Israeli, Palestinian leaders discuss grassroots peace efforts at ILR event

By Linda Myers

On March 14, an Israeli and a Palestinian told an audience about their joint work toward peace in the Middle East, in a setting more commonly used for solving workplace conflicts.

Left to right: Retired Israeli admiral Ami Ayalon and Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, discuss their joint work for Mideast peace, while ILR Professor Sam Bacharach and a group of undergraduate interns look on. The event, which took place March 14 in the New York City offices of the ILR School, was attended by business-, public- and religious-sector leaders, Cornell alumni, students and faculty. Courtesy of Sam Bacharach

"Civil Diplomacy: Mechanisms for Dialogue and Change" took place at the New York City offices of Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The focus of the evening's discussion was the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and how to work toward peace through non-institutional means.

The featured speakers were retired Israeli admiral Ami Ayalon, the former director of Shin-Bet (the Israeli security agency), and Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. The co-sponsors were the ILR School's Institute for Workplace Studies, headed by McKelvey-Grant Professor Samuel Bacharach, and the school's Institute on Conflict Resolution, which promotes alternative methods of workplace dispute resolution.

"Since a chance meeting in London, Ayalon and Nusseibeh have been working actively together and share a common voice in the pursuit of peace among Israelis and Palestinians," said Bacharach, the evening's host. In June 2003, the two men began the People's Voice, an Israeli-Palestinian civil initiative aimed at creating public support for a permanent peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, explained Bacharach. Since then, more than a third of a million people (253,450 Israelis and 161,000 Palestinians) have joined the initiative, he noted.

Ayalon served in the Israeli navy for 33 years, rising from a volunteer commando to commander-in-chief (1992-1996). He was director of Shin-Bet under Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. He recently joined the Israeli Labor Party, with the aim of strengthening his country's leadership. Nusseibeh, a professor of philosophy at Al-Quds, was appointed president of the Arab university in 1995. Under his direction, the university has grown to include a medical and health sciences complex and a wide range of social-oriented academic programs and centers.

Both men spoke at length about their efforts to create a dialogue as well as their personal histories, then took questions from the audience of about 60 people, which included Cornell students, faculty and alumni and leaders from the business, public and religious sectors.

Seth Siegel, B.S. '74, ILR, J.D. '78, Law School, asked about the effectiveness of using a non-institutional framework to promote peace in the Middle East. Ayalon said grassroots democratic organizations such as theirs were essential to making progress toward peace. "Democracy needed in Israel and the rest of the Middle East is based on people organizing and making a difference," he said.

Nusseibeh stressed that the time is right for such initiatives. "If we don't do this now, we will continue to be in this messy situation, and once again, in 10 to 15 years someone will come up with a clever idea as to how to live together, but by then the two-state solution will be out of the question. I don't want to say it's now or never, but it should be done now."

"The intent of the evening was to do what Cornell does best," said Bacharach -- "that is, to educate and to enhance discourse." The program succeeded not only in bringing speakers from two opposing sides together, he said, but broadening the discourse with an especially diverse audience.

Bacharach learned about the People's Voice when he met Ayalon through mutual friends. He was prompted to bring the two men together before an ILR School audience when he realized that the issue of working through conflicts to achieve resolution was a mutual one, shared by the school and the speakers.

"Ayalon and Nusseibeh form an unlikely alliance," he said. "One is from a Romanian family affected by the Holocaust, the other from an established Palestinian family. However, both are strong patriots on behalf of their cause and share a common sentiment, which was best expressed by Professor Nusseibeh during the meeting: 'Leaders on both sides are often full of ideologies, and ideologies are nice sometimes, especially in books. But behind all that, what you really have is ordinary people who want to live ordinary lives. They want to send their kids to school, they want to develop themselves and to find this ordinariness as a human being, as much on the Israeli side as the Palestinian side.'"

That sentiment, representing the speakers' common voice, left the participants with more than a thread of hope, said Bacharach.