The first time she came to the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, “I was shocked,” said Israeli Hagar Ben Shlomo.
Ben Shlomo, 29, arrived two weeks late in the semester. When she first saw the other participants, “everyone looked miserable [and] mad at each other,” she said.
She was seeing the initial results of one of the most important activities of this program: the Peacebuilding and Environmental Leadership Seminar.
This is where the participants — who are Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, North Americans and Europeans — engage in dialogue about history, politics, the Middle East conflict, “all the difficult stuff,” said Ben Shlomo.
Jordanian Asem Magableh, 28, also experienced how powerful an emotional experience these seminars can be. He stormed out of the first one he attended when an Israeli veteran of the 2006 Lebanon war spoke.
And yet, two years later, Magableh said he hosted that same Israeli veteran in his home in Jordan.
Ben Shlomo and Magableh spoke about the institute and their experiences there on Sept. 30 at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun.
They described to the about 60 people attending how this relatively young — 18 years old — and relatively small institute — hosting up to 40 participants per semester — does pioneering work in peacebuilding and international cooperation around environmental issues.
‘Nowhere to run’
The institute is housed at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava Valley in the Negev Desert near Israel’s southern-most city of Eilat. This location, as the speakers put it, is ideal for these kinds of seminars.
Ben Shlomo said participants have ended up screaming at each other or bursting into tears. But the kibbutz is “in the middle of the desert. There is nowhere to run. You just have to deal with it,” she said.
Even after one of these emotionally explosive seminar sessions, the participants still “share the same dining room, classrooms, swimming pool” and the like, said Magableh.
“It’s hard to talk about the conflict,” Magableh continued. Participants often came in thinking “there’s only one right side, and it’s mine,” he said.
“The point is that as angry as you can get, you have to be there, you need to listen” to the others, he said. That first semester was “a life-changing experience” for him, and he has participated in the program for three years, he said.
Of course, the program is not only about dialogue on tough subjects. Overcoming the political/emotional barriers is a means to the ultimate end of fostering international cooperation on and through shared environment protection issues.
The institute houses four research centers that deal with sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and energy conservation, trans-boundary water management and long-term socio-ecological research.
While the institute itself does not grant degrees, it provides credits that can be used toward degrees; and its academic offerings are accredited by the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
There is a Milwaukee connection to the project. Karen Schapiro, attorney and executive director of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, has taught environmental law at the institute.
Magableh came to the program initially out of his interest in studying tourism and hotel management. He said his father read about the Arava Institute, and even though it was in Israel and his father was a Jordanian army veteran, his father strongly urged participation. “They are our cousins,” his father said.
Magableh ended up working as an intern in the Center for Long Term Socio-Ecological Research. “The idea is not just academic,” he said, but is also about creating concrete projects, “things you can touch,” devoted to promoting “peaceful coexistence and environmental sustainability.”
Ben Shlomo said she did two internships at the institute. She had heard about it from friends who had participated, but she did not have the opportunity to go herself until after she completed her undergraduate degree.
She is working on a master’s degree in urban planning and for that did ecological research at the institute.
She also said she led one of the Peacebuilding Seminar sessions on “nationalism and ‘imagined communities,’” the latter a concept proposed by former Cornell University Prof. Benedict Anderson.
Milwaukee was a side stop for them. They were in the U.S. primarily to attend a six-week internship of the Keep Chicago Beautiful organization, where they visited many organizations and companies working on environmental issues.
This event was co-sponsored by the synagogue, Congregation Sinai, Jewish National Fund and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Center, Jewish Community Relations Council and J-WISE.
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