions of themselves and of the other. Some of the participants spoke of how easy it is for majority group members to be racist and condescending towards the other if the influence of the group is not appreciated. The workshop ended with some closing remarks in the large forum, followed by a brief presentation of the village of Neve Shalom /Wahat al-Salam.

We have found that the role of the facilitator is more difficult in a uninational setting than in an encounter workshop where the other group is physically present. In the uninational workshop it is up to the facilitator both to challenge the participants and to help them to understand their reactions. Yet the uninational workshop also seems to have the advantage of creating a forum that encourages some of the hidden racist images of the other to surface much more quickly and candidly, allowing the participants to deal with difficult issues in a more protected framework.