The School for Peace

School for Peace (SFP) is redoubling efforts to resource communities throughout the
region and the globe. This spring, SFP will lead courses at Ben-Gurion University,
Hadassah Academic College, Tel Aviv
University, and Ruppin Academic College for students seeking to bring conflict resolution
skills into their academic training. For many years, SFP has taught doctors, nurses,
psychologists, human rights lawyers, and other
professional cohorts to practice empathetic dialogue with each other and with clients.
The SFP is also providing special training for the staffs of health organizations in the
region, including facilities in Beersheva, Haifa, and Rehovot. And, the school continues to lead dialogues on Zoom for Israelis and Palestinians living abroad and grappling with the grief, sadness, and anger of this moment. These virtual sessions have taken place in Germany,
Norway, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Turkey, Spain, and Switzerland. The school’s director, Dr. Roi Silberberg, says that he has never felt the need for the SFP more than now: “We will not succumb to the darkness of quietude, and the chilling distance of alienation. We will maintain the hard-won trust between the Palestinian and Jewish graduates of our many SFP programs, harness their collective power, and disseminate it outwardly into the world.”

The judicial overhaul that threatens Israeli democracy is the tip of an iceberg that threatens to rip apart human rights at all levels of our society. Human rights lawyers are engaged in a struggle not only for those mistreated in our midst, but to protect the legal system that enables them to work.

The School for Peace is addressing this issue in several ways. It has founded a new alumni forum for Change Agents in Law graduates, comprised of Palestinian and Jewish lawyers. This forum is organized by Nava Sonnenschein and Mohammed Abu Sneineh. One of the first things this forum undertook was action in the recent Israel Bar Association elections, helping to get the anti-judicial overhaul candidate elected.

School for Peace associates were also invited to speak with the German Bar Association about the ramifications of the judicial overhaul laws. Dr. Manal Totry-Jubran, senior lecturer at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law and lecturer in the SFP, presented the case for preserving the autonomy of the Supreme Court, which, though its record is far from perfect, is Israel’s protector of human rights.

Attorney Michael Sfard spoke to them about his experience working to defend Palestinians in the occupied territories. Here, the Supreme Court tries to balance the demands of martial law with human rights and often falls on the wrong side of the coin. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court is currently the only avenue to redress available Palestinians who, for example, want to prevent home demolitions or child arrests.

Sfard, an SFP alumnus, is one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers. He chose this path after participating in a facilitators’ course at age 22. Today, he is leading a new course in the SFP, Advanced Issues in Human Rights Law. The participants are lawyers, and are presented, each session, with a real case, and they discuss the various ethical and legal issues involved.