NOMA FAINGOLD
Bulletin Staff
Edy Kaufman is doing his part to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Hebrew University professor teaches peace with an Armenian-Palestinian from Bethlehem University.
"It's not enough to have peace among leaders," said Kaufman, 56, the executive director of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"We're really dealing with nation vs. nation. You have to have peace among people."
Kaufman's philosophy about addressing the deep-rooted conflict is that tolerance and empathy for both sides can be taught.
The political science professor was in San Francisco last week for an international conference on coexistence and community building. He began his grassroots approach to the peace process by experimenting with team-teaching classes, first at UCLA and for the last five years at the University of Maryland at College Park.
His teaching partner is Manuel Hassassian, who is the provost and a political science professor at Bethlehem University.
Aside from teaching together, he and Hassassian have co-authored books and articles.
Their newest project is developing similar peace education courses for much tougher audiences: Israeli and Palestinian students at the Hebrew University and al-Quds University, also in Jerusalem.
The progressive joint venture would be the equivalent of a Serb and a Croatian teaching a class in nationalism.
With the increase of peace organizations in Israel over the last few years, Kaufman believes the country will be open to examining the conflict from varied perspectives.
"It's more effective to teach many positions," he said.
At the University of Maryland, the two professors encourage student participation, discussing both the historical background of the struggle as well as current peace-process issues.
The two deal with the wars since 1948 from both the Palestinian and Israeli perspectives, including using the names of what the Palestinians call a certain war and what the Israelis call it.
"I don't have a problem with calling the 1948 War of Independence `Al Nakba' because that's teaching people to have respect for their vocabulary," Kaufman said. "That's a realistic phrase because, for Palestinians, it was a catastrophe."
The two also use role-playing techniques. "Sometimes we are all Israelis and then we'll reverse roles," he said. "The students are graded on how well they prepare arguments.
"It's exciting to teach like that," he added. "Students are fascinated because they can see the open-mindedness in the way we teach."
Occasionally, he said, students have been confrontational, asking "very offensive questions like, `Why are all Arabs terrorists?' to Hassassian."
In such cases, Kaufman will be the one to answer the question. "Manuel can take it, but people might be more understanding of each other if an Israeli promotes extreme tolerance."
In developing the curriculum, the two professors felt like pioneers, with no models or texts on how to team-teach "the conflict."
The Truman Institute is currently researching and developing 19 projects focusing on peace education, including classes for the two Jerusalem universities, which may be offered as early as next fall.
The proposed curriculum, covering such topics as culture, religion and proverbs, emphasizes what the two peoples have in common instead of what separates them.
"There's so much mistrust, hatred, prejudice, stereotyping and fear of each other," Kaufman said. "Those are the things we need to look at to make peace."
His dream is to eventually publish a team-teaching guide that could be offered at the high school level, as well as to both Jewish and Arab communities around the world.
"We're trying to support the peace process from the ground up," he said.
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