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Our aim is to contribute to peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, primarily through supporting the social healers, teachers, peacemakers and innovators we have come to know. They are featured on this site. This means whole-spectrum support, co-evolved with them.
Within the limits of what is possible, we aim to back up and help the progress of these dedicated people. Since the peace process in the Holy Land is fitful and liable to persistent setbacks, our support must remain consistent and sustained, to avoid adding to peacemakers' emotional wear-and-tear.
Whenever peace comes, these people will be leaders in post-conflict social healing. For this reason, we're thinking longterm - after the peace there will be big challenges too.
Our main means of working is personal contact and relationship. This is how this project started, and that's how it will continue. This is a way of bypassing many of the necessary regulations, procedures and complexities incurred by more impersonal aid organisations. We believe that peace works through friendship and building trust.
Working with a personal sense of integrity, we set ourselves high standards, attracting others with standards and sincerity to match.
While personal friendships and judgements are involved, we nevertheless exercise a quality control, monitoring of effectiveness and accountability. We would not stop support because a recipient makes a mistake, but we would consider stopping if integrity and motivation slipped - even if they are our friends.
We work facilitatively, not just with funding, but with moral support, equipment, contacts, advice and friendship. Giving and recieving constitute a two-way flow.
Jerusalem Peacemakers is a joint project - a network of cooperating independent operators. Those we support also become advisers, monitors and coordinators for each other and new members, helping the process along.
The project seeks to raise, administer and distribute support, and to create direct connections between the wider world and peacemakers in the Holy Land. We wish to facilitate as many viable ways as possible for support and interchange to take place.
We have a spirited humanitarian ethos. Several key people have spiritual and religious involvements, yet our main motivation is humanitarian: what matters is people and society.
On the UK and US side of the project, none of the key participants has Jewish or Palestinian ancestry: we simply judge this conflict to be a crucial nexus of global progress.
The Holy Land is a microcosm of the whole world - this is not a mere local conflict. Peace and reconciliation here can shift the balance throughout the world. This is why we choose to focus on this particular conflict zone.
We have an ethos of simplicity and ground-level understanding. Many NGOs and charities do excellent work, but some have become faceless, bureaucratic, professionally formalistic and lost in marketing. Our aim is to retain a sense of personal connection with peacemakers, groups and supporters.
Our ethos recognises the emotional sensitivities of people. When we cannot support people concretely, our moral support and solidarity can make a big difference. When peacemakers are up against adversity and injustice, it's easy for them to feel isolated and beaten, so we set out to bolster their hearts and spirits.
On this Jerusalem Peacemakers site, we host web-pages and sites by which people and groups present themselves to the world. We seek also to send a constant trickle of visitors to the Holy Land, to bear witness and convey support and friendship.
Please if you have questions.
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