"Seasame Street" brings peace to the Middle East

Amid grooving on his mini-synthesizer, Israeli-Arab Mahboub has been attempting to lead a generation of children in the Middle East to abandon hate and embrace acceptance. Despite the odds, he may just have a chance. How so? Mahboub is a Sesame Street Muppet. The furry blue monster premiered on Rechov Sumsum, Israel’s Sesame Street adaptation, in December as the world’s first Arab-Israeli Muppet.

“We wanted to make the Israeli kids admire him and his abilities,” said Motti Aviram, Rechov Sumsum’s producer. “Arabs in Israel are like Israelis…so we didn’t want to make them look different. We wanted to give the legitimacy of a neighborhood street and an Arab neighbor.” With productions in Palestine and Israel, Sesame Street is attempting to teach children of the Middle East tolerance while their parents have been failing to learn. To reinforce the shows’ message of tolerance, Sesame Workshop President Gary Knell visited the Israeli and Palestinian productions of Sesame Street in May and distributed 5,000 educational kits with classroom activities in both Hebrew and Arabic to kindergartens throughout Israel.

The message comes at a time when satellites are pouring bloody images and hate-filled messages into the minds of children throughout the Middle East. In April, an identical over-sized Mickey Mouse appeared on Hamas’ official TV station. He danced and sang while instructing his fans at home to perform their daily prayers, drink their milk and join him in the fight against “Bush, Condoleezza and Sharon.” Harwa, 11, called into the show, titled Tomorrow’s Pioneers, to sing along with Farfur the Mickey Mouse look-alike. “The people firmly stand, singing this to you. Oh, oh, its answer is an AK-47,” Harwa said. “We do not know fear. We are the predators of the forest.”

In contrast, Shara’a Simsim, the Palestinian version of Sesame Street, teaches its viewers lessons of self-esteem, environmental compassion and conflict resolution. “We didn’t focus on external violence like Israeli or Palestinian because that’s a violence children are exposed to on a regular basis. But also the violence that children feel against each other is a violence that still hurts children whether it’s at home or wherever,” said Cairo Arafat, the show’s content director.

Rechov Sumsum and Shara’a Simsim began the first attempts of a united children’s television show among Israelis and Palestinians in 1998. After the first season, a Jordanian team, who wanted a Sesame production of their own as homage to the recently deceased King Abdullah Hussein, joined in 2003 and the three productions created Sesame Stories. During Sesame Stories, the Jordanian producer was blacklisted by television producers in his country due to his contribution to the project. Any work alongside Israelis was considered controversial. In Israel, few television stations were willing to invest in the program. “In our second season, we were producing it amidst days we were bombed,” Arafat said.

Despite risking their lives to spread the happy Sesame Street messages, cooperation eventually became too difficult. Each party tirelessly pushed their own nation’s ideals and wanted a show of their own so they decided to end their collaboration.

Despite this decision, both Israelis and Palestinians are using Sesame Street to provide their young viewers with a balance of cultural pride and multicultural tolerance. Rechov Sumsum, is now using Mahboub to better reflect Israel’s diverse population. “My main goal is when an Israeli kid has an Arab neighbor in his neighborhood, it should look normal to him,” Aviram said. “My kids were grown knowing being Arab is something natural. Some kids need a show for it.”