Middle East Education Through Technology
Jerusalem, Israel
$16,000 2008
http://meet.mit.edu/
2008 Middle East Education Through Technology Site Visit

The mission of MEET is to offer Palestinian and Israeli youth an opportunity to learn together in an intellectually challenging and non-confrontational environment using the international "languages" of technology and business. This is achieved through a three-year computer science, entrepreneurship and business program for excelling Israeli and Palestinian high school students. The program is conducted through intense five-week summer sessions for three consecutive years and weekly year-long after school classes between the summer sessions. The program is taught by instructors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The goal of MEET is to offer a fresh approach to reconciliation in the Middle East by building for a new future. The MEET strategy is expressly built to incorporate several principles that are essential to creating the kind of change they envision:

• Set Aside Conflict Negotiation (temporarily):  This practice is at the heart of MEET's strategy.  Rather than engage directly in dialogue/negotiation about the conflict, the MEET program focuses on pragmatic technical/business problem-solving and through this addresses leadership, social interaction, teamwork, and mutual understanding, laying the foundation for a new framework for Palestinian-Israeli dialogue.
• Change in attitude is best facilitated by "dialogue through shared experience."  Social research supports MEET's premise that participation in an ongoing inter-cultural framework which provides overarching shared goals contributes significantly to the reduction of prejudice and negative stereotyping of the 'other' and that the attitude changes resulting from the kind of individual contracts available in MEET transfer to a broad range of "out-groups" and settings.
• Perception Change and Peacebuilding Take Time:  MEET has purposefully designed a three-year program in order to allow sufficient time for relationship-building to occur and cumulative positive experiences that are goal-oriented and provide measurable results.