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Programming peace
Middle East Education Through Technology program brings together Israeli, Palestinian high school students for IT, business classes over summer vacation. 'The idea was to bring together future Israeli and Palestinian leaders, but not in some forest in Switzerland,' says program's leader
The MEET project has launched its sixth annual summer program aimed at brining Israeli and Palestinian high school students together through business and IT classes.
Some 120 students take part in the Middle East Education Through Technology program held in Jerusalem. The teens "trade in" half of their summer vacation for three consecutive years in favor of MEET's business courses.
The program is the brainchild of Anat Binur, her brother Yaron and Assaf Harlap. All three were attending universities abroad at the time of the al-Aqsa Intifada, and all three tell of the sharp contrast between the news coming out of Israel at the time and their experience of academic cooperation with their Palestinian and Arab peers.
"We wanted to create something similar in Israel, a place where you could create common ground over a shared interest," said Harlap.
"The idea was to bring together future Israeli and Palestinian leaders, to create a mutual professional language and to build a social network, but we didn’t want this to happen in some forest in Switzerland."
The program was inspired by a five-week seminar held by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which gave people from Africa basic computer programming skills.
The idea soon turned into a complete venture sponsored by MIT and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, with MIT sending its graduates to tutor participants, and Hebrew University providing them with the classrooms and student housing.
Getting into MEET is no simple thing either: Only 40 of the 700 ninth-graders who applied for the recent program were accepted and the process entailed a series of tests and personal interviews.
'We don’t agree on everything, but that's okay'
The first day of MEET's summer school saw René Murad, 15, from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem sit beside Naomi Goldman, 14, from Beit Shemesh, as if the Israeli-Arab conflict never existed.
This summer's program was cut to four weeks, instead of five, because of the financial crisis, but still, both Murad and Goldman summed the experience up with one word – "cool."
The first few days, they said, were awkward: "Most of us knew one of two students from school but everything still looked different. We didn’t know what to expect," said Goldman. "I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to fit in," added Murad, "but the Israelis were really nice to me."
"One of the best things about this program is that we get to meet Israeli and Palestinians in a non-political environment," said Goldman. "Until I came here I never met any Palestinians. My roommate here is a Palestinian girl and we've become good friends. We don’t agree on everything, but that's okay."
Not just another coexistence program
While the organizers stress that the program has no political agenda, it is a hard thing to say about a project that brings together teens from east Jerusalem and the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem with their peers from the capital's western neighborhoods, Beit Shemesh and Mevaseret Zion.
But can the program really be apolitical? "We accept people who we believe will one day be leaders of their communities, be it political, social or in the business world, so I guess there is a certain (political) element to it," said Harlap.
"The question is who soon they can realize that neither side is alone in this space. We didn’t want to create another preaching to the choir coexistence program, we wanted to bring together people from different backgrounds and change perceptions."
According to Harlap, the program's participation fee currently stands at $15,000 per student, all of which is sponsored by donations, so the students and their families carry none of the financial burden.
"Convincing school principals to let us pitch the program to the students was not easy," he added, "But since the program has a professional focus and a high academic level, we've become a local brand now. Two of our Palestinian graduates just got into MIT and our Israeli graduates serve in the military's most prestigious programs – you can't argue with that."
