Cricket 4 Peace
This project's parent organization is Peres Center for Peace
It operates in Israel and
It uses Cricket
Entered the Best New Project
More about Cricket 4 Peace
Israeli and Palestinian children might live a few minutes from each other, but would ordinarily never have the chance to interact in a social or personal setting. This fosters a culture of mistrust between the sides, leading to sustained stereotypes and prejudices.
Sport provides a highly effective way of learning and practicing the principles of fairness and teamwork, transcending factional conflicts and bringing disparate groups together. The Cricket 4 Peace project cuts across traditional identities based on nationality and creates new group identities built on equality and cooperative interdependence. This project is specifically structured so as to encourage unity and eliminate conflict, with Israeli and Palestinian children always playing in mixed teams (instead of Israelis versus Palestinians).
Cricket is universally recognized as a sport that teaches unique values of sportsmanship, demands respect for teammates and opponents alike, and is a fun, competitive, athletically demanding game in a largely non-physical framework, making it ideal for a project of this nature. Cricket in Israel is established and structured enough to allow this project to operate effectively, whilst small enough to ensure each participant is highly valued and exposed to potential opportunities other sports would not be able to offer.