The din of Israeli-Palestinian politics often drowns out the voices of the people it directly impacts. Project Engage hopes to empower these oft-unheard and unseen voices by providing select Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists with intensive communications training and then, through outreach trips to the U.S., helping them build a platform for sustainable and effective engagement with American policymakers and opinion shapers.
Specifically, Project Engage seeks to:
- Provide large-scale communications trainings to Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists;
- Offer ongoing consultancy to these organizations and activists on engaging US policymakers and publics with partner institutions;
- Facilitate intensive skills training workshops for select individuals with in-country partners;
- Prepare engagement and media strategies with the input of select partners;
- Guide select partners on outreach trips/speaking tours of Washington D.C. and the United States; and
- Enable relationship-building between outreach trip participants and U.S. decision makers and opinion shapers.
Because Project Engage believes in the inherent dignity and equality of all Israelis and Palestinians, Project Engage seeks participants who communicate a variety of perspectives—ranging from the redress of violations related to occupation and the siege on Gaza to access to justice in both the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas and Israel, minority rights throughout the region, terrorism, women’s rights, right to life, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, torture, education rights, refugee rights, movement and access, and discrimination.
Project Engage does not seek to promote or impose any political beliefs on its Israeli and Palestinian partners, nor does it endorse any political perspectives itself: In Project Engage’s view, these are matters for Israelis and Palestinians to decide.
Rather, Project Engage seeks to open an honest—and complete—discussion of the full range of human rights issues affecting Israelis and Palestinians, thereby enabling new and fresh interlocutors to effectively communicate perspectives not currently being heard in mainstream discourse. Such a deliberative debate is essential to creating informed U.S. foreign policy in the region. |
