EU refuses to fund Jerusalem coexistence project between Jews and Arabs - because Israel supports it

From the Teachers' Lounge website:

Teachers’ Lounge (in memory of Shira Banki) is an HUC-JIR professional development program for Muslim, Christian and Jewish teachers from all over Jerusalem.

We consider teachers to be key figures and cultural heroes that lead by example. They impact on their community and beyond.

The vision of the program is to promote a process of knowing “the other”. This foundation enables the formation a multicultural society with neighbors living together with mutual understanding in a shared society.

This sounds exactly like the type of program that the EU loves - sponsored by a liberal Jewish group for teaching coexistence between liberal Jews, religious Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem so they can fight bigotry and racism.

The Times of Israel  notes that the EU won't fund it, though:

The program is seeking to expand to more cities with significant Arab and Jewish populations, such as Haifa and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, but it suffers from funding shortfalls since not all foundations supporting peace projects are willing to support it.

For example, the organizers say the European Union views them as “perpetuating the conflict” because it is is officially recognized as a seminar by Israel’s Education Ministry — a body, the EU believes, that shouldn’t be dealing with residents of East Jerusalem, many of whom aren’t Israeli citizens.

“So we are battling for the very existence of the project,” Cheftzy Uzan-Nachmani, the project’s manager, said.

Israel's Education Ministry is more interested in coexistence between Jews and Arabs than the EU is. .

Every single partner for this program is Israeli.

Israeli liberals, for all their faults, actually care about peace.

The refusal of EU foundations to support a program like this shows that they hate the idea of Jews having any connection to Jerusalem far more than they care about actual peace and coexistence. Which means that their talk about caring about peace and coexistence is just prattle. They'll happily work with Iran, but working with Israeli government ministries in Jerusalem is crossing the line.

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