CCTS
Review 34

RTC’s experience in the Middle East

In the third presentation, Marwan Darweish and Sarah Giles described Responding To Conflict’s ongoing work in Israel and Palestine.

This work grew out of an initial feasibility study conducted by RTC for the British Council in East Jerusalem, primarily involving discussions with Palestinian civil society organisations, but later widening to include Israeli NGOs. During a preliminary 15-month pilot phase, RTC offered capacity building support, so that local actors could interact more coherently and strategically with each other and increase their impact on policymakers. This phase also included conflict analysis and a series of ‘taster’ Conflict Transformation training sessions for Palestinian and Israeli civil society organisations.

Having obtained further funding, RTC has spent the last 3 years (2004-2007) working with a range of Israeli and Palestinian civil society organisations on a programme to build their capacity to ensure that the visions, aspirations and concerns of Israeli and Palestinian citizens for a just settlement of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict impact effectively on political decision-shapers and on public discourse. The overarching objective is to contribute to a sustainable and just peace in the region, through good governance and nonviolent conflict resolution. The programme involves the delivery of conflict transformation training to partner organisations as well as working with them on developing and implementing action plans for transferring this learning into their organisations and wider communities.

The structure of the programme involves four field visits per year, each of 3 weeks’ duration. Each visit involves workshops and interim meetings to draw out the learning from the previous workshop and plan for the next one. As with the previous two presentations, RTC’s strategy was therefore evolutionary; no fixed path was defined at the start of the programme.

Programme delivery

The selection of partners proceeded differently in the two communities. In Palestine, partners were sought through PNGO, a network of more than 100 Palestinian NGOs. After an open recruitment process, 25 organisations were selected to form a strategy group. By contrast, Israel had no existing forum to cooperate with, and there was little desire to create one at that time. Initially, therefore, RTC worked bilaterally with a number of separate Israeli organisations: Shatil (Israel’s largest capacity-building organisation, which aims to strengthen Israeli civil society by promoting democracy, social justice and tolerance), New Profile (a feminist/anti-military group), Hakeshet (which promotes the rights of the Oriental Jews) and Mossawa (a group that advocates and campaigns for the rights of Palestinians living in Israel). RTC made it clear that this bilateral work was only for a limited period, and that it would be necessary to formulate some sort of common theme if the work was to continue, but this took some time to emerge. Interestingly, there was little curiosity from each side about RTC’s work with the other side, though both were aware that RTC was working in Palestine and Israel.

The preliminary 15-month study had revealed a Palestinian civil society that was fragmented and violent, with little capacity to effect change. The first year of the programme phase (starting September 2004) consisted primarily of conflict transformation (CT) training and organisational capacity building (including working with Israeli organisations to clarify their positioning with regard to the wider conflict). There was little evidence of applied learning until the second year, when a number of small initiatives began. These included: partners from the Medical Relief Committee transferring the training to their programme managers; agricultural workers in Gaza using CT techniques in dealing with potential conflicts over access to water and other agricultural resources following the withdrawal of Jewish settlers; women in the West Bank standing up to male dominated local councils; lawyers in the West Bank using CT in legal disputes, as a precursor to court involvement, and work to try and include CT in undergraduate legal training.

Turning points

With the Palestinians, there was a definite point, two years in, when partners had developed enough trust in RTC to accept that their ‘agenda’ was not simply ‘normalisation’.

In Israel, the turning point was when Shatil asked RTC to run two seminars for Directors of a number of Jewish and Palestinian social change organisations. More than half of these Directors expressed an interest in continuing to meet after the seminars. The current Strategy Group in Israel, the creation of which had initially been so difficult to motivate, grew out of these meetings.

Challenges

Funding has been a major challenge throughout the programme. The work has never been fully funded, and the 60-70% funding RTC does receive is provided by three donors. The UK GCPP offered substantial programme funding in early 2006 but withdrew its intention to continue funding in the summer when the war in Lebanon began and GPC had to divert the money to reconstruction work there. The three-year initial programme will end this year, and RTC is preparing for a second phase in which they will change their role from trainer to accompanier. RTC is encouraging local partners to fundraise as part of the transfer of ownership of the work.

Many of RTC’s civil society partners (Israeli as well as Palestinian) were initially suspicious that RTC had a hidden agenda to bring the two sides together for dialogue. This was never RTC’s agenda, despite the awareness that at some point in the future, civil society organisations from both sides will need to have a level of dialogue during the peace process.

The process of CT knowledge transfer by partners to a wider community proved much more challenging than RTC had envisaged. The process of building confidence to implement the learning in practical actions took longer than expected. It has been a struggle for RTC, based in Birmingham, to support this vital work from so far away, and RTC is trying to ensure a clearly defined role of accompaniment for the next phase in order to promote sustainability and long term change.

The war in Lebanon polarised society within Israel, and created great tensions within the mixed Jewish/Palestinian steering group; despite the risk of fragmentation and possible disintegration, however, the group has gained in strength and is now more able to clarify their joint vision and agenda.

Even before the recent violent takeover of Gaza by Hamas the mood of the area was one of isolation and despair. Now, things are even worse, and it can be hard to sustain optimism in a programme that at best is making only small grassroots improvements.

Discussion

The difficulty of getting partners to transfer learning and so multiply the effect of the programme, was the first focus of the ensuing discussion. Some participants had experienced this problem when working with relatively junior members of an organisation – because they lacked the authority to change attitudes within the wider organisation – but had more success when they dealt with senior managers or organisation directors. It was recognised, however, that training others was likely to be a challenge for organisations that had no training skills.

Marwan’s expressed feeling of despair was also taken up in general discussion. Participants who know the RTC programme commented on the progress that had been made – from initial hostility and resistance to the present day where 3-4 groups had developed local momentum and were doing constructive work together. The huge importance and value of sustaining hope and offering support in times of crisis was also re-iterated. Affecting the quality of coexistence at a very local level is part of this – described by one participant as the ‘daily peace’ as opposed to the ‘big peace’.

One participant acknowledged that, for him, civil society work alone was not enough. He felt that where people were dying there was a duty to try and engage with governments, too. He commended Jonathan’s success in establishing senior political links in the UK and UN, but thought such relationships were too rare, and that peacebuilding practitioners should try harder to engage at this level.

Others felt that governments generally knew exactly what was happening, but that ‘realpolitik’ over-rode this knowledge when policy was formulated. Some thought that the desk officers – whether in the UK or the USA – were generally very well informed, and tended to share much of the analysis and concerns of the peace workers. They felt that the difficulty was in getting through to the politicians themselves, especially when they received so much of their briefing not through the civil servants but through ‘special advisors’. In these circumstances, all that one can do is to continue to respond with what Jonathan described as ‘consistent, coherent argumentation’.

<< Previous article

newsletter  |  ccts |  top