This year, the Ramallah Friends School Model United Nations Club organized its fifth annual Palestinian Model Nations conference, which took took place from February 15-17, 2016. The theme of the conference was “Raising Flags”— a theme inspired by the historic raising of the Palestinian flag in the United Nations for the first time (on September 30, 2015). Delegates to the conference included students from Grades 9-12 from twelve different schools in the West Bank, a group from Al Quds University, and several individual participants from historic Palestine. The 504 delegates to the conference set a record for student participation.
Over the course of three days, the student delegates engaged in diplomatic discourse, each representing an assigned country on specific topics ranging from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to international transparency, female genital mutilation, and more. As a pilot program, RFS seventh and eighth graders were also allowed to participate in the PalMUN conference for the first time. The goal of the program is to spread Model UN culture into a younger age group and to prepare them early for participation in later grades.
What makes the Model UN Club different than any other organization on the RFS campus is that it is a true embodiment of student-directed activity. Students at RFS founded the Model United Nations Club in 2006. For the first few years, the club focused on training students with proper diplomatic discourse and Model United Nations protocol, and MUN participation was limited to regional and international conferences. In 2010, the club decided to take on the challenge of organizing the first Palestinian MUN conference, and over the past few years this event has become central to the school community. Parents, students, and faculty look forward to the conference and participate in any way possible.
The PalMUN conference is truly a student effort. Not only do students organize the event, they run their own fundraising by writing proposals, communicating with potential sponsors, and continuing to be in contact with them until the Club receives a commitment. The MUN Club is already beginning to organize for next year’s conference, beginning with a self-evaluation of the conference just past, in order to find where improvements could be made.
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