In the News

Morocco’s Barlamane covered “The Journey From Hate to Hope,” a WeAreMENA initiative in partnership with Morocco’s Mimouna Association, which brought 25 Moroccan teachers to Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto, and other Jewish memory sites in Poland. The article highlights the program’s unique role in bringing together Arab and Israeli educators and equipping teachers with tools to teach Holocaust memory in Arabic through a North African cultural lens.

After nine months of quiet preparation, 25 Moroccan educators stepped off a plane in Berlin on Thursday and into history. They have embarked on a journey through Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto, and other Holocaust sites, which the trip organizers described as the first Arab-world teachers trained to bring this history home.

What happens when young people from Israel and the Arab world meet, collaborate — and begin to create change? In this special, first-of-its-kind lecture (in Hebrew), we will unveil the groundbreaking work of WeAreMENA (formerly 4MENA) — a new regional network of youth organizations from Israel, the Middle East, and North Africa, founded and directed by Tom Vizel, former senior leader of the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed youth movement.

George Stevens is co-founder of the 4MENA Network, the first network of organisations from Israel, Palestine and across the MENA region devoted to a more inclusive, interconnected and peaceful future for all, and director of partnerships for NOAL, Israel’s largest Jewish-Arab youth movement. He argues that the peace movement in Israel and beyond has ‘an overly simplistic view in which diplomacy and Israeli concessions alone can ensure peace, with no need to offer any solution to the military might and eliminationist desires of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.’ He proposes an alternative approach: peace realism.