Training Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Mediators Our projects in Israel began years ago with a series of trainings for Israeli mediators. In May 2004, the ICfC partnered with the Israel Center for Negotiation and Mediation in bringing together Israeli Jews, Palestinians, Druze, and Bedouins for advanced training in helping resolve the problems that contribute to the current conflict devastating the Middle East and to prevent their recurrence. The main sequence of training sessions took place under the leadership of the ICfC chair Hillel Levine; Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy professor Eileen Babbitt, Esquire; Resolve Advisors trainer Shirli Kirschner, a clinician and facilitator from Cambridge, Massachusetts; Dr. Pam Steiner; and from the Israel Center for Negotiation and Mediation, Director Yona Shamir. The twenty-two trainees were experienced members of agencies and foundations from the region, drawn from various cultural backgrounds. The training focused on gaining skills in mediating historic narratives to be prepared to serve as facilitators in resolving and reconciling the Jewish –Palestinian conflict in the years to come. Trainees have organized a management team chaired by Sarah Kreimer, which oversees cooperation of the group. The trainees, now ready to mediate disputed histories and pained memories, undertook various projects. Among the most amazing ones is a project of narrative mediation between the Jewish settlement of Yaad and descendants of a destroyed Arab village Miaar in the West Bank territory. Yaad stands where Miaar used to be. The initial workshop and four subsequent dialogue sessions were facilitated by Jabir Asaqla (himself a descendant of Miaar) and Chassia Chomsky-Porat (from Yaad), two of our trainees. This series of workshops addressed the tensions between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in regard to one of the subjects that are usually considered the most “interest-based” in nature, yet which also create the greatest potential for violence: land claims. In this case, members of both groups were living around a hill in which their families held historic roots, but with radically different histories and personal stories about the situation and its meaning for their lives. It was organized by people trained by the ICfC and our local partner organizations, the Israel Center for Negotiations and the Jewish-Arab Center for Economic Develpment, as a way to apply the knowledge of narrative mediation that they gained from the ICfC to a specific dispute in their own country. Jabir and Chassia guided the participants, who were selected as leaders and influential members of their respective groups, in finding common denominators from their personal narratives- their needs, hopes, fears and concerns . This took place over the course of eight months. We started with private sessions with either group. In these sessions, we brainstormed what words and ideas each side thinks of when they think of the conflict. Then we guided the participants in explicitly comparing their lists, viewing them as the different constituents, or building blocks, within which each side constructs its social reality. We asked participants to reflect back what they heard, to check for accuracy, to contrast their lists, to focus on the similarities and the differences of their narratives, and to discuss what can possibly be done to synchronize or perhaps shift the meaning that members of the two groups give to these words in their respective stories about their lives and the land. We also guided the participants in finding parallels, where they existed, between the stories of their people. In doing so, we very purposively met with the parties separately at first before starting a joint session. In the joint sessions, we proposed certain broad themes for discussion by both sides. The discussions were tough at first, and tensions in the group ran high. The breakthrough came in a form of a trip. The group visited the hilltop where Miaar used to stand together. That evoked strong sentiments especially for the former residents of Miaar, remembering the house of a local breadmaker, finding their granparents' tombstones. Some participants held the keys to the houses that used to stand here in their hands. The pained memories that the Miaaries shared are universal. The visit to this site helped the group form a strong bond that helped them to move forward together, get 'unstuck' from positions they started out with in the dialogue process, and finding solutions to preserve the hilltop in some way together. After a few months, the group has reached an understanding about the site and in fact the group keeps meeting together to this day to discuss any issues that arise. Yaad-Miaar was a promising beginning. We consider Yaad-Miaar a model of a long-term dialogue with historical conciliation at its core. This model is being replicated in Hadar and hopefully will also be implemented elsewhere in Israel and around the world. |