Update

Earlier this year, Search for Common Ground in the Middle East (SCGME) commissioned Steve Kull of the Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland to carry out focus groups, design questionnaires, and to do polling on attitudes towards non-violence among Israelis and Palestinians. On the Israeli side, he worked with the Tami Steinmetz Center of Tel Aviv University and on the Palestinian with the Jerusalem Media & Communications Center.

The results, released on August 28, were published widely and reflected a surprising potential for a non-violent intifada. Specifically, 80% of Palestinians would support a large-scale non-violent protest movement and 56% would participate in its activities. On the Israeli side, 78% of Israeli Jews believe that the Palestinians have a legitimate right to seek a Palestinian state, provided that they use non-violent means. Details are available on the Search for Common Ground website at http://www.sfcg.org.

SCGME has received a grant from the U.S. State Department to work with a group of eight Israeli and eight Palestinian women to discuss and explore non-violent approaches to conflict resolution, and distill into book form their experiences in non-violence. Our partners are the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University and Middle East Non-Violence and Democracy (MEND).

In April, SCGME arranged for an acclaimed PBS TV documentary, A Force More Powerful, to be shown on eight Palestinian television stations. Consisting of six half-hour segments with an Arabic soundtrack, the documentary features segments on Gandhi, the American civil rights movement, the opposition to Pinochet in Chile, the Danish opposition to the Nazis, the Gdansk shipyard strikes, and the boycotts against apartheid in South Africa.

In June, the Security Working Group (SWG) met in The Hague in conjunction with the Middle East Steering Committee. Participants discussed the regional security implications of the Arab Peace Initiative adopted at the Beirut Summit of March 2002, which offered Israel full normalization in exchange for full withdrawal to the June 1967 lines. They agreed that the declaration was an important statement of principles that could lend momentum to peacemaking between Israel and the Arab states. They further recognized that it was not well understood in Israel and had generated little reaction.

Search for Common Ground agreed to pursue two strategies for sparking a serious dialogue on the initiative: commissioning articles for the scholarly and popular press on Palestinian, Israeli, and other Arab views of the initiative, and convening a combined Track I-Track II workshop where officials from Arab countries will brief Israeli journalists on the initiative. The Canadian Special Middle East Envoy, who was represented at the meeting, is supporting these activities.

Building on a previous mandate from members the Security Working Group, Search for Common Ground is developing projects to enable nations in the Middle East, despite their obvious differences, to cooperate in protecting themselves against the threat of terrorism and other incidents involving weapons of mass destruction-including radiological, biological, and chemical weapons.

One of the projects is focused on developing a multinational medical surveillance system that would enable neighboring countries to identify and respond to disease outbreaks, whether they are natural or are caused by a biological weapons attack. Another is designed to foster cooperation on rapid response to emergencies in general and chemical spills or attacks in particular. The basic assumption of the project is that cooperative responses to WMD safety, prevention, and detection will not only enhance the efforts of individual nations to safeguard their security, but also will serve as significant confidence-building measures.

Elyte Baykun recently joined Search for Common Ground as a Program Associate in the Middle East program. She received her M.A. in Conflict Resolution from the University of Denver in March 2002, and holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She is a trained mediator, having worked with the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago.

The Common Ground News Service (CGNews) has recently launched a Hebrew-language service to complement the existing English and Arabic versions. To date, more than 100 articles have been republished in such leading regional and international newspapers as Al-Quds, Al-Hayat (London), Radikal (Istanbul), Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), and the International Herald Tribune, and total readership is now over 10,000 every week. To learn more about CGNews, visit the Search for Common Ground website or send an e-mail to cgnews@sfcg.org.

Search for Common Ground in Morocco organized a two-day training workshop on applied negotiation and mediation skills in June. The workshop was held in the Human Rights Center's training facility and was attended by 13-15 participants over the two days. The trainees represented the main Moroccan labor unions, the association of entrepreneurs, and the ministries of labor and human rights. The workshop was led by Oussama Safa, SCGM's country director and a professional trainer with broad experience in the Middle East and North Africa.

The training was the second in a series of two events funded by the British Foreign Commonwealth Office; the first major workshop was held in January 2002. Since then, SCGM has been managing an ongoing process of dialogue and capacity building that featured a visit in March 2002 by a Moroccan delegation to Washington, DC. The group visited labor institutions, participated in an advanced training, and learned about the American model for conducting labor-management relationships.

The overarching goal of the capacity-building process is to create a Moroccan cadre of specialists in mediation, negotiation, and facilitation, and to institutionalize the practice of collaborative problem solving in Moroccan labor unions and enterprises. The June workshop was designed to be another building block in this process to reinforce the participants' skills in applied negotiations and mediated interventions using Moroccan cases of conflict.

Copyright 2004 Search for Common Ground