Chapter 19: The Prime Shared History Project: Peace-Building Under Fire¹

Peace building is a planned activity, based on bottom-up processes, while peacemaking is a political agreement based on top-down processes. We usually believe that a peace process can become sustainable only when the two are synchronized. For example, the Truthand Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa was a political agreement, compromising the interests of both sides, which took into account also the bottom-up needs of acknowledgment of past atrocities and taking personal responsibility for them, letting 22,000 victims of the Apartheid give testimonies. Along this analysis, the Oslo Accord gave a political opportunity (and hope) to synchronize the top-down and bottom-up processes in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Many bottom-up projects were initiated as a result of such a hope, alas these hopes were shattered by the outbreak of the bloody conflict in October 2000, after the failure of the Camp David talks.