Jewish and Muslim student ‘ambassadors’ to promote interfaith relations

The introduction of 18 Muslim and Jewish students acting as “campus ambassadors” in 10 universities across the UK is hoped to promote more interfaith relationships between the two communities.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possibly the most controversial of our time and is often the cause of tension between Muslims and Jews many hundreds of miles across the world; frequently restricting dialogue between members of the two groups.

The 26th January 2011 saw the launch of the “campus ambassador’s programme”. Run by the Coexistence Trust, a London-based charity set up in 2005 as a parliamentary network to tackle Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the programme aims to build a “network of trust and understanding between Muslim and Jewish students on UK campuses”.

The problem, explains Yuval Jacob, Jewish campus ambassador and first year chemical engineering student at Imperial, is that the two communities do not actively mix. Yuval reasons that some Jewish and Muslim students “do not see the point in developing a friendship”.

Shahnaz Ahsan, manager of the trust, says that she has found that “there are pockets of students who want to be working together and are quite excited when they see there is an external organisation supportive of what they are doing”. Ahsan hopes the programme will “set a new tone of respectful debate on campus and avoid the polarisation we have seen in recent years”.

Yuval believes the campus ambassador programme could have a much greater impact than simply promoting interfaith relationships on university campuses. He argues that bringing together the “constant onlooking majority, which lets these conflicts reign since they are simply unsure, undecided, or too cowardly to resist and denounce it” is vital to a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.