THE JOURNAL NEWS

LEARNING

Promoting peace, one textbook at a time

June 13, 2005

By Meryl Hyman Harris

Suppose life has been good to you and you want to give something back.

Like, say, world peace.

If you are Victor J. Goldberg, you plop your $200,000 down as a challenge: Every year an Arab and an Israeli who work together to advance peace in the Middle East are to share a $10,000 prize.

"I am more excited about this than I ever thought I'd be," Goldberg said last week, shortly after he had traveled to Jerusalem to see U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer present the inaugural prize.

It went to professors Dan Bar-On and Sami Adwan, whose idea was to encourage teenage students not to hate by "disarming" history books in a place where one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The work draws on Bar-On's methods of reconciliation between the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of Nazis.

The two professors write about typical textbooks on the Web site dedicated to their Peace Research Institute in the Middle East, "The heroes of one side are the monsters of the other. Also, the maps in the texts eliminate the cities and towns of the other side. The texts show the delegitimization of each other's rights, history and culture. There is also no recognition of each other's sufferings.

"The Holocaust is barely mentioned in Palestinian texts, and, likewise, the trauma of Palestinians is ignored in the Israeli texts.  The findings show also that both sides' textbooks fail to include the peaceful periods of coexistence between Jews and Palestinians."

Bar-On of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and Adwan of Bethlehem University brought together Palestinian and Israeli teachers and historians - at some risk and trouble, considering curfews and other restrictions currently in effect in the region - to develop booklets showing key moments in Middle East history through the eyes of both cultures.
The booklets are being tested in Palestinian and Israeli schools.

"If you keep teaching kids to hate in your schoolbooks, there will never be peace," said Goldberg of Scarsdale. "If you can change the schoolbooks, in a couple of generations you get a shot."

There are nine Palestinian and nine Israeli classroom teachers participating so far, Goldberg said. The booklets cover big moments in shared history, moments that are considered miracles or tragedies, depending on which side you come from. They include the Balfour Declaration of 1917, through which the British agreed to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities."

Goldberg endowed the prize on the occasion of his 25th year on the board of the venerable Institute of International Education, which administers the Fulbright program for the U.S. Department of State.

At least one of the team recipients must be a former winner of one of the institute's 200 programs, in this case Bar-On, who had a Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983.

Goldberg, long committed to the value of international education, decided he'd put his money toward something big and hopeful, rather than, say, having a room named after him or applying dollars to a project safely in progress. "It should be called the Don Quixote Prize," he said, laughing.

He had no idea the inaugural award would support textbooks. "That was icing on the cake," he said.

In fact, he does not sit on the committee that selects the winners. "Part of the value of this thing was that it be very prestigious. The $10,000 wasn't prestigious and nobody ever heard of me. So we said let's get a prestigious committee. That committee now includes, among others, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and a former president of the American Jewish Committee.

"I think the most enriched person in this is me," Goldberg said. "I've had the opportunity to see what it can mean. I am more excited than I ever thought I'd be, and my expectations were fairly low because it was such a long shot."

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Learning is published on Mondays. Meryl Harris would like to hear from you at mharris@thejournalnews.com or 914-694-5080.

Meryl Hyman Harris
The Journal News, 1 Gannett Dr., White Plains, N.Y. 10604
Phone 914-694-5080
mharris@thejournalnews.com
Fax     914-694-3535

The Journal News is the daily newspaper of  Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties, the suburbs north of New York City.