LIVE Webinar Date & Time: August 4, 2021, 12:15-1:30pm ET / 9:15-10:30am PT

Tuition: FREE.

Location: Webinar link will be emailed to each participant 24 hours prior.

Event Description: During the past fifteen years, people-to-people peacebuilding organizations working in Israel/Palestine have faced many challenges. The unrelenting expansion of Israeli settlements, the increasing restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, the lack of US leadership, and the inability and lack of will of political leadership in Israel and Palestine to move the peace process forward are just a few of the realities that have made the work of peacebuilding organizations every more difficult and, at times wholly disheartening. At the same time these dire developments have also prompted the peacebuilding community to work collaboratively to identify new strategies and approaches to the "what" and the "how" of the work they do.

But recent violence in the region and the conflict both within Israel and between Hamas and Israel give a new urgency to the reckoning that has consumed the peacebuilding field in recent years.

Some of the tough questions being asked include:

• Is people-to-people peacebuilding even possible when restrictions on movement, compulsory military service, and an ever-growing anti-normalization movement make meeting face-to-face nearly impossible? If not, what can take its place?

• Is bringing together Israelis and Palestinians even advisable given the gargantuan power differences between the two sides? If not, is there a way to bring the parties together despite the vast political inequities.

• Given the bleak political landscape on all sides, how do people-to-people peacebuilding organizations even measure success?

In a two-part series, CNI will take a look at these issues from two different perspectives.

First, on June 30, join us as an expert panel shares their views about the future of the peacebuilding movement in Israel and Palestine.

Then, on August 4, join us as we welcome youth voices to the table. In this session, we will hear from young people who have been involved in people-to-people peacebuilding to get their own thoughts and reactions to peacebuilding in the current contentious climate between Hamas and Israel.

Our esteemed panelists for this event are:

Karim Aburamadan - Born and raised in Gaza, Palestine, Karim Aburamadan is a peace activist currently living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His main focus is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Aburamadan has attended many peace-oriented programs that brought people from both sides of conflict together, such as the Seeds of Peace International Summer Camp in Maine, USA, where 200 campers from nine different countries came together. For two hours every day during the three-week program, the students collectively debated and discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Pakistani-Indian Kashmir conflict.

Aburamadan was the first-ever Palestinian student from Gaza to study in an international boarding school in Tel Aviv, Israel. As a Palestinian, he had an opportunity to live on the Israeli side of the conflict, which gave him the chance to experience the other side of the conflict on the ground, and the chance to represent his own point of view in an international environment.

During his stay in Tel Aviv, Aburamadan attended an event organized by the Leon Charney Resolution Centre where 80 international students were split into two groups, one group represented the Palestinian side of the conflict, and the other group represented the Israeli side. After 10 hours of intense and heated debate, the two groups came to a resolution on how to put an end to the conflict in a peaceful manner. This event was covered by the international and local media.

Aburamadan is currently completing his advanced diploma in International Business at George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is expected to graduate in December of 2021.

Hadeel Khier is twenty years old from Israel. She is part of the Seeds of Peace organization; she was camper back in 2016 and PS in 2018 and is now an alumni. Through the years she took part in every project that was held by Seeds of Peace and one of the projects that touched her the most in so many ways was the Negotiation and Mediation Seminar taught by Bob Bordone and other colleagues, as she comes from a place where the consequences of the Israeli Palestinian conflict are manifested on daily basis. That led her to host negotiation workshops with Non-Zero Network organization, where the workshops were based off of research done by the Harvard Program on Negotiation, and the content was created with the help of Harvard professors. Beside that, she volunteers locally in many places such as kindergarten, nursing home, women against violence, public library and in center for people with disabilities.

Eric Shagrin is a rising 3rd year at UChicago studying Law, Letters, and Society and Computer Science from South Florida. He is also enrolled in a certificate program at the Booth School of Business. He attended Seeds of Peace summer camp in 2017, engaging in dialogue with peers from South Asia and living in a bunk with peers from the Middle East. In 2019, he traveled to Nazareth for the Seeds of Peace sponsored Negotiation and Mediation Seminar taught by Bob Bordone and other colleagues. Inspired by those experiences, Eric co-founded Non-Zero Network, which empowered and provided a curriculum for youth to host negotiation workshops in various communities, including Israel, the West Bank, and the U.S. At UChicago, Eric is involved in the Institute of Politics (including founding a LGBTQ+ Civic Engagement program), Eckhart Consulting, Hillel, and is a tour guide.

Ariel Shay Shaharabani is a nineteen year old who lives in Israel.  He is a lover of science, and has conducted research in the field of Neurobiology on Drosophila flies at the Weizmann Institute of Science.  Other than that, he's an aspiring musician, a technology enthusiast and a big data engineer. In 2017 Ariel attended the Seeds of Peace camp, where he found himself living with teens from all over the Middle East, South Asia and the US. Over time and through dialogue, he had called them piers, even close friends.  Over the following three years he participated in the Seeds of Peace Junior program, being an active member of the SOP community. In 2019 Ariel's love for dialogue was compounded upon by attending the Negotiation and Mediation seminar that was run by Bob Bordone and his colleagues.