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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2008, page 53 Waging Peace Meeting Face to Face
ARI ROTH, artistic director of the Washington, DC Jewish Community Center’s Theater J, brought the co-directors of the Face to Face Jewish-Arab Teen Encounter program from Israel’s Givat Haviva Institute to Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, where they met with members of the Arab/Jewish dialogue group Peace Café on June 2. Busboy owner Andy Shallal hosted a lunch for all. Face to Face was created to establish an environment in which Israeli Arab and Jewish students could learn more about one another, break down stereotypes and reduce fear, hatred and alienation to build trust for real dialogue. The program is currently being conducted with a third of the 11th-grade students in Israel, which means some 40,000 students are involved each year. The Israeli Ministry of Education endorses the program. Face to Face’s co-directors, Shachar Yanai, an Israeli Jew, and Farhat Agbaria, an Israeli Arab, give the impressive that they feel comfortable with one another. Each took care to allow the other to express himself fully, but both made sure their own point of view was heard. Agbaria feels very strongly that their work is very important to the relationship between the two peoples. He believes that if there is to be a Palestinian state alongside Israel, which he supports wholeheartedly, Israeli Jews and Arabs must learn to live together. “This is a survival issue. Our future is with them,” Agbaria said as he looked toward Yanai. For him this is a civil rights issue in which the Arab minority is fighting for their rights within Israel. Yanai also feels that he and his Arab colleague are making a difference through Face to Face. “Thirty percent of the 11th grade population [Israeli Arabs and Jews] for once in their lives are sitting down with the other side and talking before they go off to university or military service,” he said. Both men said that 90 percent of the kids from both sides have never talked to, let alone sat with, the other side. When asked how that could be, when the two groups live in the same country and are both Israeli citizens, the answer was that each goes to their own schools and lives in their part of the country. These days there is minimal contact between the two. According to Agbaria, Arab students are more inclined to participate in the program because, unlike their Jewish counterparts, they have very little other extracurricular activities due to disparities in government funding. Shallal told the two that the relationships and interests they described are very similar to black/white racial issues in the U.S. “For the blacks, race is an issue, but for the whites it isn’t,” Shallal explained. Politics also play a role, the two Israelis acknowledged. For example, when the Arabs participating in Face to Face refer to themselves as Palestinians, the Jewish students become very upset because, Agbaria explained, “They see the Palestinians as the enemy.” And once when the Jewish students visited an Israeli Arab school and found photos of martyrs, Agbaria said, they went crazy. When there are hostilities between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, the sessions are canceled. “Both sides are fighting for who is really the victim,” Yanai said. “This is not constructive and we have to move beyond this.” Both men seem committed to continue this struggle until common ground is established between the two communities. For more information visit <www.giviva.org>. —Jamal Najjab |
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