{"id":25588,"date":"2010-11-13T13:57:16","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T11:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=25588"},"modified":"2014-01-05T22:06:20","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T20:06:20","slug":"meanwhile-over-in-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/11\/13\/meanwhile-over-in-istanbul\/","title":{"rendered":"Meanwhile, over in Istanbul\u2026.."},"content":{"rendered":"

(The following is a condensed report of an Israeli and Palestinian delegation I was part of two weeks ago in Istanbul)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe word \u2018peace\u2019 has become hollow.\u00a0It has lost its meaning,\u201d said one of the participants.\u00a0\u201cThat may feel like the case,\u201d said another, \u201cbut we cannot let the voice of despair and violence re-appropriate our language for the world we hope to build.\u201d<\/p>\n

This excerpt came from a recent gathering of Israelis and Palestinian peace builders meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.\u00a0The gathering was billed as a \u201cConsultation\u201d of bi-communal field experts. Over the course of three days, twenty participants acted as a think-tank to envision the seemingly impossible \u2013 the reemergence of a cross-border peace movement in Israel \/ Palestine.<\/p>\n

The host organization was a Massachusetts based NGO called the\u00a0Karuna Center for Peacebuilding (KCP), which specialize in bi-communal trainings for grassroots peace-building practitioners all over the globe.\u00a0Istanbul was chosen as a compromise for an off-site location close enough but far enough away from the conflict zone.\u00a0Ten Israelis and ten Palestinians, from places that included Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jaffa, each with advanced level peace-building resumes, were invited.<\/p>\n

The founder of\u00a0Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, Dr. Paula Green, organized this gathering with one goal in mind: to assess \u2018what kind of bi-communal programming would be useful for this region.\u2019\u00a0In other words, what kinds of trainings or actions could bring Israelis and Palestinians together in joint cooperation under today\u2019s reality?\u00a0What could be helpful\u00a0now<\/em>, when the prospects for meaningful resolutions are not promising and the political will of the leaders are not inspiring.\u00a0But this was not a gathering of politicians.\u00a0The twenty men and women, ranging from their late twenties to their early sixties, were assembled in an effort to help make sure that grassroots collaboration projects between Israelis and Palestinians do not become extinct.<\/p>\n

As irrelevant as co-existence work may often seem to a cynical person, this was a battle tested group of peace workers.\u00a0Extensive field experience united this particular group in Istanbul. They were not beginners. They didn\u2019t need prior agreements or ground rules as is usually the case for this type of meeting between Israelis and Palestinians. Most, if not everyone assembled, had spent the better part of the past two decades invested in some type of bi-communal work.\u00a0Friends Across Borders,\u00a0Givat Haviva,\u00a0Neve Shalom\/Wahat AlSalam<\/span>, Eden Association,\u00a0Kids for Peace<\/span>, Face to Face, and\u00a0AlWATAN are just a sample of the organizations represented in the room.Everyone here shared the same strong belief: that that sustainable peace is much more likely if a certain segment of conflicting parties in the society have the courage to cross boundaries and forge a relationship with their adversaries.<\/p>\n

With so much experience under one roof, facilitators Paula Green of KCP and Carol Kasbari from Jerusalem, asked the group to brainstorm ways to expand the shrinking field of peace workers inside the Holy Land.\u00a0Our only assignment beforehand was to read several chapters from \u201cBridging the Divide: Peace-building in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,<\/em> a study of lessons learned from co-existence activity edited by Edy Kaufman, Walid Salem, and Juliette Verhoeven.\u00a0Invariably, we examined some of the key obstacles inhibiting our attempts at bi-communal work, many of which were easy to discuss, but difficult to imagine transcending.<\/p>\n

The topic of the \u201c1%\u201d kept surfacing -the distressing statistic that less than 1% of Israelis and Palestinians ever meet face to face for the purpose of a cooperative activity. Perhaps it is not a surprising statistic.\u00a0For both political and social reasons, most Israelis and Palestinians do not base their impression of the other through personal contact.\u00a0There are many reasons for this.Palestinians, for example, face extraordinary pressure to refuse participation, specifically bi-communal activity with Israelis, as part of a national anti-normalization boycott.\u00a0Several Palestinians invited to this consultation had to decline for fear of losing their jobs or being labeled as traitors or collaborators.<\/p>\n

For Israelis, there is little incentive to participate in bi-communal work.\u00a0For reasons including the construction of the wall\/separation barrier, the diminished physical threat from Palestinians in recent years has sedated the Israeli public to the point that the conflict is no longer seen as an existential threat. Therefore, the desire to meet them or work in partnership has lost its sense of urgency and relevance, at least in the short term.\u00a0The group all agreed, however, that this \u201cbubble consciousness\u201d simultaneously contributes to a growing sense of apathy and fear which, in turn, greatly reduces interest in bi-communal activities.\u00a0Exploring long term mutually satisfactory arrangements to end the conflict is even less likely in this atmosphere of separation and non-cooperation.<\/p>\n

The group also spent time examining what has worked in the peace-building field over the years including the specific characteristics of why certain groups have lasted.\u00a0A powerful example of effective, inspiring and sustainable bi-communal activity mentioned repeatedly was the work ofBereaved Parents\u2019 Circle, a joint support group of Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children from violence in the conflict. No matter what your politics are, given what these parents have endured, it is pretty hard imagining anyone convincing these people why they should hate each other.<\/p>\n

But what makes a project like this effective and sustainable?\u00a0One could say these parents are taking huge risks, but they are also meeting real human needs.\u00a0Encouraging Israelis and Palestinians to cross boundaries, literally and figuratively, has to resonate on a deep enough level to motivate taking the risk \u2013 the type of risk that makes it so plainly obvious that we are all in this together.\u00a0Is it precisely these types of encounters, which wake us up to our interdependence, that this consultation was geared to uncover.<\/p>\n

One specific encounter that emerged during the sessions was the role of a new third party.\u00a0Not a third party as a moderator, but one with high stakes in the conflict. A discussion was convened around the simple question: can joint German-Palestinian-Israeli dialogue make a difference to our future?\u201d\u00a0Although the format is unclear, what was clear is that Germany\u2019s history is directly linked to the formation of Israeli society and has immense consequences on where Palestinian are today. This is well documented from the Israeli perspective, in Avrum Burg\u2019s book, \u201cThe Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes.\u201d<\/span><\/em> The question of the German voice in this conflict, however, peeked genuine curiosity.\u00a0If organized and facilitated appropriately, perhaps the German narrative, in the context of the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, may enable parties to directly confront issues of shame and blame in an unprecedented manner. Who knows what would ultimately yield, but these were the kind of imaginative and risk-taking suggestions that emerged.<\/p>\n

Other brainstorming sessions focused around different but interrelated topics, based on questions raised by the participants:\u00a0Some of these included: What if we did all live in one state?What are the lessons to learn from the success of Hamas and the Settler movements?\u00a0What is the role of Diaspora Jews and Palestinians in encouraging bi-communal work?\u00a0How can we build a constructive struggle to end the occupation?\u00a0What are the criteria for an effective peacebuilding program?<\/p>\n

On some level, most of these conversations were not new.\u00a0But on another level, few could say they had been able to talk about these subjects with peace building practitioners from both sides.The amount of expertise in the room was demonstrated less by what was actually spoken, but more by what was implicitly understood.\u00a0The lack of defensiveness was noticeable, but even more striking was the sheer absence of blame. Resisting the urge to blame is a quality that cannot be understated in any context, but particularly in bi-communal work.<\/p>\n

With help from the Karuna facilitators, the group was guided along a certain trajectory.\u00a0By the final day the conversation had shifted to the practical.\u00a0The challenge was clear. With support from Karuna, would members of this delegation be able to take ownership of a project to train more peace builders in this region?\u00a0Could more people, on both sides, be mentored and supported to further this critical goal of meeting the other for the purposes of shared cooperation? Were there others out there even interested?<\/p>\n

The answer was a unanimous, resounding, almost self-evident yes.\u00a0But more questions remained.\u00a0Could this kind of cross-border training be done given the political and social barriers?Not easily.\u00a0Would there be money for it?\u00a0It would have to be raised. Where would it happen?\u00a0It would have to be researched.\u00a0There were no simple answers and no template of success to work from.\u00a0All Karuna could offer was its experience in other conflict regions and its limited resources to help push this into a reality.\u00a0It was up to these twenty individuals to be the \u201cpeople they were waiting for.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the story of the Middle East Consultation in Istanbul.\u00a0The entering question, \u201cwhat kinds of programs would be useful in this region,\u201d was actually the beginning of the answer.\u00a0The kind of program constructed and run by people who\u2019ve been working tirelessly for years to advance a cooperative interdependent bi-communal future \u2013 that is the kind of program needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(The following is a condensed report of an Israeli and Palestinian delegation I was part of two weeks ago in Istanbul) \u201cThe word \u2018peace\u2019 has become hollow.\u00a0It has lost its meaning,\u201d said one of the participants.\u00a0\u201cThat may feel like the case,\u201d said another, \u201cbut we cannot let the voice of despair and violence re-appropriate our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":30672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148,155],"tags":[2484],"class_list":["post-25588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel","category-palestinianna","tag-peace-in-the-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}