Arava Institute shatters the mold

PAT JOHNSON

During the Oslo process, which was intended to lead to a two-state solution, an estimated $20 to $30 million was invested in peace-building projects aimed at enhancing understanding and trust between Israelis and Palestinians.

With the collapse of Oslo and the start of the Second Intifada, in 2000, almost every one of these “people-to-people” (P2P) projects collapsed along with the peace process. Substantial research has been devoted to “what went wrong,” but one Canadian professor looked at an unprecedented and successful project that withstood the conflicts of the last decade to find out how things can continue to go right.

“The best way to get to peacemaking is not to do peacemaking,” Prof. Asaf Zohar told an audience at the University of British Columbia on Oct. 27. The example he and his academic colleagues studied is the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which exists to teach “future Arab and Jewish leaders to cooperatively solve the region’s environmental challenges.”

Arava brings together for a single semester at a time cadres of students, made up one-third of Jewish and Arab Israelis, one-third Palestinians and Jordanians and one-third foreign students from around the world, to study environmental issues. While the conflict eclipses almost everything else in the region, Zohar said, environmental degradation, poor air quality and perennial regional challenges around water are absolutely dire.

Arava was created by kibbutzniks from the Conservative movement who were determined that borders not get in the way of crucial environmental cooperation. Zohar noted that some of the world’s best sites for solar energy creation are precisely on the border between Israel and Jordan. He added that, while many or most Israeli-Palestinian civil society projects ground to a halt with the beginning of the Second Intifada, the students, faculty and founding kibbutzniks were determined to not let the Arava Institute suffer the same fate.

“They said, ‘If we stop talking now, it’s done,’ and they managed to get through it,” Zohar said, though it was not without its difficult moments. Palestinian and Jordanian students insisted on a protest march through the small community to express dismay at the loss of life during the conflict. And the pain in the tight-knit Israeli community, whose sons and daughters were on the front lines, was intense.

The intercultural bonding and understanding Zohar observed, however, did not occur during deep conversations about the conflict, but through the more ordinary interactions of students from different backgrounds. Classes are taught in English, which results in some foreign students mentoring Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian peers. When the school does field trips in Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, the native students mentor the others in local customs and cultures, leading to an ever-shifting function of mentor and mentee, he said.

In interviews with alumni, Zohar and his colleagues discovered that, from a mutual understanding perspective, informal conversations were more important than formal class settings.

“Coursework often got in the way,” he said. In fact, he noted, the class most alumni dismissed as the least impactful was the solitary component of the program that dealt directly with cultural understanding and peace building.

In addition to alternative energy, the institute, which is associated with Ben-Gurion University, does work in such areas as aquatic farming, greywater irrigation and using seawater for agriculture. Arava students and faculty are vocal critics of Israel’s high per capita use of water.

It was scholars associated with the Arava Institute who helped scuttle a plan to divert water from the Mediterranean or the Red Sea, through pipes or canals, to the Dead Sea, which is polluted and receding at a rate of a metre per year. The plan, which was endorsed by such leading voices as Israel’s President Shimon Peres, was scuttled in part through research from the Arava Institute, which determined that combining the two water bodies held potentially catastrophic environmental consequences for the Dead Sea.

“It would have been total ecological disaster,” said Zohar.

But Zohar’s research is less concerned with the environmental achievements of the Arava Institute and more with the secondary impact of cultural understanding. With colleagues Stuart Schoenfeld and Ilan Alleson, Zohar interviewed alumni of the program to determine the qualitative factors that permitted the continued success of the multilateral school, even as similar projects dissolved amid the acrimony of the past decade. Among the findings was the impact of intense living structures, in which students were housed in triads of an Israeli, a Palestinian or Jordanian and a foreign student, meaning that every student was always in a two-to-one minority. While almost all students arrived with predictable preconceptions, Zohar said, they were able to “suspend certainties” in this situation, in part by retreating to the transcendent matter at hand.

“You can talk about politics, but we’re here to talk about the environment,” is how Zohar summarizes the attitude that helped students overcome conflicts. Even so, school administrators have had to become adept at obtaining travel permits for Palestinian students to move between the institute, located on Kibbutz Ketura, 50 kilometres north of Eilat in the remote Negev, and their homes in the West Bank and Gaza.

If Canadian audiences have not heard of this story, it is not necessarily an oversight. Arava tends to operate deliberately below the radar, because too high a profile could jeopardize its work among parties who might view this “collaboration” in the most negative sense of the word. That sense is particularly acute for Arab students.

“The Palestinians and Jordanians who come here are really courageous,” Zohar said. Many are blackballed in their home communities for “studying with the enemy” and condemned by their families.

Zohar said that the Arava Institute is “an example, not the exemplar” of how individuals from conflicted cultures can overcome difficult divisions by focusing not directly on the roots of conflict but instead diverting energies to a shared objective. The Arava Institute, by mere dint of surviving, is a success story in what remains of the people-to-people projects initiated during the Oslo process.

“It’s not huge,” Zohar said. “It’s 40 or 50 students per semester. But it is huge.”

In addition to the happy byproduct of intercultural cooperation, Zohar added, almost every grassroots environmental project springing up in Israel in recent years comes from among the relatively small corps of a few hundred alumni of the Arava Institute.

As well as chairing the business program at Ontario’s Trent University and its new master’s program in sustainability studies, Zohar is chair of Canadian Academics for Peace in the Middle East, an organization that aims “to protect civil and scholarly discourse as it pertains to the state of Israel and the Middle East on university and college campuses across Canada.”

Pat Johnson is director of development and communications for the Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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