Greetings from the top of Mount Carmel and facing the Mediterranean Sea. Missing CIDCM from Haifa- a city with a century old uninterrupted track record of a shared Jewish/Arab society- an exceptional experiment that transcends the turbulent ethnopolical realities of the Middle East, The University of Haifa is now celebrating its 50th year of existence; half a century in Hebrew is YOVEL = in Arabic YUBIL, and in English JUBILEE.
I am sorry that due to COVID, I was unable to make it to College Park during the last two years, and I fear we now have to consider the current prediction that pandemias are being transformed into sindemias- namely that the continuity of mutating viruses will make it as much as usual feature as the flu; we may need to learn to live with a regular yearly vaccine. But as long as life goes one, we should not give up our hopes or dreams. In my case, I do want to make it physically to College Park - the latest next May, when I finish teaching here in Haifa.
At this time, I continue with teaching, researching , publishing and developing programs for intra and international conflict transformation that were developed at CIDCM as a laboratory. More specifically, I wish to illustrate and through attachments the activities that I have been involved in the last couple of years and end by sharing the future activities planned for 2022.
The importance of CIDCM as a meeting workspace for “Partners in Conflict” summarizing the 26th year experience of Kaufman/Hassassian is already in the webpage at UMD/BSOS video focusing on how to team teach our conflict. We ended this rather unique experiment with the preparation of a proposal entitled “Bridging Fellows” and we would like to provide the link and a few lines of explanation. At the early years of the team-teaching, the then President of UMD and later the UM System, Prof. Brit Kirwan was very supportive of CIDCM has shown in the well deserved homage to Dr. Jehan Sadat. Prof. Kirwan was very supportive of the idea of two professors from contending sides working together and he publicly supported the USIP publication of a book I edited with Prof. Shukri Abed with articles of 5 Arab and 5 Jewish academics: PEACE, DEMOCRACY AND THE ISRAELI/PALESTINIAN CONFLICT [among the Palestinian contributors is Prof. Ziad Abu Amr - current Deputy Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority as well as the already mentioned Prof. Manuel Hassassian- currently Palestinian ambassador to Denmark].
Last but not least, the deteriorated relations between the Israeli and Palestinian political leadership stress even more the potential contribution of expert academics from both sides in peacebuilding. The prevailing pessimism at this time has made more difficult to establish bilateral cooperation, and the role of third parties as facilitators and conveeners has become crucial, not only to offer and develop trilateral activities [projects, encounters, team teaching, publications and policy relevant recommendations] Over now decades -in fact from its inception - CIDCM has been a "safe haven" and inspiring place for such work and hopefully should continue stimulating action research across the divide in the Middle East at large institutionalized such shared vision of the Center transcending the current practical and psychological difficult times
