Building Together for Peace and Development

"Our primary concern," says Paz, "is with societies in transition, with societies undergoing fundamental processes of transformation from conflict to conflict resolution, from the rigidities of centralized economics and political dictatorships to democracy and free market economics and from poverty and dependence to sustainable human development and socio-economic advance. All these changes are happening very rapidly. If, in 1988, for example, someone had said that in less than two years the world would witness the break-up of the Soviet Union bloc and the end of apartheid in South Africa, no one would have believed him. This rapidity of change," he stresses, "produces a kind of social and philosophical vertigo. It is very frightening for many people when the certainties and verities by which they have lived are challenged and collapse."

NISPED, which opened its doors in January 1998, is a center for education, training, consultancy, research and project development for these societies in transition. Paz recognizes that they vary greatly in terms of their setting, pace and achievement, but, as he points out, "they all share common elements." One of the most significant is the central role of the civil society within these transitions. "Civil society," he explains, "is an inclusive term for voluntary, people-centered, non-governmental groups and organizations. It includes community associations, women's and youth groups, cooperatives and small and medium enterprises, labor movements and more - all bodies which give people some measure of control over their own destinies, some realistic empowerment." Paz is convinced of the need to enhance and expand the active involvement of the civil society in the positive evolution of these transformations. Thus, in resolving conflicts, "a durable peace process must be linked to a people-to-people process, one that works parallel to the political process."

MASHAV shares this conviction and recognizes the linkage between conflict resolution (and other major transformations) and sustainable human development. "If the lives of people are not changed with the coming of peace," as Paz explains, "then the peace process itself will degenerate. If people's lives are not improved, if they do not have increased hope for the future and for that of their children, then they can easily slip from disappointment and cynicism to renewed hatred and from there the distance to the slide into violence is a short one. When we talk about development in this context or indeed in any other," he adds, "we mean more than economic development. We must also focus on human resource development that is the key to advancing potential and capacity. We must also be concerned with the social aspects of development, with education, health and welfare, with the promotion of democracy and human rights, with greater equity and the expansion of opportunity, with national culture and with respect for our ecology. In a word: with sustainable, human-centered development as a comprehensive concept."

In line with these policies which have guided NISPED since its inception, great emphasis is placed on courses and workshops for Palestinians. As Vivian Silver, NISPED's Executive Director says, "We are working together with them in developing a society according to a value system which embraces women's rights, democracy, the eradication of poverty and the better distribution of resources."

In 1999, of the 18 courses and workshops run by NISPED, ten were for Palestinians. The names of these courses demonstrate the focus and range of NISPED's concerns. Of the ten, the following seven were given in cooperation with MASHAV: "Support Systems for Small Businesses," "The Role of NGOs in the Peace Process," "Human Resources Management," "The Role of the Civil Society in Building Peace," "Promoting Women Leaders," "The Contribution of Volunteer Organizations to Local Government" and "Promoting Youth Leaders."

Another workshop, "Promoting Entrepreneurship for Palestinian Women," was held in cooperation with the Peres Center for Peace where Paz is a senior consultant, while two other workshops were held in partnership with the International Labor Organization (ILO).

In working with a broad range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Palestinian Authority, NISPED is demonstrating its deep-rooted belief in the importance and necessity of involving the civil society in as many facets of the peace process as possible. And the key words are: "working together." As Paz says, "We plan, organize, run and evaluate courses together, on a basis of full partnership. Given in Arabic, one half of each course is held at an Israeli venue (NISPED's base at the Negev College and its residential center at the guest house of Kibbutz Ruhama) and one half at the Palestinian venue in Gaza or in the West Bank. All this helps create a healthy situation of people seeking to create a partnership of equals. Behind all our programming there is one constant - Let's build together."

"Together" is also the dominant thrust behind NISPED's growing number of regional and international connections. It conducts courses in cooperation with the Ministry of Trade of Jordan and is developing working ties with similar Egyptian frameworks. NISPED has particularly extensive ties with Palestinian bodies, including over 25 NGOs and various government offices. On the international scene, NISPED has developed, in its brief lifetime, close working ties with a number of major UN agencies. It serves as the focal point for SHIFT (Shaping our Future Together), a major people-to-people peace program initiative of the ILO, the International Labor Organization, which seeks to promote a whole range of projects undertaken jointly by Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. It is launching a UNESCO-sponsored program designed to deepen knowledge of language and culture for Israeli and Palestinian secondary school teachers and pupils. In partnership with UNIDO, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, it is initiating training programs for Latin American and African countries, focusing on support systems for small and medium enterprises. In Israel itself NISPED has developed working ties with a number of bodies (in addition to its partnership with MASHAV). It has even launched a consultancy framework called Plan-Dev, which offers planning and evaluation services for development projects throughout the world.

An additional agreement for a permanent, institutionalized connection was reached when a memorandum of understanding was signed with the World Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (WASME), the roof organization of the world's SMEs. The first joint course was held in November-December 1999, with the participation of the Secretary-General of WASME. NISPED now heads WASME's training arm. Additional international courses were held, including one in Portuguese for Brazilians organized in cooperation with the Israeli-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce.

"We give a great deal of weight to promoting small and medium-sized enterprises since they are an important tool of economic reconstruction and for helping people develop their initiative, through learning how to help themselves - and this is particularly necessary for those living in societies in transition, i.e., in societies undergoing vast change."

Recognizing the significance of these enterprises, NISPhas set up a subdivision, "The International Center for the Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises (InCep-SME)," which is providing training, project promotion and consultancy services. It is headed by Shmuel Bahat, the founder and former director of Israel's Small Business Authority.

Paz has had a lifelong interest in promoting the establishment and role of cooperatives "which," he explains, "are enterprises owned by the people who run and use them. They, too, are important tools for economic self-help and development." To this end NISPED is launching a new sub-division - the International Center for Cooperative Studies (INCECOS) which will focus on training, project development and consultancy for and about cooperatives.

Paz is a man of vision, with a talent for translating his ideas into pragmatic programs.

NISPED is really Paz's "baby," a center he conceived, designed and heads. "When looking for institutional support," he notes, "I was really very pleased and moved to find that MASHAV recognized our potential and gave us its approval and full backing. And, in truth, we are important to MASHAV as our areas of concern are those with which it is more and more involved."

Paz's proposal was also favorably received by the Negev College, an independent, degree-granting institution affiliated with Ben-Gurion University. The College, located near Shderot (approximately 13 miles from Gaza), is Israel's largest regional college, with 9,000 students enrolled in its academic programs and in its adult and community education framework.

"There was a real meeting of minds between us and the College," recalls Paz. "It has supported us from the beginning for it, too, is interested in making a contribution to the peace process. We have a symbiotic relationship with the College which gave us space for our academic plant and which grants our graduates their certificates upon completion of our courses. At the same time, the College benefits from the work we are doing and the directions we are taking. Until our relationship, for example, the College had had only one Palestinian graduate, a student who now heads the Israeli desk at the Palestinian Authority. Today, it has more than 600 Palestinian students each year - the participants in NISPED courses and workshops."

To listen to Paz is to realize that his work at NISPED is a logical culmination of what he has done in the past, of a life devoted to helping people work together to build moral, ethical and just societies.

Born in the United States in 1930, Yehudah Paz came to Israel in 1950 with his wife, Ruth. "The State of Israel had just been born then and we wanted to be a part of that national and Jewish renewal. How could we not be part of that national rebirth?" he asks rhetorically. Even more than this desire to be part of the new State was the sense of moral responsibility he and his wife felt to try and build a better society, to contribute to promoting universal values and relationships. "We did not believe that, after 2000 years of exile, the Jewish people should create just another petty state, albeit a Hebrew-speaking one. We felt that the end of our exile should see us giving birth to an ethical society, one that would be a 'light unto all nations'."

The logical destination for the Pazes was the kibbutz, that unique form of communal settlement in Israel where the good of the community and equal rights for all are primary values and "where," says Paz, "there is the moral imperative to translate one's beliefs into concrete reality. If you believe something to be true, then you have to act on it. And we believed in the right of the State of Israel to exist and, even more important, in the need to give that existence content and meaning." The kibbutz on which the Pazes settled was Kissufim in the Negev, in the southern part of Israel, which they helped to found and on which they still live. Paz has served as the general secretary and treasurer of the kibbutz and has also held significant administrative and executive positions in the United Kibbutz Movement, the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor), the Jewish Agency and the Israel Labor Party.

Over and above all, Paz is an educator in the truest sense of the word, one who seeks to help people develop their innate capacities and potential. In the 1960s (after nearly a decade as a farmer in the field crops branch of his kibbutz), he was a teacher and the principal of the school in Kibbutz Kissufim and in the 1970s he was the principal of Maale Habesor, the regional secondary school. Over the years he has been a lecturer at the Negev College, Ben-Gurion University, the United Kibbutz Movement's Efal Education Center and a variety of universities throughout the world.

Yehudah Paz became directly involved in development cooperation (and began his two-decade relationship with MASHAV) in 1980 when he became the director and principal of the Afro-Asian Institute which had been founded by the Histadrut in 1958 - Israel's oldest development cooperation institution. (MASHAV was also founded in that year.) Its focus was on leadership training for the trade union, cooperative and community organizations and on strengthening their contribution to development. In 1993 Paz pioneered the amalgamation of the Afro-Asian Institute with the Center for Labor and Cooperative Studies for Latin America and with the Institute for Eastern and Central Europe (a division for the Middle East was established later) to form the International Institute, which he headed as director and principal until his retirement early in 1997. During those 17 years these MASHAV partnership institutions were recognized throughout the world as leaders in their field, and under the directorship of Paz conducted several hundreds of MASHAV-supported courses in Israel and abroad in which over 18,000 participants from some 145 countries took part. Among the myriad graduates were dozens of presidents, prime ministers, ministers and members of parliament; hundreds of leaders of trade unions, cooperatives, women's and youth groups and other people-centered organizations and literally thousands of men and women whose horizons of perception were broadened, whose personal capabilities were expanded and whose commitment to their country's development heightened by their studies at the Afro-Asian and the International Institutes - as were their ties of friendship to Israel.

Paz treasures a plethora of friendships and contacts in virtually every country of the world as well as an inexhaustible store of anecdotes, stories and memories. Among the most poignant of these are the loyalty and ongoing contact of movements and leaders from almost all the countries of Africa and Asia with the Institute during the 1980s, despite the fact that many of their governments (almost all of those in Africa) had broken their diplomatic relations with Israel; the intense work of leadership training with and for the major organizations of the black community of South Africa from the early 1980s on and during those darkest of the apartheid years through which more than 500 men and women leaders studied at the Afro-Asian Institute; the first programs in Israel for leaders of the newly-reborn free cooperatives and trade unions of the former Soviet Union and of eastern European countries in the early 1990s following the end of the communist era; the first workshops with Palestinian participants soon after the signing of the Oslo agreements in 1993, and more.

"These were years beset with multitudes of daily problems, from chronic shortages of funding to bureaucratic buffeting, from ideological-political disputations to administrative complexities," says Paz, "but no one could ask, could dream of a life whose every day and every activity was richer in meaning, in ethical and social worth, in the sense of real accomplishment, in never ending new contacts with men and women of character, than that which I knew during those years. And let me add, on a MASHAV note, that although those years saw a very broad spectrum of political parties in power in Israel, the MASHAV support for this work, whose value in itself anfor the true spirit of Israel was readily apparent, never faltered."

Paz sees a connection between his life, his ideas and his work and those that guide MASHAV. "I have always regarded Israel's development cooperation activity as a multi-faceted endeavor. Yes, it is important in terms of friendships for our country, in terms of strengthening political and economic ties, in terms of Israel's global presence. But to my mind its essential value, its real importance lies in the fact that the spirit and the reality of its commitment to partnership in social and economic advance, to building a better world, to helping people everywhere develop societies based on principles of social justice, mutual assistance and equity is the truest expression of what we wish and hope that reborn Israel can and will be. This activity is, in many ways, the 'special soul,' the value-rich heart of even the most hard-headed and pragmatic of foreign policies. It is the modern expression of what Jewish tradition calls 'tikkun olam,' making a better world, which is a commandment incumbent on all of us. And the search for this kind of Israel, for a life of meaning and value, no less than the search for roots, is what brought me to Israel and directed my own life and work. And it's what I leave as a goodly inheritance to our four children, their wives and husbands and our six grandchildren."

Paz, however, is not just a theoretician. He is also a highly dedicated activist, one whose national and international commitments and connections are really extensive, including, among others, service as consultant to the Bernard van Leer Foundation in The Hague, The Netherlands, and to the ILO in Geneva, Switzerland.

Paz's interest in the establishment and promotion of cooperatives is reflected in his involvement with the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), the largest non-governmental organization in the world, with more than 750,000,000 members across the globe. Paz serves as Executive Board member, chairman of the Global Human Resource Development Committee and vice-chairman of the Asian-Pacific Region.

Paz is also the author of numerous studies, monographs, articles and texts, as well as visiting lecturer at universities in countries all over world, from the USA, through Europe to India, China and Japan. And, if this were not enough, in his "spare" time Paz plays the oboe and lectures on the American Civil War, a sideline research hobby of his.

Underlying all his work, all his contacts and all his interests is Paz's concern with the ethical, moral nature of society. He is interested in seeing the creation of societies which will maintain institutions of democratization, social justice and responsibility. "As societies change," he says, "there must be a moral cohesion behind the institutions they develop. Otherwise, there is no chance for any peace process to succeed and survive."

Paz, however, is by nature an optimist. He has always lived and acted on his conviction that human beings have a capacity for shaping their destinies in a moral and ethical fashion. At NISPED, he has brought together years of teaching, research, community activism, international affiliations and training and technical assistance for developing countries to create a center where "working together" to promote peace and development is sowing impressive seeds.