About twelve years ago I participated in a conference in Cyprus that was co-sponsored by an American and Spanish NGO. The conference brought together Israeli and Palestinian educators to discuss introducing peace-oriented study in their respective school curricula.
We were all asked to bring material relating to peace already in use, which would be reviewed and from which either side could borrow creative ideas. Palestinian educators had no such material so the time at the conference was spent reviewing Israeli material.
During a discussion about, if I remember correctly, problems of teaching peace in the classroom, one of the Palestinian teachers raised an issue that was quite unexpected by the conference sponsors, and by me for that matter. She, being a Christian Arab from Jerusalem, expressed discouragement at the increasing gap between Christians and Muslims within the Palestinian community. As a lifelong Palestinian nationalist she was disturbed by the fact that her teenage son had more in common with Israeli teenagers that he met on the beach in Tel Aviv than he did with Muslim Palestinian teenagers who were his lifelong neighbors.
