Peace Leadership Program for Israelis & Palestinians

We are raising money for the Radical Aliveness Peace Leadership Program for Israelis & Palestinians. It is a 3-year intensive experiential training program for community leaders from across Israel and the West Bank that started in February 2023 and has continued despite the war.

The group consists of 11 Israelis and 11 Palestinians including Christians, Druze, settlers, Orthodox Jews, returned Zionists, Palestinians living in Israel, Palestinians living in the West Bank, secularists, and former soldiers. It is a *very* heterogeneous group.

We gather three times a year for a week, in locations across Israel and the West Bank, with smaller in-person group sessions and one-on-one Zoom meetings in between. The war has made this more challenging; sometimes we have to meet separately– Israelis together and Palestinians together – and gatherings have become increasingly risky.

THE TRAINING

.

The training focuses on the development of two key skills:

First, is the ability to tolerate one's pain. Participants are given space to fully express their rage, despair, and hopelessness, with no requirement to hold anything back. This may sound basic but most people have nowhere to go to address their deepest feelings. This makes violent and aggressive avenues of expression much more likely.

Participants also learn to tolerate the pain of others; the pain their people may have directly or indirectly inflicted. Witnessing the deepest pain of one’s “enemy” is a transformative experience and central to our curriculum.

The second skill we develop is recognizing and understanding the perceptual filters through which we see the world. These filters are shaped by culture, religion, class, family systems and interpersonal experiences and can be challenging to identify. Painstakingly, participants accept that their reality is one perspective among many and that their “enemy’s” reality feels just as real. Acknowledging the power dynamics between groups of people is an important part of this process.

Both skills aim to counteract the dehumanization of “the other” inherent in deep-rooted conflicts like this one.

The leaders then return to their communities, as Imams, Rabbis, teachers, parents and political agents, with far greater capacity to create environments with less polarization and less dehumanization even when there is intense disagreement. The ultimate goal is to produce leaders trained to find new ways of imagining the future by facilitating difficult and painful conversations between parties.

FUNDING REQUEST

The program costs $200,000 per year to run. We have recently completed the first year, there are two more to go.

Most of the costs are tuition support for participants - room, board, travel expenses, meeting expenses in between modules, and facilitation expenses. Many participants have lost their livelihoods due to the ongoing war and would not have the means to participate without your support.

100% of the funds go directly to support this program. They are processed through the Radical Aliveness Institute, a 501c3 organization and are tax deductible. Please give whatever you can – no amount is too small.

We are so grateful for your support.

MORE ABOUT RADICAL ALIVENESS

The program is based on the principles of Radical Aliveness, an approach to personal, interpersonal and social change that Ann Bradney has spent decades honing. For 30 years, she has facilitated hundreds of groups around the world– in the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe, Kenya, and the Middle East – and this approach is what emerged from noticing what brought people into real connection with each other, particularly when there is friction. There is nothing ideological about the approach. It does not hold a specific vision for how “conflict resolution” in the region (or anywhere) should look. Its focus is on creating an environment in which all of the complexity and deep emotion of a situation is allowed to be present. When no one has to leave or be right, new possibilities emerge.