ALLMEP, or "What Works in Peacebuilding?"

ALLMEP is one of those groups that all the folks ‘in the know' have heard about, but its public profile is still fairly low. It represents 57 organizations active in Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding activities. That means Arab-Jewish or interreligious dialogue in the US, academic cooperation in the Middle East, advocacy, development, educational and environmental initiatives. It's all good.

It was founded in part to support more funding for NGO's doing useful work in Israel and Palestine towards an eventual peace settlement. That being said, it's heavy on what is sometimes called ‘people-to-people' activities and short on think tanks and advocacy solutions. This reflects an institutional bias on the part of NGO's in the field that have to find meaningful work to accomplish whether or not peace breaks out, and without regard for who gets elected.

While I count myself as a supporter of ALLMEP, they really only have organizational members. It's a good group of diverse nonprofits: large and small, US based and international, Israeli and Palestinian, working within all three societies (US/Israel/Palestine), active in the West Bank as well as Gaza, and backed by Jews, Arabs, faith groups and more. Even within each country there is a lot of diversity: these folks are from Denver and Sarasota, not just Washington D.C. and New York. They are from Ramallah and Bethlehem as well as al-Quds. And of course, Tel-Aviv and Haifa, not just Jerusalem.

You can read about ALLMEP and the principles on which they were founded over here. There are still some interesting questions that are worthy of exploration.

• Which peacebuilding activities are most effective, and how do we know?

• Are there any peacebuilding initiatives that have ever been labeled a failure? Where can we learn about those negative examples?

• Is there a way to prioritize the relative significance of different kinds of work - or must we say, as many do, that's it all good to the same extent?

• How does the utility of peacebuilding compare with parallel but different approaches, such as human rights monitoring, international advocacy, and domestic political engagement?

• Are there any broadly shared agreements over the leverage points for pressure? Where should my dollar of peace building support go - lobbying Congress, educational campaigns within the Jewish community, better mobilization of Arabs and Muslims, faith based organizing, Arab-Jewish coexistence within Israel, development activities, women's leadership development, youth activism, or what?

These questions are coming from the years of personal experience I've had with these activities. Over the years I've either worked for, or attended a program with the following organizations:

• Reut/Sadaka
• The Parents Circle
• Friends of the Earth Middle East
• International Center for Peace in the Middle East
• Youth Against Racism (defunct)
• Interns for Peace
• Hadash Youth
• Palestinian Center for Rapprochement
• Oasis of Peace/Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam
• CRB Foundation
• Peace Now
• Ratz Youth/Mapam Youth (before Meretz)
• Women in Black
• Alternative Information Center
• Christian Peacemaker Teams
• Rabbis for Human Rights
• Gush Shalom
• Youth Sings a Different Song
• Givat Haviva
• Dai L'kibbush (Down with the Occupation)
• Ta'ayush
• Coalition of Women for a Just Peace
• Netivot Shalom
• PRIME
• Holy Land Trust
• IPCRI

[This is a partial list, and doesn't include other activities under foreign auspices (Swedish Foreign Ministry, Danish solidarity groups, American organizations, dialogue activities in Jordan, etc.) I'm also excluding groups that are not specifically devoted to these activities, but simply engage in them as a kind of side project (Shomer Hatza'ir, Green Action).]

The thing is, the political situation right now feels even MORE hopeless than it did when I started my activism, in 1984. Back then, Israelis and Palestinians barely acknowledged each other, politically speaking. There were no official channels connecting ‘The Palestinians' with ‘The Israelis.' Only a small number of Israeli Arabs and Jews had ever attended coexistence programs, not to mention programs that brought Israelis together with residents of the Occupied Territories. Environmentalism in both societies was virtually non-existent, so naturally there were no programs focusing on environmental cooperation.

We can look back at thousands of individual programs run by hundreds of NGO's, involving hundreds of thousands of people on both sides. And it's hasn't altered the basic reality: most Palestinians and most Israelis are willing to use violence against the other side to force them to accept a peace agreement with terms they would not otherwise accept.

Can someone please tell me - what have we learned about the peacebuilding industry as it pertains to Israel and Palestine? Where is the useful research telling us what works and what doesn't? What kind of metrics and evidence can we use to guide our future behavior?