“It is a great honour for us and an enormous appreciation of our work that the Consul General visits us”, underlines the Managing Director of the Peace Academy, Junior Professor Dr. Janpeter Schilling. First contact with Consul General Sandra Simovich were established at an event on the founding of the State of Israel last summer.

Consul General Sandra Simovich stresses that it is important for consulate to cooperate with civil society actors such as the Peace Academy. She and Schilling see great potential for cooperation. “With our respective work, we are pursuing the common goal of a tolerant, pluralistic society,” said the Consul General. Possible areas of cooperation are anti-Semitism, racism and civil courage. The discussion focused in particular on the peace concept of the “Shared Society”. This approach aims to enable all social groups and individuals to participate equally and fully in a common society. In 2018, the Peace Academy launched a five-year project with Givat Haviva and the University of Haifa to further develop the concept and to make it transferable to other countries which also have similar internal social conflicts or experience discrimination against minorities. Schilling and the Consul General were able to put initial ideas into concrete terms: The Peace Academy can look forward to Sandra Simovich as a speaker at one of the next Landau Peace Lectures. The Consul General would like to use her network and high profile to support the work of the Peace Academy.

“At the Peace Academy Rhineland-Palatinate we work intensively on Israel, its society and Shared Society,” said Schilling. Germany and Israel have similar polarizing problems. In both societies there are tendencies of separation rather than unification. It is therefore very important to counter this trend through cooperation and joint projects.