Enter YaLa Young Leaders.
Launched in May 2011 as a joint partnership between the Peres Center for Peace and YaLa Palestine, based in Ramallah and chaired by Salah Elayyan, the Palestinian Authority's cabinet secretary, YaLa-Young Leaders is a Facebook-based movement that promotes dialogue and engagement as a means to secure a safe, productive, and peaceful Middle East.
It sounds utopian. But the movement has grown to 355,000 people, including Egyptians (103,000), Israelis (13,800), Palestinians (22,100), Jordanians (20,500), Lebanese (2,200), Syrians, Yemenis, Sudanese (100), Turks, (8,700) Moroccans (25,200), Tunisians (24,600), Iraqis (29,000), Libyans (9,900), Saudis (3,700), Algerians (40,700), Emiratis (1,100), and Kuwaitis (1,100).
The driving force behind YaLa was Uri Savir, former Oslo negotiator and now head of the Peres Peace Center, who was inspired by lessons learned from his experiences during the negotiations. Savir's takeaway was that the Oslo Accords -- as a top-down approach -- lacked the inclusiveness of Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab societies. So YaLa is very much bottom-up.
Through the power of Facebook, YaLa has spread through the region. YaLa-Young Leaders provides a platform for ongoing dialogue and seeks to harness the power of youth that has driven so much of the Arab Spring and the Rothschild protest movement in Israel. In a way, YaLa can be defined as a meeting point between Tahrir Square and Rothschild. Rather than meet once a month, as Israeli and Arab negotiators might do, YaLa allows thousands of interactions a day on a variety of issues from protests in Egypt, to Syria, to the latest international crisis between young Arabs and Israelis who physically cannot engage. To imagine thousands of young Arabs and Israelis with 24/7 access to one another is to imagine the future.
Now with 355,000 members, it's the biggest movement of its kind in the region and has developed partnerships with governments, including the United States, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland, as well as the support of private-sector companies such as Microsoft and Facebook. YaLa's members are active, not only in ongoing dialogue, but also in peace advocacy through the promotion of YaLa's Peace Initiative and in YaLa's Online Academy (YLO@), with online courses for Arab and Israeli students from leading universities in the United States, such as Princeton, Harvard, Vanderbilt, and University of Michigan. It has also launched an online media platform, YaLa Media Cafe, with blogs from young leaders emphasizing peace, democracy, and gender equality.
John Wallach was a dreamer. But like Uri Savir, he also understood reality. And in a historic conflict likely to take time to resolve, investing in a younger generation is critically important.
"The aim of YaLa-Young Leaders," Savir told me, "is to be a regional voice for the generation of change in the MENA region in order to promote common values and aims in relation to the respect of human rights, democracy, peace, and economic cooperation.... I believe that in these times, governments in the region and the international community will have to listen more carefully to the voices of young constituencies in the MENA region as expressed on YaLa. It is a voice of change, equality, and hope."
And who can argue with that?
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