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Arab American University welcomed Director of the Palestinian European Cooperation mission in Higher Education, the Director of "Erasmus" program grant in Palestine Dr. Nedal Al Jayousi and founder of the Jerusalem American International School Mr. Ross Piraeus, who visited AAUP headquarters in Ramallah city to give a seminar for Conflict Resolution and Development program graduate students in the course of Conflict Theory taught by Dr. Ayman Yousef.
University Site, Ramallah
Dr. Yousef started the seminar, stressing on the importance of cooperation between Arab American University and both active Palestinian institutions and characters in order to consolidate the concepts and tools to solve Palestinian society disputes as a whole and Master students at Conflict Theory course in particular.
Director of the Palestinian European mission Dr. Nedal Jayousi admired the academic development the university reached, stressing on the importance of teaching Conflict Resolution and Development program in one of the prestigious Palestinian universities, as conflicts is an existing experience not just theories thought far from the Palestinian reality.
He talked about conflict management, solving and switching concepts, pointing to multi international experiences especially in communities been through conflicts or armed conflicts, noting that there’s no clear difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation concepts, the first concept have an active role in solving community conflicts and disputes especially after influential leaders interments’ to arrange situations and things, while the second concept would be more effective in political disputes to reach a win-win situation between conflict parties especially after involving new factors and variables; civil society, social movements, trade unions, women’s spammers and students.
Jerusalem American International School founder Mr. Ross Piraeus talked on his personal experience in solving conflicts and consolidate the concepts and tools to bring peace in schools educational level and students experiences using painting, art, sport and soft powers mechanisms. He pointed to the importance of having a Palestinian future vision, understanding current reality, develop a future vision for Palestinian community to resolve conflicts and consolidate peace concepts internally and externally in a local power system where power distributed among various parties in presence of obvious imbalance in power with "Israel" as an occupier and settler.
He explained, armies and successive wars can’t resolve conflicts as violence can’t and won’t bring peace for the conflict parties, thus the best solutions are to teach and educate the community on conflict resolution concepts and the importance of Renounce violence, adopt a peaceful strategy able to develop visions and strategies to deal with political, local and community conflicts in its various names, stressing the importance of start educating children in schools and make it part of children’s educational programs. Noting that 41 global peaceful experiments were done successfully, solved conflicts in a peaceful way between the conflicting parties, hoping to adopt this experiment in Palestinian reality, even if this experience needed a long time, stressing the importance of focusing in education on peaceful methods to reach a strategy to resolve the conflict.
During the seminar students were divided into groups to present ideas, discussions, presentations and mention examples of community conflicts and applied theories and skills to analyze conflict they learned during the program using conflict analysis tools and find solutions.