Whose program is this? Negotiations in designing a student-initiated and student-led Jewish-Arab/Palestinian dialogue program on campus

This research examines the Nice 2 Meet U intervention program which, unlike other programs promoting dialogue between Arab/Palestinian and Jewish students on Israeli campuses, was a grassroots program initiated and moderated by students. The program was designed jointly by the initiators, the participants and the researcher/advisor using action research. The objective of the current study was to describe the negotiations among all the partners with respect to a central dilemma: should the program include political discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The research proposes seeing the negotiations over designing grassroots conflict intervention programs as an arena in which the participants' academic, ethno-national and gender positions intersect and shape knowledge-power relations. Alongside the risks inherent in this process, it also offers potential for creating transformative spaces that challenge traditional patterns of power relations and encourage students to take part in changing the social atmosphere on campus.