Jewish-German-Palestinian Youth encounter

The encounter has take place in the school for peace on August 19-21, and 35 participant were at the group. The aim of the encounter program was to connect the youth to topics concerning the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and to learn about the different perspectives that each group brings to the encounter.The history of this encounter was that there is an exchange program between the German group and the Arab group from Daburiah. This year they added to the program a Jewish group from Afula. Their program did not include any mention to the conflict and the Arab coordinator asked the SFP to conduct a workshop that will deal with that topic. It is important to remember that it was the first time that Jews were participating and there was no joint view of the project by the three coordinators. They also stayed away from any thing “political” or controversial in their program, but that of course meant that they stayed away from the Palestinian narrative, and not the Zionist narrative. So when they arrived at the SFP there was a lot of fear that what we do will tear apart the group and make it hard for them to continue together.



The program included a variety of activities, we will mention some:On the first day we divided them into two mixed groups for acquaintance, which ended up as a conversation about “why should we talk politics, it will tear us apart”. Than each national group sat by itself and talked about its “identity card” who they are: the Germans talked about the fact that they should stand from the side and not take sides in the conflict, the Palestinians said they know more than the rest about the conflict and that they don’t trust the Jews to continue and be friends with them after the workshop is over, and the Jews talked about their initial rejection from meeting Germans, they said they immediately thought of Nazis when they were told about the project.

Later each national group was asked to present something from their heritage or culture: The Palestinians presented a drama of the massacre in Kufer Qassem. The Jewish group, which planned to present a song, saw the drama and changed their presentation to a drama of an exploding bus. The German group prepared a dramatic presentation of typical German characters.



On the second day: The program focused on history, each person was asked to prepare a list of historical national events that were important, and later in national groups they had to choose 5 events that they wanted to present. Than they prepared a chronicle presentation of these events, with color and words, on a long paper, like a path. All the participants were asked to walk the three paths. Later there was a discussion on the events, what terminology was chosen, which events were taken out of the list and why.At the evening they heard a lecture about the 532 Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948. The focus was on the history itself, which is not usually talked about in Israel, and on the ways to memorize, with examples from Israel and from Germany.

On the third day: The group heard two young women from NSWAS, one Jewish and one Arab, tell about the village and how it is to grow up in such an environment. Later there were summery sessions in national groups and in the plenary.The program was interesting and at the end positive summaries were heard from the three coordinators but there were some difficulties:The youth were afraid to go into the discussions about the conflict, this was due to natural fear from conflicts, but it was harder this time because their coordinators also were afraid that this will make the rest of the program in Israel hard. So the coordinators didn’t support the program so much.
The Three languages were present in the workshop, at all times, we thought that English could be used as a mediating language but it was not possible, this made the discussions very difficult.



The team from the SFP included Michal Zak as the pedagogic advisor, Uri Gofer and Ragda Nabulsi as coordinators, and Nivin Rizalla and Sharon Komash as facilitators. In addition there were three coordinators for the groups, an Arab, a Jew and a German. The group came with one translator, and we added Kevin Duerr,a volunteer at NSWAS, as a German facilitator and translator.