In 1995, Norway was invited by the Palestinians and the Israelis to
assist them in designing and implementing a program in which the
two parties would cooperate in "enhancing the dialogue and
relations between their peoples, as well as in gaining a wider
exposure of the two publics to the peace process, its current
situation and predicted results." The parties decided to "take
steps to foster public debate and involvement, to remove barriers
to interaction, and to increase the people-to-people exchange and
interaction."1
This became known as the official Israeli-Palestinian
People-to-People Program, and what distinguished it from other
initiatives, was its relation to and backing from the authorities.
The initiative came from the chief negotiators in the secret Oslo
channel.2 They were concerned about how little Palestinians knew
about Israelis and vice versa. The Oslo agreement was the result of
elite negotiations, and the negotiators wanted to bridge the gap
between them and their publics. By embarking on the program, the
authorities wanted to provide legitimacy to those on both sides who
wanted to meet and to cooperate after the Parties had signed their
mutual recognition.3
An Initial Design for Institutional Change
The official status was a major design criterion shaping the
Program. The Norwegian financing per se was of less significance,
as many other countries financed people-to-people activities.
However, the fact that Norway was invited to take a role as "coach"
for the official program became significant for the way this role
developed. At the outset, the three partners held quite different
views on what a people-to-people program would imply. They
appointed one representative each4 for the concept development team
which met regularly from January 1995 until the signing of the Oslo
II agreement.
Two core assumptions influenced the design: First, the parties
assumed that the peace process would follow the roadmap defined in
the Declaration of Principles and, therefore, the P2P
activities would be embedded in that process. Second, the overall
instrument to build trust and confidence in the peace process was
increased cooperation between the parties and the peoples,
as well as increased integration on the popular level. The idea of
any need for separation was ruled out of practical politics.5
Eventually, both would turn out crucially wrong.
The main guidance to the design team was to prepare a program to
facilitate mass encounters between Israelis and Palestinians,
accompanied by campaigns and active use of the media. The
suggestion was to set a target for as many as 10,000 persons of
various categories to meet during the first year. The spirit of
peace was quite high then, and it was expected that reconciliation
processes between the two peoples could start immediately. Norway
was ready to allocate a considerable sum of money.
The design team did not share this enthusiasm, however. They
suggested starting what they called "a public-opinion project" and
to build up activities gradually as experience was acquired. The
designers aimed at bridging the gap between the negotiators/leaders
and the publics, and at providing the people with a wider exposure
to the process. This way public opinion on both sides would be
channeled from a suspicious, hostile, and largely ignorant one
towards mutual recognition and, more concretely, recognition of the
other side's aspirations, anxieties and legitimate interests.
The team saw the need for a systematic removal of thresholds for
interaction, and for the restructuring of the actual meeting points
between the peoples. It aimed for a methodical exposure of the new
realities in the media and within the public debate, as well as for
a feedback by the various publics to power-holders about reactions
to and interpretations of the political interventions and
"messages." The team, therefore, prescribed three kinds of
activities: First, a series of "strategic interventions," i.e.,
interventions into areas that could help shape new ways of
interaction; second, opinion polling and research projects; and
third, a media and communications strategy. The guiding idea was to
think in terms of institutional change. The targets for
interventions were ministries and public institutions, as well as
core arenas for public encounters like checkpoints and crossings.
Mass encounters were part of the larger repertoire of methods. Four
target groups were defined - the general public, youth, opinion
leaders, and Palestinians living inside Israel. It was assumed that
projects would tackle issues on each side according to needs,
priorities, and possibilities, rather than try to coordinate
directly between the two sides. The challenge was to identify areas
with leverage to influence the larger societal systems.6
A Challenging Start
Immediately following the September 1995 agreement, the design team
was given the assignment to start the Program. The team had already
invented and decided to use the label "P2P" which was later
to be used by the whole field. Each side nominated a
non-governmental organization (NGO) as its "Planning Group"
and the two sides shared the facilities of a Joint Secretariat
provided by Norway. This became the operating level of the Program,
while the three partners met for so-called "hub-meetings" to
coordinate their individual decisions as required. On the top, the
three "owners" were to keep contact to provide guidance and
direction, as well as to help clear any misunderstandings or
conflicts between them. The model was based on collaboration and
consensus.7 The costs were to be shared between Norway and the
Israeli partner, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman
Philanthropists.
By the time the Program started, an Israeli had murdered Prime
Minister Rabin. Some time later, Israel killed the "Engineer," a
Palestinian responsible for several attacks on Israeli civilians. A
new cycle of violence began. Acting Prime Minister at the time,
Shimon Peres, launched a major military operation in South Lebanon.
He called for early elections, and lost to Binyamin Netanyahu
during the summer of 1996. In the new political context, it became
impossible to properly launch the Program, which had to be
repeatedly delayed.
Meanwhile, the Program prepared 36 projects for implementation,
partly of its own design and partly suggested by others. By the
time the Israeli government changed into one that was hostile to
the Oslo process, the Program had designed its logo, printed its
presentation material, and started 14 projects. The Program was
operational, but the political context completely changed its
opportunity situation.
Working under Likud: The Decoupling Strategy
With the results of the Israeli elections, it became clear that the
Program needed a "clutch" as the authorities would probably not be
able to provide its "motor" - as the analogy went in the internal
Hub discussions at the time. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs decided to stand by Norway's commitment and, after
consultations with its Israeli colleagues who were able to confirm
that the new government was committed to continuing the P2P
activities on a grass-root level, the Program was instructed to
design a new approach. It gave up its institutional approach and
went, on its own terms, "grass root." It also became "reactive" in
the sense that it rather reacted to applications from others than
to proactively defining interventions itself. It also reduced the
role of the Hub, and, by implication, the role of politics.
The new design focused on providing support to non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) working within specifically targeted
segments of the society and wishing to undertake joint projects
between Israelis and Palestinians. The Program undertook to cover
the extra costs incurred by the cross-border collaboration under
the prevailing circumstances. The objective was to foster more
face-to-face interactions. The NGOs were expected to work
within their ordinary fields, as the aim was not to finance the
establishment of new peace-oriented organizations. To maximize
outreach, financing was spread to many organizations. The goal was
to foster true cooperation between partners working as
equals in joint projects.
To provide transparency and enable interested organizations to
search for support, calls for projects were advertised in Israeli
and Palestinian papers. The Program was to support relatively small
projects, with at least one partner from each side, within the
fields of culture, media, adult dialogues, youth, and environment.
The budgets were not to exceed U.S. $20,000. To strengthen equality
among the partners, the Norwegian support was to go to the
Palestinian partner, while the Israeli financing was to cover the
Israeli side. Financial reporting was to be done separately and the
narrative report was to be a joint product. Meetings were to take
place in the region, with all the difficulties this implied.
During the following years, the Planning groups received two
hundred applications per year. The two Planning Groups and the
Secretariat evaluated the projects and checked the applicants. They
agreed on a prioritized list of around 40 projects8 within the
different fields, taking into account the geographical distribution
within Israel and the Palestinian areas in order to cover, for
example, Gaza and the northern parts of the West Bank. The Planning
Groups and the Secretariat assisted applicants in finding partners
and improving their projects. The total list was presented to the
authorities, and the Hub met to formally accept the selection.
There were a few cases where the Program itself commissioned
applications in fields of a particular interest.
In 1998, the Program modified the fields of interest. The
experience from media projects was not convincing, and the category
"school twinning" was added.9 In addition to the obvious goal of
reaching to pupils and teachers, these projects were particularly
interesting. As they implied approval and support by the parents,
they had the potential to reach out to people who had not
previously participated in peace-related activities.
In its capacity as the official program for people-to-people
activities, the Program tried to involve the authorities on both
sides and to remind them of their commitments in accordance with
the 1995 agreement. A core issue was travel permits which became an
increasingly important obstacle to meetings. The Program took upon
itself the specific responsibility of building an infrastructure
for people-to-people activities and activists. It established a
database of organizations and projects, as well as an internet
homepage. It organized meetings - both uni-national and joint
-between activists to provide them with the opportunity to exchange
experiences and ideas. A major success was the convention in August
1997 which was held in Gaza and in which 120 Israeli and
Palestinian activists took part - although it was a logistical
nightmare. The Program had flexible funds for small activities that
needed urgent support, and Norway initiated regular meetings
between donors.
During 1996-1999, political circumstances led to uncertainty
regarding the continuity of the official program. The Oslo process
was in a shaky situation, and all the other initiatives defined in
the Oslo II agreement had grinded to a halt. However, the
people-to-people activities were not only tolerated, but actually
supported by the authorities on both sides - even if the public
profile was kept low in the midst of the conflict. Norway managed
to clear potential conflicts and ensure the continued support for
the Program through secret meetings on top political level.10 This
benefited the whole field and not only the official Program.
Adapting again to Changing Political Environments
The "civil-society turn" was not intended by design, but imposed by
changes in the political environment. This led the Program to try
to reactivate its initial ideas. The Israeli elections in May 1999
brought Labor to government and Ehud Barak to the Prime Ministry,
raising expectations within the peace camps. In discussions held in
Helsinki in November 1999, a faction of activists argued that all
projects should focus on the upcoming negotiations and campaigned
to win support for any negotiated peace agreement.11 The issue
threatened to split the activists into two opposing groups.
The official Program was not willing to pursue this venue. We
argued for keeping a neutral political profile, while continuing to
stimulate public debate. However, we also tried to enter the new
political space and build institutionally oriented projects
according to the initial design. We invested a lot of work in order
to establish cooperation between regional partners with bigger
projects. One example was Cooperation North, which involved
cross-border cooperation between municipalities in the north of the
West Bank. These projects came in addition to support to
civil-society projects.
Ehud Barak failed, and with the botched talks in Taba, he lost the
February 2001 elections to Ariel Sharon. By then, the second
Palestinian intifada had started. The two peoples got engaged in
hot conflict, with violence claiming heavy casualties on both
sides. People-to-people activities became almost impossible to
carry out. Many peace activists on both sides turned away, sad and
disappointed by their former friends on the other side.
The Program changed its operations and tried to rescue as much of
the infrastructure as was possible. We gathered activists to
discuss the new developments. Israeli activists met in Israel in
March 2001; the Palestinian activists were invited to Oslo in June
of that year. In March 2002, we invited a mixed group of activists
to Istanbul to discuss the situation and to explore methods of
dealing with it. In the sad environment of the till-then bloodiest
weekend in the history of the Oslo process, these activists mourned
and planned a new future together. Instead of canceling projects,
we tried to implement as many of them as possible. A few new
projects were accepted and financed, but most of them never got
started.
It became unfeasible to persist with the established method of
operation. After a series of political consultations, the Program
shifted into financing the initiative called the Peace Coalition.
It consisted of one Palestinian group and one Israeli - both headed
by respected leaders on both sides - who worked to influence public
opinion. The thrust of their message was that negotiated peace was
possible, and there was a partner on the other side. The Program
also urged the Quartet to include people-to-people activities in
its new Road Map - which it did.
In spite of all these efforts, everything came to a halt in 2003.
In a last attempt, Norway tried during that year to persuade the
parties to analyze achievements and shortcomings, and, eventually,
to redesign the Program under a new and more appropriate name.
Then-Prime Minister Abbas nominated a steering group, and the
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs prepared one group that would
meet with its Palestinian counterpart. When Abbas handed in his
resignation, however, once again everything was put on hold.
Program Outcomes Were Good
In our evaluation, the P2P Program did not develop into the
intended political instrument as designed. The reason, however, is
mainly external to the Program: the Oslo peace process broke down.
The parties were never really able to use the Program, or to
provide it with the necessary political guidance. In our view, this
does not mean that the P2P Program or the other
people-to-people activities were futile or failures. They were
successful, but the timing was wrong. The battles to fight
outweighed the peace that was to be implemented.
Altogether, the official Program went through five major design
changes. In practical terms, the initial design was never really
put to the test, as the requisite conditions were never realized.
The Program survived government changes and provided official
legitimacy to the field in shifting contexts. It built an
infrastructure which incorporated both organizational structure and
a network of organizations and activists experienced in designing
and implementing such joint projects.
In our assessment, the outreach was quite substantial, although we
are not able to provide a figure for the number of people having
been directly or indirectly mobilized by the projects.12 There was
some albeit limited media coverage. During the period from 1995 to
2003, the Program received 705 applications for funding of
projects. Of these, 174 projects13 were actually implemented with a
high rate of success. A total of 465 organizations cooperated in
these projects.14 The number of projects is shown in Table 1.
To many participants, the backing from the authorities was viewed
as providing legitimacy, which for them was important in their
decision to join in the Program. That said, the Program gave rise
to a lot of deliberation within Palestinian society - which was its
goal. In the absence of a peace process, the critics of
people-to-people projects got the upper hand. At a certain point,
an umbrella organization for NGOs decided to expel the
members who participated in such activities, criticizing them for
"collaborating" with the occupier, as well as for being financed
with foreign funds through Israeli organizations. The official
Program negotiated an understanding that such criticism would not
extend to "our" project partners, pointing to the fact that the
Israeli organizations were funded by Israeli funds and the
Palestinian partners obtained their share (normally half of the
total) directly from Norway.
In total, the Program spent U.S. $2.9 million on project support.
Of this, Norway contributed 66 percent and the Israeli foundation
the rest. Of the Norwegian support, 81 percent went to Palestinian
organizations. A third of the share that was spent on Israeli
organizations was used to finance the Israeli part of the Peace
Coalition. The category Adult Dialogues was the biggest with 29
percent of the total project support, while Youth was second
biggest with 20 percent. We spent 16 percent on the big projects,
11 percent of the total on Environment, 10 percent on Schools, 8
percent on Culture, and 5 percent on media projects.
According to estimates made,15 international donors contributed as
much as U.S. $20-25 million to people-to-people activities between
1993 and 2000. Most of this financing was channeled to
civil-society organizations. If these estimates are correct, the
official P2P Program may have contributed with around 13
percent of the total financing available during those years.
Many Lessons Learnt
In addition to the overall assumptions that have informed this
discussion, we may list several more points in the general nature
of lessons to be learnt. Any people-to-people program should be
designed with enough flexibility to allow for adaptations to the
ups and downs in the political process. The first lesson is that
such a program will be heavily influenced by its political
environment. In our case, the parties never used the Program to its
full potential, for the simple reason that the political
environment changed from one where the agenda was peace to one
where both parties took to weapons.
Another lesson relates to the projects themselves and not to the
general design: Whenever people from the two sides met, the issue
of the conflict was always present and needed to be addressed. This
did not come as a surprise to us. The very reason for our
suggesting that meetings would entail joint work on a project or
the solving of a task is due to our belief that collaboration on
any undertaking facilitates the process of bridging the gaps
created by the conflict. We wanted to elicit mutually benefiting
experiences; unfortunately, the conflict was always present and
controlled the structure of the encounters. Many groups needed
assistance to find ways of talking to each other, and to vent in a
constructive way their grievances, their fears and their hope.
Therefore, the Program made available process consultants when
needed.
We learnt that the differences between the parties are reflected or
reproduced in the projects. Israelis and Palestinians do not meet
as equals. They come from different societies, and they have quite
different backgrounds and organizational cultures. They are acutely
aware of the political realities, i.e., that one side "represents"
the occupier and the other the occupied. The Israeli organizations
tend to be more experienced and professional in dealing with
European or American donors. Thus, unwittingly and with the very
best intentions, they tended to become paternalistic and to
reproduce the relations of dominance that prevailed in the
political domain. The Program had to carefully create equality
between the partners by, for example, splitting the budget and
allocating at least one half directly to the Palestinian
partner.
The participants often came to meetings with different motives,
motivations and expectations. Often, they expected too much. It
takes time to build trust across the divide. In some projects, the
participants were to an extent disappointed by their partners and
sometimes failed in having goals and interests coincide. Also,
language barriers and the cultural differences between moderate
Palestinians and left-wing Israelis led to difficulties in
communication. It is not easy to properly "read" the other part
with incompatible frames of reference for interpretation. To our
surprise, the challenges seemed largest in youth projects.
A main challenge was, as mentioned earlier, the lack of legitimacy
for people-to-people cooperation. We believe that even the rather
passive support from the authorities on both sides for the official
Program was important for the whole field. Third parties have a
role to play. Without the perseverance of Norway and the
Secretariat, the official Program would have faced the same
limiting odds as the other initiatives that were agreed upon by the
parties in 1995 and, like many, would never have got off the
ground. The need for a third party was obvious on all levels down
to individual meetings in projects. The main burden on the
facilitator is not to administer the project funds - a rather
straightforward and limited task - but to act as a go-between and
process consultant on all levels of activity. The facilitator
probably should be sufficiently organized to match the
organizational complexity of the field. Our responses were the
Planning groups and the Secretariat. When working together, the
small team struggled with the same problems in bridging internal
differences, as our constituencies did in the world outside.
Concluding Remarks for Future Designs
In hindsight, would we use the same design again? Probably yes,
with minor modifications. There are few theoretical models that can
help us find suitable tools for changing the images of the other
across divides of protracted conflicts. Intervention models often
apply to confined social systems, and not to two open, large-scale
societies with opposed and conflicting narratives and
interests.
One place to start is to consider the characteristics of different
types of initiatives or interventions. The potential of each of
these will vary according to the phases of a given conflict
resolution process. With a view to illustrate the approach, we have
listed ten types of activities that are often used, with their
characteristics and assumed usefulness in different contexts,
ranging from hot conflict to peace-building. The ten types cover
small-scale dialogues and initiatives involving only one of the
parties at a time, as the simplest forms. Targeted information from
one side to the other, as well as coordinated initiatives and
campaigns that involve joint action by change actors from both
sides, represent intermediate forms. Emotional content is increased
when joint ventures are created, like concerts and so on. Then we
have more complex forms of cooperation and direct meetings of
various scales, ranging from groups to communities. The most
complex change initiatives involve solving regional tasks or
organizing reconciliation and transitional justice events.
In Table 2, the ten types are listed indicating whether they are
well-suited or demanding for implementation within a given context.
The ten types of initiatives have different characteristics. Some
of them imply a strong focus on the conflict. Others have a lesser
focus, or have greater unpredictability in the way the interaction
leads to a focus on the conflict. The numbers of participants vary,
as well as the intensity of the encounter. The initiatives differ
in their potential impact in changing the images of the other, as
well as in potential for outreach to new groups
The most efficient people-to-people initiative is one that involves
a high number of participants, reaches out to many constituencies,
and offers high-intensity encounters with a focus on the conflict.
Such initiatives are impossible to make before the very last phase
of conflict resolution. Therefore, the ideal and high-efficiency
program to support initial phases of a peace process does not
exist. The design will by necessity strike compromises between what
is possible and what is effective in a given political
context.
The Israeli-Palestinian People-to-People Program was designed while
negotiations were on the agenda, and it was implemented while the
situation in the Oslo process degraded from cold to violent or hot
conflict. It went through a few ups, and many downs. While the
peace process slipped backward, we were bustling forward towards an
increasingly unreachable goal. No doubt, we were successful in what
we were all doing, but the two peoples missed the opportunity to
make peace.
Bibliography
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1 The Interim Agreement (Oslo II, 1995), Articles II and VIII of
Appendix VI ("Protocol Concerning Israeli-Palestinian Cooperation
Programs").
2 Uri Savir and Ahmed Qurei'a presented their ideas to the
Norwegian State Secretary Jan Egeland in November 1994.
3 A more comprehensive description can be found in Hanssen-Bauer,
Jon and Mona Christophersen, 2004 (in Norwegian).
4 The three were Ilan Baruch who worked in the Israeli Ministry of
Foreign Affairs where Uri Savir was the then-director general, Dr.
Hassan Abu-Libdeh who was a close associate of Ahmed Qurei'a and
was then director of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics,
and this author. Mona Juul, then political adviser at the Norwegian
Embassy in Tel Aviv, participated occasionally.
5 The issue was explicitly raised with Uri Savir as a question
whether the program should consider the option that the Palestinian
people might opt for increased separation before being ready for
more cooperation. Savir's position was that this would run counter
to the spirit of the Oslo agreement.
6 The author was inspired by theories of socio-technical design of
organizations, organizational ecologies and referent organizations
(see e.g. Eric Trist, 1983; Oguz Babüroglu, 1988; Thoralf U.
Qvale, 1996), as well as theories of intervention and teambuilding
(see Jon Hanssen-Bauer, 1986).
7 The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed Fafo to be
its representative and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
appointed the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropists (later
Kerev). Ahmed Qurei'a appointed Hassan Abu-Libdeh to set up a
Planning Group. Later, the planning role was handed over to the
Palestinian Center for Peace and the political supervision to
Mahmoud Abbas. Abu-Libdeh was replaced by other representatives
(for a long period, Sufian Abu-Zaideh).
8 That the number became around 40 did not reflect any political
decision in itself. Actually the Program was never able to spend
much over half of the allocations made available by the Norwegian
Government. The Director of the Program held back. He wanted to
have projects of a certain quality, and thought that an increase in
the number and the level of spending would not pay off and be worth
the added investment within the current political environment. The
infrastructure established could have served a volume several times
bigger than the actual one, if and when that would have been
required and possible. The Program was not intended to become a
dominant actor in terms of its size.
9 The projects proved rather demanding due to opposition in the
Ministries of Education, and mostly private schools
participated.
10 Meetings were held, e.g., between Eitan Bentsur (director
general in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and Hassan
Asfour on behalf of the PLO.
11 It was expected that Israel would hold a referendum. During this
time, the Palestinians also pushed to activate cooperation
mechanisms established in the Oslo II agreement.
12 Such estimates have been made for the whole people-to-people
field, but they are based on doubtful methodologies.
13 In Table 1 above, the decision was to finance 37 projects in
2002-2003, but only 4 were actually implemented.
14 Two-hundred and twenty-two Israeli and 204 Palestinian
organizations, 29 organizations had both Israelis and Palestinian
members, 5 organizations were Norwegian and 5 had other
nationalities
15 Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI),
2002.