The rise in violence against women is interconnected with the presence and rise of authoritarianism and militarism. Gun Free Kitchen Tables, an Israeli feminist movement to counter domestic violence committed by military-issued weapons, looks at the domestic and intimate violence integral to patriarchal militarism and its effects on women.
According to the American Friends of the Parents Circle – Families Forum, “the Israeli government has recently announced its intention to restrict the Parents Circle’s public activities, starting with the removal of its Dialogue Meeting programs from Israeli schools…based on false allegations that the Dialogue Meetings [it often hosts in schools] denigrates IDF soldiers.” The dialogue meetings being challenged are led by two PCFF members, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who tell their personal stories of bereavement and explain their choice to engage in dialogue instead of revenge.
NBA Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo was joined alongside storied Portuguese soccer manager Jose Mourinho as guest speakers for the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation’s Mini Mondial. The mini mondial celebrates the annual culmination of the Peres Center’s youth sports programs.
Quakers in Britain have launched a new education pack about the impact of conflict and stories of peacebuilding in Palestine and Israel. “Razor Wire & Olive Branches” draws on eyewitness accounts of human rights monitors to explore the conflict through the lives of those affected by it.
The Israel Football Association (IFA) and the Jaffa-based Peres Center for Peace and Innovation signed an agreement to collaborate on a unique nationwide project, which will build connections between Jewish and Arab boys and girls through soccer.
Israel’s parliament has passed a law that could ban groups critical of the armed forces or the state from entering schools and speaking to students. The law by 43 votes to 24 in a move that its detractors say will stamp out free speech in the educational system.
Israeli organisation Givat Haviva, whose work in The Jewish-Arab Center for Peace earned it a UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 2011, is set to open an international boarding school in September 2018. The program will focus on “intellectual growth, conflict resolution training and leadership development.”
NBA players have landed in Israel where they will participate in special workshops aimed at encouraging peace education through basketball.
Thousands of Palestinian and Israeli women marched in Jerusalem and Jericho this month demanding peace from their societies. They are doing so by reaching past and through stereotypes and artificial boundaries to find true partners. Such efforts are given little, often inaccurately reported and interpreted, coverage by the standard media. So it is through the networks of women’s civil society organizations and initiatives that we learn of them. We believe that linking peace educators’ networks to those of civil society activists is essential to the field’s having the information necessary to inquiring into the multiple possibilities for action among those they are educating for responsible global citizenship. So we offer this article hoping that it will be adapted for peacelearning purposes.
The Heart to Heart program fosters friendships between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis at a summer camp near Ottawa, half a world away from the mutual suspicions of home.