JERUSALEM — These may not the best of times for the Middle East peace process.
But at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, organizers don’t seem fazed.
“It’s not the first time we’ve worked in circumstances like these,” said Edy Kaufman, executive director of the institute, which was founded in 1966 through Hebrew University.
Until the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, Truman was the Middle East’s only research institute dedicated to peace.
“For our first 25 years, until the peace process got under way in 1991, there was very little practical spin-off from our work. But we pursued it with great energy nonetheless,” Kaufman said.
“Once the peace process began, our carefully built working relationships — especially with Palestinian academics and increasingly with Jordanian scholars — bore fruit. And things moved so quickly that negotiators and academics alike were all running to keep up in those years. We’re confident it will happen again.”
When it opened, one of the institute’s first steps was to open its library of Middle East journals to anyone interested.
“The library attracted Arab academics because it stocked PLO publications that were, at that time, banned elsewhere in Israel,” Kaufman said. “I had an arrangement with our librarian that whenever an Arab came in to use the library, she would inform me and I would come down, introduce myself and invite him for a cup of coffee. We met as fellow academics, as equals, and slowly we built up trust.”
During the institute’s first years, Kaufman and his colleagues got to know some 20 Arab academics in this way. Slowly, the more courageous among them began attending lectures at the institute, and more slowly still, they started to take part, adding new perspectives and opinions.
As their participation grew, Kaufman invited them to take the podium as lecturers. But it wasn’t until 1985 that a scholar from the University of Nablus nervously agreed to speak about economic development in the West Bank and Gaza.
When the peace process got under way in the early 1990s, a massive return on the quarter-century of carefully built-up trust was reaped.
“The main purpose of any research institute is to be policy-relevant,” Kaufman said. “And suddenly we had a massive practical contribution to make. The political leaders negotiating the peace needed practical advice, lots of it and quickly, on issues that included water rights, refugees, settlements and the status of Jerusalem.”
The second major priority of the institute today is peace-building projects.
One project, now largely completed, is ridding high school textbooks of stereotypes and omissions.
Another of the institute’s peace-building projects is known as “The Common Heritage of Arabs and Jews.” In monthly seminars, seven Israeli academics from the Truman Institute have paired off with seven Palestinian scholars from Al-Quds University.
Together, they are focusing on what they share as children of Abraham — from the Semitic languages they speak to common philosophy.