Creating a Buzz in Tunisia by Yoav Stern

Dozens of security personnel and UN representatives made a mad dash toward the Israeli pavilion in Tunis one day last week. They appeared from everywhere, rushing to discover what had happened to the Israeli flag that had adorned the pavilion at the UN World Summit on the Information Society. Someone tried setting it on fire.

Elsewhere at the conference, the Israeli projects were well-received. Susan Hazan was one of the Israeli participants. She presented a project called "Living Together," in which Israeli youth from all of the existing communities took photographs that together formed a fascinating human mosaic. "The project has Arabic subtitles, and is extremely strong visually. Lots of people were interested in it," reported Hazan.

Several projects relating to cooperation and coexistence between Jews and Arabs were exhibited at the Israeli pavilion. The local Tunisian audience was especially interested in them. One project is "Kav Or" - a distance-learning program for hospitalized children. It is offered by a non-governmental organization that operates computer networks in hospital wards throughout Israel in which children are hospitalized. Since a large number of the project's clients are Arab, every computer is installed with an Arabic-language operating system and an Arabic online distance-learning system.

"We were approached by people from Egypt and from Jordan. You can only imagine children from Israel and children from Arab states contacting each other by Internet to exchange experiences," said Etti Lahav, the coordinator of the project, who presented it in Tunis. (Ha'aretz)

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