Israeli-Palestinian center fights for its funding and its survival

TEL AVIV -- With death tolls mounting and distrust reaching epic proportions, the director of Windows: The Israeli-Palestinian Friendship Center says it's more important than ever to keep the center open.

Although the number of visitors has dwindled, lectures and events are still taking place.

"A lot of people who were not interested before in these issues are asking themselves now what's happening," Rutie Atsmon said in a recent interview at the center. "People are looking for opportunities to meet Palestinians and hear from their side what went wrong."

Windows was founded in 1991, with its main goal to produce a magazine for Israeli and Palestinian children. The idea was to have both an Israeli and a Palestinian editor, and the magazine would be half Hebrew and half Arabic.

It was a novel idea. So novel, in fact, that no one would fund it.

"People thought we were crazy," Atsmon said. But she and her Palestinian counterparts were determined. It took four years before the first issue came out.

It was only after the peace process began, that "schools began looking for materials and found they didn't have anything," Atsmon said. Only then did the project receive money from the Ministry of Education, but those funds have since dried up.

Slowly, with the help of mostly American foundations such as the Abraham Fund and Moriah Fund, as well as volunteers -- Atsmon herself is hardly paid -- the organization took off. In the years between 1996 and 1998, thousands of Palestinian and Israeli children took part in workshops designed to break down stereotypes. One of the highlights was an exhibit the center co-sponsored in Washington, D.C.

"People who don't have Arab friends have very deep, negative stereotypes," Atsmon said, adding that Israeli Arabs know more about Jews than Jews know about them, because Arabs are the minority.

The magazine comes out sporadically, when there is money to produce it. At most, there have been four issues in a year.

Obviously, the editors don't always see eye to eye. Atsmon said that often the Palestinian children's articles are all about their suffering, "and if there is too much about that, Israelis won't read it."

Until two years ago, Atsmon ran the organization from her home. Now, at least, she can afford office space in central Tel Aviv.

The center consists of one good-size room, with Atsmon's office along one wall. She hopes to move into larger quarters though, because lectures often draw an overflow crowd.

Recently, the center exhibited the drawings of Palestinian children from Hebron, in a show called "Stones of Pain." Many depicted soldiers, bullets, blood and the Dome of the Rock. A few showed doves.

Although Israelis haven't exactly been lining up to see the exhibit, Atsmon believes it's important that it be shown at the center, in the Jewish part of the city, rather than in the Arab section of Tel Aviv, in Jaffa or in an Arab village. "It puts a hole in the bubble of Tel Aviv," she said. "It's right under their noses. We have to reach people."

Some foreign dignitaries have stopped by, and when a reporter visited, Atsmon was in the middle of prevailing upon the Norwegian ambassador to Israel, who had visited Windows recently, to help a Palestinian get a permit to travel to Israel, so he could lecture at the center. He had been denied one by the Israel Defense Force. She was not successful, and his lecture had to be canceled.

While lectures always draw a good crowd, it hasn't been easy to attract people to the art exhibition. Atsmon pointed to the high profile of the Seeds of Peace summer camp in Maine for Israeli and Palestinian youth, some of whom were invited to the White House.

Somehow, she said, "If it's not on the news, it's as if it doesn't exist. We've been doing activities like this for years, but because it's not on the news, it's like it's not happening."

One person involved in trying to get a higher profile for the center is former Bay Area resident Dr. Naftali Kaminski. The director of the Functional Genomics Institute of Respiratory Medicine at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Kaminski spent four years at U.C. San Francisco before returning to Israel a few months ago.

While at UCSF, he was a founding member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern Physicians and Scientists. His return to Israel almost coincided with the eruption of violence.

While Kaminski said his views had always been to the left of center, he credited his years of dialogue with Palestinians in San Francisco for propelling him to stay active upon his return to Israel.

"You cannot only deal with ideology and politics," he said. "You have to show people you are there for them, and don't consider them animals because the media tells you so."