Israel & Palestijnen Blog: Vrede tussen Israel en Palestijnen

vrijdag 3 april 2009

Vrede tussen Israel en Palestijnen

Van Sittard Web Log:

Vrede tussen Israel en Palestijnen

http://sittard.blogspot.com/2009/04/dangerous-filename-vrede-tussen-israel.html

Uit een Israëlische opiniepeiling vorig jaar (zie hieronder):

The survey of 1,721 Israelis, both Arab and Jewish, also showed that 73 percent of the Jews and 94 percent of the Arabs want Israel to "be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities."

Goede wil is er dus voldoende in Israël, en de regering zou hier gebruik van moeten maken om een aktief beleid te voeren om de samenleving tussen Joden en Arabieren in Israël te verbeteren.

De Palestijnse Autoriteit op de Westelijke Jordaanoever doet intussen het tegenovergestelde en straft pogingen tot begrip en toenadering vanuit de bevolking genadeloos af.

Steun de One Voice Movement.

Wouter

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Strings of Peace

Yup. On Sunday, March 29, 2009, Palestinian officials in Jenin announced that they have disbanded a youth orchestra after it played for Holocaust survivors in Israel. The youth orchestra was founded three years ago and was called "The Strings of Peace". The group began their concert with an Arabic song called We Sing For Peace.

The story in the BBC is here. The NY Times report is here.

The Strings of Peace

Zie ook:

Palestijnse kinderen zingen voor overlevenden Holocaust

Palestijns jeugdorkest opgeheven na zingen voor Holocaust overlevenden

Palestijnse Autoriteit heeft geen boodschap aan vrede en begrip overbrengen

Last update - 16:53 23/06/2008
Poll: 77% of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/995466.html

A recent opinion poll conducted by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government found that 77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.

The survey of 1,721 Israelis, both Arab and Jewish, also showed that 73 percent of the Jews and 94 percent of the Arabs want Israel to "be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities."

The Kennedy School said in a statement that the poll produced a number of results it termed surprising, pointing to a higher level of co-existence than might have been anticipated.

The research comes at a period of simmering tensions in some sectors of the Arab-Jewish divide within Israel.

The release of the poll coincided with celebrations, accompanied by widespread Israeli Arab boycotts, of the 60th anniversary of the state's declaration of independence.

Israeli Arab MKs cited widespread discrimination as the cause of the boycotts. At the same time, MK Limor Livnat (Likud) proposed that the Knesset remove Arabic from its list of the country's official primary languages.

However, Professor Todd Pittinsky, research director of the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership and lead researcher for the poll, said that the results pointed to a contrary phenomenon. Much media coverage focuses on the divisions between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel, and not enough on the sincere and concerted efforts to coexist peacefully, Pittinsky said in a statement.

According to the poll, 68 percent of Jewish citizens support teaching conversational Arabic in Jewish schools to help bring Arab and Jewish citizens together.

The data also showded that more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews (69 percdent) said they believed that contributing to co-existence was a personal responsibility.

"Every day, innovative experiments in coexistence are going on," Pittinsky said.

"People on the ground in Israel are running community centers that enable cultural exchanges; in bilingual schools?like the Hand in Hand network of schools - young Jewish and Arab children become culturally conversant with each other. These deserve as much attention as rockets and roadblocks. They should be nurtured, studied, funded, and reported in the media. Ultimately the most successful efforts should be launched on a wider scale."

The study, conducted in Hebrew and Arabic with the assistance of University of Haifa researchers, was funded by the Alan B. Slifka foundation, which has sponsored a number of coexistence projects.

"This report supports what we have long suspected?unity among Israel?s Jewish and Arab communities is not only attainable, but there is great public support for it," philanthropist Slifka said.

"The critical next step is for Israeli policy makers to bring about the structural changes that the Jewish and Arab publics support, to reshape the educational, income, residential, and other divides that undermine national unity."