by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Bureau Chief/PMB

April 14, 2009

A group of Jewish and non-Jewish students at Princeton University has invited 16 Arab student leaders from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco for an innovative conference on U.S.-Arab relations.

Visions and Revisions: Charting a Common Future for the United States and the Arab World will take place on the Princeton campus April 24-27.

Interactive sessions will center on such issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, human rights, economic interdependence, the environment, world health, religion, media stereotypes, and terrorism.

The overseas contingent will include representatives of American University in Cairo, University of Jordan and Al al-Bayt University in Jordan, the American University of Beirut, and the Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. (But no Israeli university. See sidebar.)

The Arab students, who are scheduled to arrive on campus on April 23, will be housed with Princeton students in their dorms.

With a focus on informal interactions, planners hope the participants will get to brainstorm about possible collaborative projects, said 20-year-old sophomore Zahava Stadler of Hillside, who is president of Yavneh House, the Orthodox student organization at Princeton.

“There are three main goals — knowledge, empathy, and…collaborative leadership,” Stadler said as she sat in the university’s Center for Jewish Life/Hillel with some of the other conference planners.

“The application process was very much centered on finding student leaders in these countries who ultimately will be an influence on the future of these regions,” she said.

Nour Aoude, a 20-year-old junior from Lebanon, said the goal of the project is to address political, cultural, and social issues between Americans and Arabs “in a setting where you can develop strong bonds with the other person. ‘Empathy’ is a key word here.”

Stadler and Aoude participated in a meeting convened last fall by 24-year-old senior Zvi Smith, who formed the idea of the conference after spending time in Jordan last summer under the auspices of the university’s Religious Life Council, an interfaith dialogue group. Also attending the meeting were 20-year-old sophomore Emmett Buckley of Richmond, Va., who is Catholic; and 21-year-old junior Farah Naim, a moderate Shia Muslim from Miami.

While he was in Jordan, Smith recalled during a phone interview, he befriended two Palestinian students at Al al-Bayt University. He decided to tell them he was a Jew who spent two years living and studying in Israel.

“It made our friendship more meaningful — deeper, closer,” said Smith, a member of Yavneh. “It wasn’t that we agreed” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, “but it was a common linkage — something we shared — even though we were on different sides of the issue.

“I was fascinated by the idea that you could feel closer to someone based on the fact that you could passionately disagree with them,” he said. “The disagreement can be a connector and not a divider.

“The point is to be honest about our differences and also to identify common values and common areas of concern, and from that point we get to collaborative leadership.”

‘Awakening experience’

Aoude, who has a Druze background, remembered his first encounter with a Jew.

“That changed my view of the Arab-Israeli conflict altogether. Generally, that was an awakening experience,” he said. “I think it’s just a very valuable experience to be exposed to people of different cultures, and I want people from the Arab world to have the same experience I did.”

Buckley, co-convener of the Religious Life Council, said he was drawn to the project by his interest in conflict resolution and in interfaith, intercultural dialogue.

“I think one of the goals of the conference is to address the issue of misperceptions between the Arab world and the United States — how the other is portrayed in the media,” he said, “and also to create a space where you can have an opportunity to establish friendships, so you can say you have a face to imagine when you hear the news.”

“The hope,” said Stadler, “is that these friendships will be the driving force for actual changes on the ground because of the nature of the people attending the conference — their activism and their leadership.”

Naim, who has a South Asian background, said, “It’s not about where we’re from or our color or what our religion is. More than anything, it’s about who we are as people.”

Another Jewish conference planner, 21-year-old Daniel Growald of Shelburne, Vt., said in a phone interview that he is anticipating “four incredible days.”

“I hope that not only will the participants share knowledge about each other — how they live their lives and see the world — but that they will come away with friendship,” Growald said.

Smith said he is hoping to arrange for the CJL to host the Arab students at a dinner on the Friday night of the conference. “This is an opportunity to begin a kind of interaction people can use to understand each other better — to engage and to see the other’s perspective, to take a new angle on an old conflict and perhaps approach it in a different way. We’re hoping this will be a transformative experience.”

Lead sponsors of the Visions and Revisions conference are the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Office of Religious Life, the Fund for Intergroup Collaboration, and the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life.

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The question of Israel

TO THE QUESTION of why neither Israeli, nor Israeli-Arab, nor Palestinian student leaders were invited to participate in the Visions and Revisions conference at Princeton University, Zahava Stadler has a multifaceted answer.

First and foremost, Stadler said in a phone message, she and the other student planners wanted the conference to be as clear as possible in its focus on Arab-American relations.

“We were afraid that if there were an Israeli delegation, then the larger goals of the conference would be lost amid an impassioned and, frankly, distracting discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” she said.

In addition, Stadler said, the planners did not want to be seen as presumptuous — presuming to invite Israelis and Arabs to come to Princeton to work out their differences.

“That’s not what our goal is here,” she said. “Our goal is to learn something from the students that come and to have the students that come learn from us.

“There’s a reason we framed this not as a conference between the United States and the Middle East, but the United States and the Arab world,” she said. “That’s because our goal is specifically to bridge the divide between students in the United States and students in the Arab world. We felt that between American and Israeli students, there was much less of a gap to be bridged.

“Israeli students have a much stronger cultural tie to the West,” she said. “There was simply more to accomplish in building the relationship between American and Arab students.”

That said, it is clear that when the Visions and Revisions conference convenes on campus this month, Israel will nevertheless be in the room — if only in the consciousness of some of the 14 Princeton students who will be participating.

For example, Zvi Smith of Los Angeles, the Princeton senior who spearheaded the conference, lived in Israel from 2003 to 2005 while studying at a yeshiva there.

“It might be something I’ll think about as the conference happens,” Smith said during a phone interview. “My expectation is that I might just have a little more respect for both sides of the debate….”

Although he doesn’t presume to have an answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Smith said, he is certain that one way of working it out is through developing relationships — the very goal of the Visions and Revisions conference.

“[It’s about] developing a network of students who can work on a set of issues and who can turn to each other when things come up,” he said.

When the Arab student leaders come to Princeton and to its Center for Jewish Life/Hillel, it will perhaps be the first time they have had an opportunity to meet with Jewish students, Smith noted.

“That’s an important step,” he said. “Meeting Jews is going to be the first step to stop demonizing Jews.”

— MARILYN SILVERSTEIN

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