"Know your enemy" is the maxim of an army; "understand your neighbor" is that of the Truman Institute.
by Wendy Elliman
"The principle we work on is trying to understand our neighbors," says Dr. Edy Kaufman, executive director of the Hebrew Universitys Harry S Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace. This is part and parcel of the Institutes long tradition of working relationships with academics in the Arab world. "For our first 25 years, until the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, the Truman Institute was the Middle Easts only peace research institute," he says. "Madrid triggered a boom in such institutes, in the Arab world and particularly in Israel. Our working relationships, especially with Palestinian academics and increasingly with Jordanians, have been built up over 33 years. These are relationships that have survived both the intifada and the Gulf War."
The cultivation of these relationships was a long slow process. "We began by opening our library of Middle East journals to all comers," says Dr. Kaufman. "Arab academics came because the library stocked PLO publications that were, at that time, banned elsewhere in Israel. I had an arrangement with our librarian: she would let me know when an Arab came to use the library, and I would come down, introduce myself and invite him to a cup of coffee. We met as fellow academics, as equals, and slowly we built up trust. When we were ordered to close the library to Arabs because it held certain classified materials, we chose instead to get rid of those materials."
During the first years of the Institute, which was founded in 1965, Dr. Kaufman met some 20 Arab academics in this manner. Slowly, the more courageous among them began attending Institute lectures. When they disagreed with what was said, they responded. Dr. Kaufman then invited them to give lectures, and eventually in 1985, a scholar from the University of Nablus nervously agreed to speak about economic development in the West Bank and Gaza.
"By the time the intifada broke out in 1987, a dialogue between us was firmly established," says Kaufman. "In 1988, we held our first joint research projects, and when the Gulf War began three years later, our tradition of working together was strong enough to withstand that conflict as well. In fact, we all went ahead with a joint workshop days before the first missiles were fired."
When the peace process began in late 1991, the 25 years spent carefully building up trust were rewarded. "The main purpose of any research institute is to be policy-relevant," says Dr. Kaufman. "Until the peace process got underway, however, there was no practical spin-off from our work. Once it began, it moved so quickly in its first years that negotiators and academics alike were all running to keep up!"
The political leaders negotiating peace needed practical advice lots of it and quickly on issues ranging from water rights to refugees to settlements to the status of Jerusalem. On the Israeli side, Truman Institute researchers were invited in as advisors. On the Palestinian side, with no government in place on which to draw for manpower, many academics with whom the Institute had worked became members of the negotiating teams themselves. Racing to keep pace with the peace process, Truman Institute scholars worked with their Palestinian colleagues on the subjects under negotiation, and had the satisfaction of seeing recommendations they made written into the agreements.
"One area on which we had great impact is how Palestinians and Israelis share underground water resources," says Dr. Kaufman. "Instead of deciding who should get how much, our Israeli-Arab research team proposed a jointly-run profit-making Palestinian-Israeli company to administer the aquifers, allocating according to need. On the settlement issue, we managed to establish a dialogue between settlers and Palestinian academics who are close to the Palestinian Authority."
The mechanics of peace-making are not, however, sufficient in an ethno-political conflict as deep-rooted as that between Israel and the Arabs, says Dr. Kaufman. The second major priority of the Institute today is, therefore, peace-building projects. Since 1993, five such projects have been underway "with reciprocity from the Arab side," emphasizes Dr. Kaufman, "because unless you know theyre doing the same, it wont be effective."
One such project, now largely completed, is ridding textbooks of stereotypes and omissions. Another, known as To Live Together, is an ambitious plan, in which Jewish youngsters in a Jerusalem high school are being paired with Palestinians in a Beit Jallah school over a five-year period. The teenagers take part in joint trips, projects and meetings, and study peace education and conflict resolution according to curricula prepared by Institute researchers.
The Institutes newest project concerns the common heritage of Arabs and Jews. "In a conflict situation such as that in the Middle East, stress is inevitably on the differences between people, the clashes in their needs and hopes," he says. "Our Common Heritage project will focus instead on what Jews and Arabs share and not what divides them, building curricula to teach what we have in common."
Seven Israeli academics from the Truman Institute will pair with seven Palestinian scholars from Al-Quds University in the project. In seven seminars, they will focus on what the Children of Abraham share, from historic periods of coexistence to philosophy , and from Semitic language to their faiths, which have much in common. By early next year, the project hopes to produce and teach a university-level curriculum, which will later be adapted for high school and even elementary school pupils.
"This is our Good News project," enthuses Dr. Kaufman. "In many ways, it encapsulates what were trying to do. When you focus on conflict, you get conflict. But here our focus is on harmony, and I believe that it will ultimately produce harmony."