Judith Norman, who traveled in Palestine/Israel with EPF PIN in May/June 2016 reflects.

The movement for peace in Israel-Palestine is a big and messy tent. Many of the groups that are promoting a vision of peace in the region have incompatible goals, strategies, and rhetoric. The very notion of “peace” is contentious – after all, peace can simply mean the absence of conflict, not necessarily the presence of justice. When privilege or injustice goes unquestioned, the situation might appear peaceful. But is this the sort of peace we want?
One strategy for attaining peace promotes co-existence between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. The theory is that when people learn to live and work together with mutual respect, there will be no motivation for violence. Certainly, a lot of the violence involves dehumanization, and co-existence projects try to defuse this by promoting mutual humanization, like a soccer camp that enables Israeli Jewish kids and Palestinians to play together, to experience each other as normal human beings rather than as enemies.
In our visits to Palestine and Israel, we heard some thoughtful skepticism about the effectiveness of these well-meaning projects; the main criticism is that these projects do not address the root causes of the conflict, which are structural and historical violence.
Structural violence is distinct from direct violence in that it is not simply a matter of personal antagonism (which could be addressed by personal understanding). Israel’s occupation of Palestine is an example of structural violence, because it is administered through a set of violent yet impersonal institutions. For instance, the occupation involves a legal regime that subjects Palestinians to harsh and often arbitrary military law, while Israeli Jews are held to much more lenient civilian regulations. The occupation imposes a system of roadblocks and barriers that restrict (or in the case of Gaza, entirely block) freedom of movement for Palestinians. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza experience a brutal military regime that hampers, cripples, and often destroys lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, while institutionalized discrimination relegates Palestinians within Israel to second class citizenship or worse.
On the other hand, Israeli Jews experience none of this. While they occasionally (infrequently) experience direct violence, they experience none of the structural violence of the occupation. Many are unaware that it is even taking place. And this creates a disparity between the experience of Israelis and Palestinians which co-existence projects do nothing to address. Connecting on a personal level will not address violence on a structural level. In fact, by misdiagnosing the problem, co-existence projects can even make things worse. We visited with a former IDF soldier from Breaking the Silence who argued convincingly that it was the structural violence of the occupation that bred direct violence, and not the other way around. By fostering personal relationships, co-existence projects attack a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
We heard some good coming from co-existence projects. At their best, they can open up space for dialogue where Israeli Jews can hear about Palestinian experience of structural violence. In 2015 we visited a bilingual Jewish-Palestinian school in Jerusalem which was doing just that. Jewish graduates from the Hand-in-Hand school were consequently less likely to join the IDF to carry out the occupation.
So, co-existence projects might have a place, but they need to be located within the general framework of anti-occupation, pro-justice organizing. One reason why they play an outsized, imbalanced, and therefore often counter-productive role in the movement for peace is that they have a strong sentimental appeal to outside donors. The image of Jewish and Palestinian children playing together is immediately and intuitively attractive, and (particularly European) NGOs are able to secure funding to promote such programs over groups that are doing more politically nuanced anti-occupation work. This is a prime example of a problem with NGOs and foreign donors: all too often they impose an agenda that is unresponsive to the needs and best interests of people who live in the region and who almost always have a much better sense of how to address their own problems.
Co-existence projects appeal to a false and simplistic framework that assures us that the real enemy is intolerance, and that it can be combatted through tolerance and understanding. Nobody is really to blame, we all just need to work harder to understand each other. The only problem is that when it comes to Israel / Palestine, there is serious political culpability – the Israeli occupation and the institutions that maintain it (which includes US government spending). This is the elephant in the room with many of the co-existence projects, and ignoring it will not make it go away.