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Abstract
This article explores ways of improving peace education, placing emphasis on peace education programmes in Israel that use dialogue to foster mutual understanding and respect. This article offers a critical assessment of contemporary Israeli peace education initiatives, emphasizing that current peace education programmes in Israel have failed to significantly improve social attitudes between Arabs and Jews. Critiques of contemporary forms of peace education focus on their psychological and social contexts, and the ways in which the framing of peace education has substantive impacts on the likelihood of its success and its sustainability. Emphasis is placed on the importance of incorporating affective rather than primarily cognitive models for promoting coexistence; the importance of pursuing long‐term peace education programming rather than the predominant short‐term ‘encounter group’ model; and the need for a comprehensive social and political approach to peace education that extends beyond schools and embraces society as a whole.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Maya Kahanoff, professor and researcher at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace and The Swiss Center for Conflict Research and Resolution, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Kahanoff’s course, ‘Jewish‐Arab relations: social psychological aspects’, inspired this article. I am grateful for her teaching, criticism, support and feedback. With sensitivity, care, empathy and patience, Professor Kahanoff encouraged her students to be open and responsive to narratives, experiences and convictions that often sharply challenged their own. The author also wishes to thank Lars Dietrich and Max Kitaj, fellow students on the course, for stimulating conversation and reflection.
Notes
1. This article will use the phrase ‘dialogue groups’ to refer to group meetings that are also known as ‘encounter groups’ and ‘contact groups’ that bring together people of different ethnic, national and religious backgrounds to meet one another, to discuss their identities, values, feelings, beliefs and interpretations of history, and to work towards improved communication, mutual understanding and the promotion of values of peace, openness and tolerance.
2. The phrase ‘Arab citizens of Israel’ is deliberately broad, and includes citizens who identify themselves as Bedouin, Druze, Palestinian Israeli and Arab Israeli.
3. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe and analyse the tensions and difficulties that the Arab minority faces in a democracy which also defines itself ethnically/culturally/religiously, and seeks to maintain a permanent Jewish majority so that the Jewish people do not become a minority in their own homeland, and have their human rights potentially threatened as a result. However, Arab citizens of Israel face both formal and informal discrimination, and some of it stems from the intrinsically imperfect tension between Israel being both a Jewish state and a democracy. Israel, by its very nature and self‐definition, cannot and should not attempt to address these tensions by rejecting the Jewish and democratic synthesis which inspired and guides its founding and current functioning. It can and should, however, seek to make that synthesis a more just and inclusive one that is responsive to the rights and needs of Israel’s minorities while simultaneously respecting the Jewish character and raison d’être of the state. These are not mutually incompatible goals, although harmonizing them is and will remain an often difficult process entailing compromise and will inevitably be a dynamic process, as Israeli society and its constituent communities evolve. Additionally, the creation of an independent Palestinian state beside Israel provides another important and necessary way of providing Arab‐Israelis with the opportunity to live in a country that fully reflects their collective identity, culture, and national aspirations, should they choose to exercise this option.
4. It should be noted that the majority of Arab citizens of Israel do not share the sentiments of the radical Arab leadership which rejects the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign Jewish state and as a democracy. As Rory McCarthy (Citation2007) notes in The Guardian, an opinion poll released in 2007 showed the support of 75% of the Arab sector for a constitution that defined Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state.