By Melanie Grayce West
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303635604576391960650558804
When Vic Goldberg set out to award a prize to a grassroots organization that works to bring about peace in the Middle East, he jokingly called it the Don Quixote Award.
The 77-year-old retired IBM executive thought he'd hardly be able to find one Israeli and one Arab working together to establish peace and break down the barriers of hatred toward one another. Critically, he was looking for people that "show courage," he says.
"I thought it would be a null set," says Mr. Goldberg.
Yet since its founding in 2005, the $10,000 Victor J. Goldberg Institute of International Education Prize for Peace in the Middle East has been awarded annually. This year the prize goes to the executive directors of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development. Amal Elsana Alh'jooj, an Arab citizen of Israel, and Vivian Silver, a Jewish citizen of Israel, will accept the prize at a ceremony in the Peace Tent in Rahat, Israel, on June 21.
Their organization, founded in 1998, focuses on the Arab Bedouin community of the Negev and on community and economic development projects. One project, for example, focuses on a group of 35 Palestinian and Israeli women who are working together to build small businesses. The women make jewelry, soaps and dolls together, among other things.
Mr. Goldberg says he is now encouraged by the number of groups that have applied for his prize. When he developed the prize, he wanted to put an emphasis on peace at a community level. The prize also needed to be personally important, so he focused on Israel. "The situation there has deteriorated and it's never going to be right unless people work together," says Mr. Goldberg. "And I despaired of the governments doing that successfully then and, I'm sad to say, perhaps even more so now."
As a trustee for the Institute of International Education, which administers the Fulbright Program and other international education programs, Mr. Goldberg knew his prize had to pay tribute to that institute's core value that if "you expose people to other cultures, your chance for world peace is better," he says. As such, one of the winners has to have a tie to the institute.
The 14 winners of the prize so far are "the most extraordinary people you would ever want to meet," he says. "Some of them exceed the courage standard. There are cases where they had to meet talking across checkpoints."