Katharina von Münster/ Winfried Veit Conflict management and crisis prevention in the ongoing crisis – The Middle East conflict from the perspective of civil society. With the outbreak of the second(“Al Aqsa”) intifada in September 2000 the Middle East conflict returned to a new spiral of violence. Seven years of relative tranquility between the 1993 signing of the Oslo Agreement and the failure of the Camp David summit in July 2000 had clearly not been used to secure peace, in what is arguably a classical example of missing an opportunity to prevent and deal with conflicts. 1 This failure applies equally to the international, state level with its multiple levels of mediation and intervention(UN resolutions, American mediation, etc.) as well as to the level of civil society, with numerous non-governmental organizations(NGOs) doing their utmost to set up lasting“people-to-people” structures for dialogue, with the goal of avoiding and dealing with conflict. Similar comments can be made about the“internal” strife between Israel’s Jewish majority and Arab minority, which in the wake of the second intifada has developed its powerful potential for conflict in a highly dramatic fashion. The present paper attempts to sketch these two conflicts from the perspective of civil society viewpoint, and then to portray the efforts by Israeli NGOs – whose activities are supported by western donors- to prevent and deal with conflict. 1 On the concepts of“conflict prevention”,“crisis prevention” and“dealing with conflict”, cf. Andreas Mehler/Claude Ribaux, Krisenprävention und Konfliktbearbeitung in der Technischen Zusammenarbeit, gtz Eschborn(unpublished ms.); Ulf Engel/Andreas Mehler (ed.) Gewaltsame Konflikte und ihre Prävention in Afrika, Hamburg, Institut für Afrika-Kunde, 1999. 1