The Canadian Peres Center for Peace Foundation is suspending activities after failing to gain a foothold in the Jewish community.
“After almost six years, we have reached the conclusion that we cannot penetrate the general Jewish community and the general public,” said Arie Raif, the organization’s CEO and vice-chair.
Fundraising never lived up to expectations and barely warranted all the costs and efforts put into it by the organization’s volunteer base, Raif said.
“We got less than one-quarter of what we’d anticipated over six years,” he stated. “It is expensive to run a campaign to raise funds, but it is ten-fold more complicated to raise funds for a charity that is misrepresented as a political entity. We are not left. We are not right. We are a humanitarian NGO.”
READ: NEW HEAD OF RABBINICAL ASSEMBLY WILL EXEMPLIFY CANADIAN VALUES
The Canadian Peres Center For Peace Foundation was launched in early 2010 as “an independent, non-profit, non-partisan NGO that supports the work of the Peres Center in Israel in organizing humanitarian projects, educational and cultural programs, scholarships, fellowships and residencies for medical personnel from the Middle East,” the organization’s website states.
“We followed the idea that the Peres Center in Israel has undertaken very serious projects [to address] the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Raif said. “As Peres said at the time, ‘people build peace, not just governments.’”
The Peres Center is named for Shimon Peres, a 92-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who has held many positions in the Israeli government, including prime minister and president.
Raif said he had anticipated Canadians would support the Peres Center’s agenda of nurturing a culture of peace and mutual understanding, particularly its program to bring Palestinian infants to Israel for treatment for serious medical conditions.
“We in Canada believed that Peres was right in promoting dialogue and people- to-people interaction. We believe he was right in nurturing a culture of peace and mutual understanding in the region for youths. We believe that joint projects like saving the children by bringing them to Israeli hospitals – more than 8,000 children have received treatment – would generate Canadian generosity, so we could send funds to Israel so the Peres Center could continue with its projects,” Raif stated.
Raif admits he’s disappointed that the centre’s message of peace did not catch on in large enough measure with Canadian Jews.
“I am saying the Jewish community in Canada is leaning very much to the right and misunderstood and misinterpreted what we were trying to achieve,” he said. “At this stage, we still believe that we must find a way to live in peace with our neighbours.
READ: TONY KUSHNER SAYS FEDERATION IS SILENCING DISCUSSION ABOUT ISRAEL
“Anybody who tells you peace is not achievable is not realistic,” he continued. “It was achieved with Egypt and Jordan and we pulled out of Lebanon because we cannot occupy and control the West Bank with 2-1/2 million Palestinians.”
Citing leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet, and military intelligence, Raif said they predicted that occupation “will destroy our economy and if we continue to occupy West Bank territories, it will harm Israeli society, the Israeli economy and most of all bring us close to a civil conflict.”
With operations now suspended, Raif held open the possibility of one day re-launching with a new motto: “In spite of our differences, we can build peace, not just negotiate peace.”
