We are happy to share the external evaluation of our Environmental Peace Dialogue course at the School for Peace conducted in partnership with Citizens for the Environment and supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, and evaluated by Dr. Gal Harmat of Swiss Peace.

This was the seventh cohort of a course that brings together Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian participants to explore what happens when environmental activism and intergroup dialogue are intentionally woven together.

The course ran from February 2025 to February 2026, through an active war, under conditions that led many dialogue organizations in Israel and Palestine to suspend their work entirely.

The evaluation captures something that felt true from inside the process: that perseverance itself became a methodology. Showing up, again and again, even when the dialogue was painful or incomplete, created something neither curriculum nor facilitation alone could manufacture.

As Dr. Harmat writes: “The commitment to return, to sit together again, to continue working on a shared task even when it was uncomfortable, proved to be the course’s most significant methodological resource.”

A key finding: joint environmental projects – the doing together – emerged as the primary source of hope and connection across the two groups, often more than verbal dialogue alone.

We are deeply grateful to Dr. Harmat and Swiss Peace for the rigor and care they brought to this work, to Citizens for the Environment for a meaningful partnership, and to the Robert Bosch Foundation for their sustained and generous support.

And above all, to the participants who kept coming back.

Read the report here

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