The School for Peace: Continuing the Dialogue

For over forty years, the School for Peace at Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom has brought Palestinians and Israeli Jews together in dialogue that confronts, rather than avoids, the realities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. What does it mean to remain in dialogue in a time of violence, war, and deep polarisation? And what can solidarity mean when experiences, expectations, and relations of power are profoundly unequal?
Founded in 1979, the School for Peace developed a distinct educational methodology in which political differences, group identities, history, and power relations are brought into the dialogue rather than set aside. The aim is not necessarily agreement or reconciliation, but to create a space in which participants can examine identities, assumptions, expectations, and responsibilities, including those within their own group.
While many dialogue initiatives were suspended following in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, the School for Peace continued its binational programmes.
This afternoon concludes a three-day working session with fourteen participants who met online over 5 months and followed a seminar in Germany before. They will offer an insight into their continuing process: why they take part, what has been difficult, what has changed, what dialogue can make possible, and where its limits lie.
The group will then move from talking about dialogue to exploring a question that has become increasingly important within the group: what does solidarity mean in a context of conflict and unequal power? What can we expect from one another? And can solidarity coexist with profound political disagreement?
Journalist Guus Valk, who lived in the collaborative village Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom for a year, will introduce this afternoon. Earlier this year, he visited the village again and described in an article for NRC how current events, in the wake of everything that has happened since October 7, have pushed relations within the community to breaking point.