Opinion
Opinion Piece – Why Conflict Education?
By Abi Dauber Sterne
During this COVID period, I’ve asked myself many times, what kind of education are people looking for? And, more specifically, during this period, when people can’t travel to Israel and when there is so much upheaval in the world, what kind of Israel education do they want to engage with?
The answer, of course, is all kind of things. But, interestingly, just as I thought that people wouldn’t have the energy to delve into complex and difficult issues – specifically ones that don’t immediately impact on their lives – it turns out, they do.
The Jewish Agency for Israel’s Makom just announced an 8-part online series for educators on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Within days, we had significant interest from a wide range of educators.
Makom has always hailed the importance of education from and towards complexity, and it turns out, that even during the most complex period of our lifetime, people want still more complexity.
We decided to launch this program – long before COVID-19 hit – because we understand that Jewish young adults (our main target audience) and their educators need a space for a dynamic, complex Israel in their lives. Lacking such a space amidst the raucous community arguments, some of the next generation exhibits growing signs of detachment from and deep discomfort with Israel and the Jewish people more broadly.
When educators are unable or unwilling to explain, contain, and grapple with challenges that Israel can present to some, engagement with Israel is at risk.
How can we expect our educators to respond to their participants’ questions about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, when the established Jewish community struggles to respond to complexity and provide education and training to do so?
Through this new Jewish Agency Makom program, we aim to expose educators to rich content, while also creating a space where complex conversation is welcomed with curiosity rather than judgment, with encouragement rather than deferral of serious engagement.
In other words, we have two main goals: 1) For Jewish educators to feel better equipped to teach about and respond to questions about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and as a result, more comfortable talking about Israel more broadly, and 2) To signal to Jews of all kinds, with a range of political opinions, that they are an integral part of the broader Jewish people.
Our online course is our way of dipping our toe in the choppy water. We’re expecting critique – Why did you include this speaker and not that one? Is this field better studied with or without voices that question fundamental values of Israel? Are we appropriately teaching how to navigate between competing values of security, freedom, social resilience, and more? How come the program did or didn’t talk about this or that issue? And so on, and so on…
But we’re also expecting that this course – just the beginning of our work in this arena – will open up new conversations for many educators and their students, create new and richer engagements with Israel, and ultimately lead to a stronger Jewish people.
Abi Dauber Sterne is the director of the Makom: The Jewish Agency for Israel Education Lab.