After
listening to news accounts of Palestinian homicide bombers and Israel's
military response, Eddy Ehrlich feels ready "to explode."
Then Ehrlich, a self-described political centrist, goes to his
monthly Jewish-Arab dialogue circle and comes away feeling like
a changed man.
"Thirty souls have opened up and the humanity flows,"
Ehrlich says. "I go out so relieved."
Bassam Amin, a Palestinian living in Brooklyn, had to force himself
to go to his most recent dialogue group. Israeli soldiers on a Ramallah
street had recently shot to death one of his cousins, a mentally
disabled man, he says. Amin, who spent the first half of his life
in Kfar Malek, near Ramallah, says he now has nightmares about Israeli
soldiers coming to his door in the middle of the night, dragging
him out, naked, into the street.
"I have to challenge myself to sit across this table and speak
about peace" while feeling so angry, he says
At the same time, Amin struggles to teach his 6-year-old son to
eschew hatred. "This is a huge dilemma for me, to explain the
destruction to my son. I try to explain to him that not all Israelis
are bad, that not all Jews are bad."
Ehrlich and Amin are both part of a fledgling network, The Dialogue
Project. At a recent session, in the back room of a Brooklyn Middle
Eastern restaurant, a small group of Jews, Muslims and Christians,
including Israelis and Palestinians, engaged in one of today's thorniest
- and most elusive - endeavors: talking to "the enemy."
Their dialogue grew passionate, even heated, but with great effort
remained respectful. Afterward, conversation was animated as participants
caught up on each others' personal lives while scooping up hummus
and salad with warm pita.
"This is not a feel-good touchy-feely thing," says Marcia
Kannry, founder of The Dialogue Project. "But the news is pushing
us along to keep it up."
The idea first occurred to her after she found herself overwhelmed
by grief in September 2000, when Israel's now-Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon took a walk on Jerusalem's Temple Mount and violence let
loose in the start of the current intifada.
Says Kannry, who had lived in Israel as a regional director for
the Jewish National Fund, "My choice was to stay in bed and
moan, or figure out a way in my own community to confront this."
So she began talking with Palestinian shopkeepers in Park Slope
and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where she does her errands, and with school
administrators at area schools with large Arab student bodies.
About 14 months ago, she started to organize her new network into
dialogue groups.
Result: three dialogue circles, each with 15 to 30 participants,
two in Brooklyn and one on the Upper West Side. Four more - in Brooklyn,
Manhattan, Riverdale and New Jersey - are in formation.
Each dialogue circle meets once a month for several hours, led
by a facilitator. Kannry tries to balance participation between
Jews, Muslims and Arabs, with non-Arab Christians involved as "supportive
others," but says it's much easier to get Jews involved than
Arabs.
About 800 people of the 1,100-plus on a dialogue circle waiting
list are Jews, she says.
"People know that their passions run high, and that they want
to be polite. Those from Muslim communities are not used to speaking
in a circle. They're not therapist-oriented like we are," she
says.
The currently explosive level of tension around Israeli-Palestinian
issues makes the work of The Dialogue Project more difficult - and
even more compelling.
"Many ongoing participants haven't wanted to come because
they feel so angry," says Kannry. "The feeling is, 'The
fire is burning. Why are we talking about picking up the hose rather
than actually picking it up?' "
At the dialogues she says, "You can feel people palpitating
with rage but nonetheless following the guidelines" that are
part of the project.
And they persevere.
"I come in wanting to explode but have to pick the one thing
I can talk about, and then listen to 29 other people," said
Ehrlich, who participates in the Park Slope dialogue circle and
works as an occupational therapist. Two of his brothers live in
Israel - one on a kibbutz, the other in Efrat.
There are a few other similar efforts in existence.
According to the Web site Middle East Web (www.mideastweb. org),
nine groups meet in other parts of the U.S., from San Francisco
to Orange County, Calif., from Duluth, Minn., to Charlottesville,
Va.
There are nine more in Israel and the Palestinian territories through
peace-making organizations there, three in Europe, and five that
exist only in cyberspace.
The Dialogue Project's circle discussions maintain clear guidelines:
The purpose is dialogue, not debate. Meetings begin with a classic
conflict resolution exercise: mirroring. People pair off to share
their perspectives on a particular topic for a few minutes. Then
the circle comes back together as partners synopsize each others'
stories for the group.
Then participants start to discuss a specific theme, trying to
stick to statements that begin "I feel" One month the
topic might, for example, be current events. At this month's meeting
of the Park Slope Dialogue, held Sunday at the Ethical Culture center,
it was the Holocaust.
Through the process members say they begin to know "the other."
"I better understand the Israeli obsession with security and
defending themselves," says Diane Chehab, a Christian Lebanese-American
who still has family in Beirut. "Being able to listen in a
better way, I now understand what they're talking about, even if
I don't agree."
One evening before a recent meeting, several dialogue members joined
other interested people in a visit to El Maqdies Mosque, in Bay
Ridge. It marked the first time that the mosque, which attracts
Sunni Muslims from different ethnic backgrounds, had hosted Jews.
A reciprocal trip to a Brooklyn synagogue is being planned.
And it was the first time that most of the Jews had been in a mosque.
"I was actually scared," says Alexander Gonenne, an American
Jew whose father and stepsiblings live in Israel. "As soon
as prayers began, I felt frightened. I tend to associate the prayers
with a negative connotation, based on my experience in Israel."
Bassam Amin, the Palestinian Muslim pharmacist who works in downtown
Brooklyn, says, "The call to prayer is not a call to war."
Says Benny Davidovitch, an Israeli who has lived in the U.S. for
the past year and works as a physicist, "it's very hard to
hear" strong critiques of Israel. "I feel very sorry and
guilty. I feel confusion, because this is about my survival. It's
my family's life, my friends' life."
Eddy Ehrlich, of the Park Slope circle, says that "there isn't
equity" in his group. "Jews are being asked to examine
what evils they have perpetrated, and that question isn't being
asked of the Palestinians," he says.
Part of the problem may be the inherent bias that stems from self-selection.
Most of the Arab participants are "non-radical," Ehrlich
says; most of the Jewish participants see themselves on the liberal-left
of the political spectrum.
Ehrlich calls himself "a pragmatist, somewhere in the generally
silent middle." He says he is the only Jewish participant who,
while introducing himself during a dialogue, describes himself as
a Zionist.
"I end up feeling like I have to represent the part of the
spectrum that isn't there. At the last meeting there was justifying
of suicide bombers. To me, it was a real problem that there was
a lack of historical context, and a lack of religious context"
in understanding the Jewish connection to Israel.
"The idea that is convenient for Arabs to latch on to is that
the Holocaust is the reason for the creation of the State of Israel,"
he says.
So then "why go?" Ehrlich asks rhetorically. "What
choice do I have? The alternatives suck.
"The choices are to yell at the radio or to get together with
close-minded Jews, pat each other on the back and feel sorrowful
or justified.
"I do it," he says, "to invest in a future that's
grounded in reality, in a reality that recognizes the other. It
matters how we behave now, while we wait to see what happens.
"It's better to be angry up close than hating from afar."
Published in The Jewish Weekly Serving the Jewish
Community of Greater New York, Friday, May 10, 2002 http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=6144
For more information, look at http://www.thedialogueproject.org,
write to marcia@thedialogueproject.org, or phone Thomas Cox at (718)
965-3830.
