Despite the fact that Ambassador Jones is only a few months in office, and still has many pressing tasks as a result, he was very enthusiastic to meet with us and made the necessary time arrangements. We were five persons – representing different aspects of the work of IEA:

·        Yehuda Stolov – presented the unique approach of IEA, unique in the peace and coexistence building field in it a-political nature, applying to all parts of the political spectrum in the respective societies, and unique in the interfaith field in its interactive nature, avoiding the setting of a panel and passive audience.
He further presented IEA activity, with thousands of people in more than 300 programs, in its three geographical focuses: within Israel it works to form and sustain on-going groups that builds communities that model relations of friendship on the one hand and with support and respect to the distinctive identity of each group – so far established 15 groups from the Upper Galilee to Eilat; in the Israeli-Palestinian context through cooperation with 7 Palestinian organizations from across the Palestinian Authority – in 14 weekend retreats; and in the context of the larger Middle East, in cooperation with organizations also from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia and Turkey – in 4 annual conferences under the auspices of URI.

·        Najeeba Sirhan – presented the work of Karmiel-Majd el-Krum Interfaith Encounter, which is focused around two main schools in the two neighboring towns. She described how they came together as a result of the October 2000 events in order to heal the wounded relations between the communities. In the beginning they met reluctance in the teachers' room and started with a small group of teachers dedicated to this mission. After consolidating the team of teachers they went to work with the children but facing refusal of parents to allow their children to enter the other town they had to start in a 'neutral' place – an educational farm serving both schools. Now, after several years of work, they have on going encounters at all levels, visits to homes and places of worship, joint choir and soccer team, language classes for children and parents etc. They are now good friends and continue to include more people from the two communities.

·        Shlomo Alon – who is the current chairperson of the board, presented the work of the Arabic Interfaith Encounter, which bring together Jewish and Muslim educators to jointly discuss issues of education through language and culture. The group's language is literary Arabic which is a unique challenge not only to the Jewish participants but also to the Muslim ones.

·        Nada Abu Zaidan – presented the work of the two groups for interfaith encounter in the village of M'ghar. Following the violent clashes between Christians and Druze last February, a team of the IEA came to the community center of M'ghar and together we started this activity. First one group formed with 28 members, men and women, who started to meet regularly and also organize larger events that brings together hundreds of people of the 20,000 residents of the village. After a while Nada noticed that all the voices that are heard – also in the reconciliation efforts – were voices of men and the women were not heard. So she started a special sub-group of women, jointly organized with a nun in the village, with 7 women from each of the three communities – Druze, Christian and Muslim – in the village.

·        Sahir Siam – presented the work of the Jerusalem Women's Interfaith Encounter and its work in the past four years with some 25-30 women in each encounter and additional joint celebrations of Holidays of Jews, Muslims and Christians.