This chapter offers a theoretical overview of the modern world system: a system ordered by states rather than nations. The normative acceptance of the unit and design of the state internal to this, the interstate system, proscribes that people should live sedentarized lives within clearly demarcated state borders, governed by statebearing nations ruling over them. Sesame Street’s adaptation of the interstate system, in turn, meant that Israeli citizens (Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel) were bound to their street-state, Rechov Sumsum, and later, Sippuray Sumsum, and Palestinian citizens (Palestinians citizens of the non-state institution of the Palestinian Authority), to Shara’a Simsim, and later, Hikayat Simsim. If citizens crossed one-street-state into the other, the assumption was that they would necessarily return “home” to their own bordered street-state.

Describes the logic behind Sesame Street interventions’ design and goals, through the performance of concise encoding and production studies of the text of Israeli and Palestinian versions. Compares how the producers intended, negotiated, and expressed the text’s encoding with how the child audience decoded the series after broadcast, thereby revealing how the PeaceComm interventions may have “worked” on the children. The glocalized hybrid series—produced in the euphoric period of the Oslo Peace Accords in the mid-1990s by separate but intertwined Israeli, Palestinian and American teams, later joined by a Jordanian crew, in multiple zones—interpreted and negotiated the American team’s, Sesame Workshop’s, global concept to fit local concerns, incorporating original Sesame Street segments dubbed into Hebrew or Arabic during both optimistic and crisis conflict phases. They created two separate street-state sets and series, privileging the intersection of the axis of ethnopolitical “group” identity and state-based citizenship rights to populate each street-state. The closed text of a “mediated contact effects” PeaceComm model illustrating pro-social interactions between and within the two streets operated in tandem with television’s open text that allowed children to read it on different levels. This inherent contradiction complicated the series’ potential to effectively build and make peace.