University of the Middle East

How it Started

Palestinian Hala Taweel, 34, a Harvard doctoral candidate, is co-founder with Jewish MIT lecturer, Ron Rubin, 28, of their planned University of the Middle East. The idea came three years ago from a group of young, enthusiastic graduate students from all over the Middle East. To this end, Hala and Ron have created a system of linked universities throughout the Middle East and North Africa in order to foster cooperation and coexistence between the people of the region regardless of their ethnic, religious and political backgrounds. This summer they brought together, at Boston College, high school teachers from seven countries from seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The New York Times (6 Aug 1999) reported: "Teachers Gather, Putting the Maps Away." It desribed a scene from one of the meetings. "Across the table, Mona Barghout, 32, a Jordanian whose family had been forced to flee Israel in 1948, told Ms. (Judith) Zilberman how hard it would have been, just a month ago, to imagine herself having lunch with an Israeli. 'The people around me,' Ms. Barghout said, describing her friends and family in Jordan, 'they wouldn't accept me making contact with the enemy. Peace, it's only on paper.' "Yet asked the next evening, at a New England clambake that closed the program, what she would tell those same friends and relatives upon her return, Ms. Barghout said, 'All people are the same.' "As if on cue, someone listening to the conversation exclaimed, 'Sah!' the Arabic word for 'correct.' It was Moshe Peretz, a Jew from Jerusalem."

Hala wrote: "We (The University of the Middle East) are almost doing the same kind of dialogue, except that ours is more regional. "My mother, Raymonda Tawil, started dialogue with the Israelis since 1967, when dialoguing with the "enemy" was a taboo. I was born in Jerusalem but was raised in Nablus and Ramallah. After having suffered the occupation years I appreciate more and more the meaning of dialogue and being able to talk, connect and know ' the other.' We are all victims of a sad era where only we will get us out of it. Dehumanizing the images of the others was so easy for a very long time. Now I believe the real time has come to learn and work with each other. It is from this personal conviction that I took an oath to work towards peace and reconciliation through education."