Unleavened Media: Can technology bring peace to the Middle East?

As a platform for collaborative problem solving, few sectors bridge cultures like technology. For example, according to the Kaufman Foundation, 52% of Silicon Valley start-ups have foreign-born founders. Led by staff from MIT, the Middle East Education through Technology (MEET) program encourages collaboration between high-achieving Palestinian and Israeli high-school students.

The 100 Jerusalem-area teens are selected from a pool more than ten times that size. They work in small, bi-national teams in English to solve technical and business challenges. While programing in C++ or building an IM client, these students actually learn much more. MEET student George Khoury talks about the larger role of MEET.

"If I could choose a headline for the newspaper of the year 2020, I would choose this: 'MEET leaders change the world, a peace treaty has been signed.'"

Each summer, the groups - equal parts male and female, Israeli and Palestinian - spend 5 weeks learning advanced technical and business skills. The program maintains continuity through weekly programs, including workshops and field-trips, throughout the year. Hebrew University provides the classrooms, computer labs and facilities. Other donors include MIT, Steven Spielberg (Righteous Person Foundation) and the Charles H. Revson Foundation.

This summer, 15 MIT students and 5 MEET alumni serve as instructors. In fact, since its founding in 2004, a total of 80 MIT students and alums have taught in the MEET program. "I came hear to teach," says recent MIT Sloan graduate and MEET business instructor Ben Schlesinger, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant. "I actually feel like the students are teaching me."

Melkar Mualem, a third year student living in Ramallah, had this to say about the MEET program:

We had a long discussion about Palestine and Israel and it was empty of discrimination. Everyone exchanged knowledge, teachings of his family, school, environment and each other. Every one of us got more information from the other and it helped us make up our mind and our view on the situation here. MEET for me is my second family and my big source of inspiration."

The 200 MEET alumni are beginning to make an impact in their world. Among the Palestinian alums, a young man recently launched his own web-design company in East Jerusalem. Other Palestinian alums have matriculated to top universities around the world. Two are currently at MIT, two others have scholarships at universities in Canada and Lebanon, while yet another is in the Student Leaders Program at Georgetown University. "A student that finishes MEET is part of a family - a family of support that includes the academia world and the business world,"Anat Binur, MEET co-Founder and currently in the PhD program at MIT, said.

The MEET program demonstrates the potential for Palestinians and Israelis to transcend and embrace differences. Technology has an important role to play in uniting these divided communities. Wearing a yarmulke and pointing to his MEET classmate (George Rizik), Israeli MEET student Eli Luskin comments, "I think George is exactly like me. Before, I thought that Arabs are, I don't know, not human beings. But now, I think we are the same." MEET is proving that "enemies" can learn to love one another.