With missile after missile flying into southern Israel, killing three, and Israel activating its Iron Dome interceptor system, as well as bombing Hamas terror sites in Gaza with reports of 15 Palestinian deaths, it seems a poor time to launch into a blog post about Middle East peace.
As I began writing, I read that sirens are sounding in southern Israel, that the Israeli Air Force fired a missile into a car in Gaza, killing the commander of Hamas's "military" terror wing, Ahmed Jabari, and Egypt has recalled its Ambassador to Israel.
Yet it is at these times when I most feel the need to hear about an end to the fighting and destruction. Am I expecting a miraculous transformation of swords into ploughshares? No, in the reality I see played out in the news, peace often takes its own unexpected form, shaped by slow moving changes in attitudes and perceptions.
With an eye toward what speeds those slow changes, I recently found a well-documented Israel program, a person-to-person initiative aimed at creating an atmosphere of peace and better understanding between Jews and Arabs that is gaining ground.
Michael Leitner, a professor who teaches Therapeutic Recreation at Chico State in northern California, recently spent a year in Israel evaluating the effects of this cross-cultural soccer program directed at changing how Arabs and Jewish children perceive each other, and found that it is working.
The program, called "Get to Know Your Neighbor" was organized by Mifalot, a largely international foundation, corporate and public sector sponsored organization founded by the Hapoel Tel Aviv Football Club that works through sports to create a more receptive field for peace in the Middle East.
According to a report on the Inside Chico State website, the program which the English and Hebrew speaking Leitner evaluated from 2011-12 involved Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian youth in soccer games and other activities.
For the Mifalot program, Leitner administered-- both before and after the teenagers played together-- a questionnaire that addressed issues of friendship, living proximity, negative characteristics and trust.
From pre-test to post-test, results showed that levels of trust increased from 7 percent to 40, and that the level of Israelis hatred for Arabs decreased by almost 14 points, and that of the Arabs for Israelis declined by 23.
"Although there were skeptics who believed that kids might not be honest in answering the questionnaires, they were wrong," Leitner said in the report. "The youngest kids were the most honest.
With those kinds of promising results, the Mifalot program found funding, in part from a grant from USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, for a three year program called "United Soccer for Peace" designed to train both Jewish and Arab coaches.
"I do interviews and try to understand how attitudes are evolving," said Leitner when I spoke with him recently. A few days before, he had given an on campus lecture titled, "Playing for Peace in the Middle East," and had been encouraged by the large turnout.
Leitner explained that the new program's plan is to train 50 Israeli and Palestinian coaches a year for the next three years. The program calls for the formation of teams-- each roughly half Arab and half Jewish-- with a goal of reaching 45,000 children ages 8 through 17.
The coaches will receive training in team building exercises designed to lead to a positive change in attitudes.
Leitner who is joined in his research by his wife Sara, who also teaches at Chico State, and handles the data analysis, will soon return to Israel to collect and evaluate data on potential changes brought about as a result of the program.
On previous trips to evaluate the children in sports programs, Leitner has seen attitude change in adults as well. Israeli soccer moms, he said, now organize social groups that include all moms.
"The situation is ripe for positive change," he said.
Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate.In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."
that the Israeli Air Force fired a missile into a car in Gaza, killing the commander of Hamas's "military" terror wing, Ahmed Jabari, and Egypt has recalled its Ambassador to Israel.
