A CIRCLE OF DIASPORA
Palestinians, Israelis and Jews in Dialogue
January 24, 2006
Summary by Phoebe Hoss
On Tuesday evening, January 24, 2006, a large and diverse audience was introduced to the Dialogue Project (www.thedialogueproject.org). This event was co-sponsored by the Peace Task Force, Artists for Humanity, the Community Church Action for Justice Committee, and the Not in Our Name Education Committee.
The Reverend Cheryl Walker opened by saying that peace and justice begins in dialogue. She spoke of dialogue as a means of transformation, of unfolding shared meaning – in contrast to debate, which aims to get another to agree on a particular issue. Dialogue involves faith, faith in the goodness of the other. We enter dialogue not sure of how we will be transformed, but knowing that we will be transformed. Dialogue brings us together as a community where all people share common goals.
Marcia Kannry, founder and president of the Dialogue Project, spoke of its aim of getting Anglo-Americans, both Christians and Jews, into dialogue with Muslims, Arab-Americans, new immigrants, and citizens from around the world. The Dialogue Project creates a safe space for people who have grown up learning to hate a particular other – a space in which to learn to hear that person and ultimately to see him or her, with those beliefs, as another human being.
The difficulty of really hearing another was dramatized for us through an exercise, in which we all took part, conducted by the evening’s main facilitator, Jennifer Besch, executive director of the Westchester Cluster Mediation Services. This helped to prepare us for the main event, a dialogue – engaged in not only by the four panelists but also by all the members of the audience.
The panel consisted of Adeeb Fadil, a Christian Palestinian American, born in the U.S.; Yehuda Ehrlichman, an Israeli American, born in Jaffa; Linda Sarsour, a Muslim Palestinian American born and raised in the U.S.; and Ms. Kannry, an American Jew who once held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship and has since revoked her Israeli citizenship. Those on the panel paired off, as did everyone in the audience, each taking three minutes to speak to the listening other in response to three questions; and then reversing the process. The questions were: What is your connection to the Land, meaning Israel and Palestine? What do you fear most? What was your first encounter with the other, someone who believes differently from you? The guidelines for dialogue were stated and included: to suppress any impulse to interrupt in order to give the other one’s full attention; confidentiality; time limits; active listening; and speaking from the I”.
For the next few minutes, Reidy Friendship Hall hummed with the susurrus of serious quiet voices, all hearkened to by serious attentive faces. At the end of the dialogue, each panelist was asked to report on what his or her partner had said. Perhaps the most moving of these reports was Linda Sarsour’s on Marcia’s going to Israel, becoming engaged there to an Israeli, who was later killed by a Palestinian. But how, after the first Intifada in 1987, when Rabin called for collective punishment -- using rubber bullets and massive house demolitions -- she took three months off from work to go to Israel – in a sort of reverse exodus -- to speak to Palestinians and Arabs who had been in conflict with Israel. During these three months, Marcia stayed only in Palestinian homes. This experience led her to leave her position as a fundraiser for a Zionist organization and face the fact and the effects of the occupation.
Among the fears expressed by the panelists were that something cataclysmic might happen, such as a nuclear attack by Iran on Israel; that extremists on both sides would prevent compromise; that if ever a Palestinian state is established, the hatred by Palestinians that has developed against the Jews would continue to upset the peace.
Among comments from the audience were these:
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Ignorance prevails on both sides: dialogue provides context in which to remedy it.
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This exercise had an “Alice in Wonderland” aspect, with the prospect of Hamas’s imminent election and its desire to eradicate Israel. To this Marcia responded that the purpose of dialogue is to give equal footing to a power imbalance: if Hamas wins, Israel will have to deal with it. We were reminded of Kissinger’s “You don’t make peace with friends. You make peace with enemies.”
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In respect to Marcia’s defense of Palestinians after they killed her fiancé, one member, recognizing how difficult forgiveness is, said that we need to practice spirituality.
All in all, the evening’s event was an experience, not just something to which we listened passively. It gave us an inkling of how we can – as the Reverend Walker said to start with – “leap into the abyss holding each other’s hands.”
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