Tell Your Life Story: Creating Dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians 9786155211027

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TELL YOUR LIFE STORY

TELL YOUR LIFE STORY Creating Dialogue between Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians

By Dan Bar-On

Central European University Press Budapest New York

©2006 by Dan Bar-On Published in 2006 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: ceupress @ ceu.hu Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-646-557-2416 E-mail: mgreenwald @ sorosny.org All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 963 7326 70 7 978-963-7326-70-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bar-On, Dan, 1938Tell your life story : creating dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians / by Dan Bar-On. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-9637326707 ISBN-10: 9637326707 1. Psychology—Biographical methods. 2. Storytelling—Psychological aspects. 3. Bar-On, Dan, 1938- 4. Political psychology. 5. Children of Holocaust survivors— Psychology. 6. Children of Nazis—Psychology. 7. Jewish-Arab relations—Psychological aspects. 8. Palestinian Arabs—Psychology. 9. Israelis—Psychology. I. Title. BF39.4.B37 2006 305.80095694—dc22 2006020002 Printed in Hungary by Akadémiai Nyomda, Martonvásár

Table of Contents

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xi

INTRODUCTION My Journey Through the Whirlwind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

CHAPTER 1. Developing a Methodology: Narratives and Stories . . . . . . . . . .

23

CHAPTER 2. Reconstructing Narratives Out of Silence: Beginning a Dialogue Between Germans and Israelis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

CHAPTER 3. PRIME: Peace-Building Efforts Under Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77

CHAPTER 4. Storytelling in the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Context . . . . . . 121 CHAPTER 5. The Diverse Voices of Haifa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 IN CONCLUSION Life’s Rivers, Whirlwinds and Whirlpools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Preface

“In the desert, especially during the fall, huge whirlwinds emerge. Strong winds from different directions collide, lifting dust, leaves, and paper as they whirl over the yellow and dry plains. Sometimes they cross a road, a car or a house, filling up everything with dust. When caught in a whirlwind, you do not know where you are; it blurs your sense of direction. But at a certain moment, it just dies out and the desert returns to its deep silence and slow pace, under a clear sky. This is my image of where we are today, pulled and pushed by different dynamics that whirl us and whirl around us, so that we cannot make sense anymore of what going forward or moving backward mean, where we are heading or from whence we came.” An interviewee

In this book I will take you through my personal whirlwind journey through chaotic times. It started in Haifa where I was child during the 1940s and ’50s, moving to Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev desert, where I lived for almost twenty-five years. Over the course of more than thirty years it overtook my professional activities. In the whirlwind I found my way between research and intervention by developing a method of inquiry that combines interviewing, analysis and group dialogue. I describe my Jewish–German studies on the aftereffects of the Holocaust, but most of the book focuses on my studies in the Israeli-Palestinian domain, with both Palestinians from the Palestinian National Authority and Israeli Palestinians.1 Joint studies are a central focus. Some of my work has been with Prof. Sami Adwan, with whom I co-direct PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), and with Fatma Kassem, my co-facilitator of a Jew-

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ish- and Arab-Israeli students’ workshop at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The book ends with my interviews with Jews and Arabs in Haifa in 2000 and 2001, during the outbreak of the second Intifada. Thus my journey, which started in Haifa, will end there. In a way the journey is also my own quest to keep up hope in chaotic times that engender increasing desperation. Approaching the age of 65, I have an image of retirement, of people being able to look back with satisfaction at what they have accomplished, enjoying the rest of their lives with their grandchildren, calmly doing things they never had time to do before. Yet this serene image does not appeal to me. I am quite restless. Apparently, most people are unaware of my restlessness, for I often hear that I appear calm and relaxed. But I know parts of myself that others cannot see. Some of this restlessness is perhaps my personal character, that of a person who tries to do too many things at once, not really enjoying the possibilities for leisure that are offered. My mother claimed that as a baby I had to be fed with two spoons so that I would not cry in between the single spoonfuls. (The anecdote may tell as much about my mother as it does about me, but I will not pursue this line of inquiry further.) It took me many years to find out that much of my restlessness is not an innate part of my character, but rather a product of the chaotic situations with which I had to struggle: the era in which I grew up, the era in which I live now; the political domain as well as the professional one. I would say, in retrospect, that elements of my restlessness are a reaction to feeling overpowered by unpredictable whirlwinds that I did not initiate, trying to work my own way through in spite of them. At the same time, I always tried to avoid being caught in the loop of seeing myself as victim of circumstances. My strategy for coping was to be hard on myself: I am not a victim; if anything, I am a victimizer who brought these situations on himself. Even as I write these words, a voice in me says, “You are making it up, it was not so hard after all; you are simply a bit spoiled.” But I learned to struggle with this voice, as well as with the chaotic circumstances, and I learned to attribute less of the total responsibility for my restlessness to my “bad character.” My journey through the whirlwinds I encountered, in myself and in others around me, brought me to the personal and professional choices described in the following chapters. Because

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the currents of history have influenced the course of my journey, the book begins before my birth, with the escape of my parents from the gathering storm in Europe in the 1930s. The interplay of biographical happenstance and professional choice becomes evident as my narrative proceeds.

NOTE 1 The terms “Israeli-Palestinians” and “Arab citizens of Israel” refer to the

same minority group within Israel, as its members themselves use both labels to identify themselves. It is important to consider them separately from the Palestinians in the PNA, who seek their own state.

Acknowledgements

Though I describe herein mainly projects in which I have been involved, I wish to emphasize that other practitioners and researchers embarked upon similar undertakings in parallel. I learned a great deal from them and from our exchanges about our experiences. First were my mentors, whose work preceded mine; I discuss at least two of them in this book: the late David-Phillip Herbst and the late Don Schön. I still miss my conversations with them, almost daily. Then there were colleagues from whom I learned, such as Gabriele Rosenthal, Benno Mueller-Hill, Gertrud Hardtmann and Israel Charny, Bennett Simon, and Carol Rittner—all associated with my earlier work in the German–Jewish context. When I moved to the Palestinian–Israeli context, I became deeply indebted to facilitators such as Rabah Halaby and Michal Zak from the Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam School of Peace, Fatma Kassem of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Rafiqa Othman of the David Yellin College of Education, and Nazir Mgally from Nazareth. I thank Ms. Kassem, my co-facilitator of the group described in chapter 4, for helping me work through some of the issues discussed in this chapter. I am also indebted to researchers Ifat Maoz and Gabi Solomon, Danny Bar-Tal, Ariella Friedman, and Elia Awad, not to speak of Sami Adwan, my co-director at PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), without whose collegiality much of my work would not have materialized. The middle part of chapter 3 was written collaboratively with him—most of our writing about PRIME is a shared endeavor, as is our work on its projects. When I became ever more involved in narrative research, Amia Lieblich, Ruthellen Josselson, Niza Yanay, and Yoram Bilu were important colleagues with whom to consult. Over the years I had the

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privilege of seeing some of my former students (notably, Gadi Ben Ezer, Julia Chaitin, Shoshana Steinberg, Tal Litvak-Hirsch, and Nitai Keren) become important partners to consult and continue to work with. I thank Dr. Chaitin for her inspiration and for help in the global analysis and translation of some of the interviews presented in chapter 5. I thank Dr. Litvak-Hirsch for allowing me to cite the texts discussed in chapter 4. My special thanks go to Chaia Beckerman for her excellent work of editing. I also want to thank Dr. Wolf Schmidt, Susanne Kutz, and Ulrike Fritzsching of the Koerber Foundation who have supported me and my complicated journey for several years now. My interview partners and the participants of my groups became a kind of extended family for me, a clan I never had in my private life. I am grateful for their patience with me and apologize for my mistakes, when I must have hurt them with no such intention. Similarly, I learned a lot from my children. Yaara and Shani have lately become writers and researchers in their own rights. Others would simply say things that had meaning to me, even if they did not realize or intend it. Last but not least, I acknowledge the support of my wife, Tammy; I owe her so much, even if I do not always find the words to express my gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

My Journey Through the Whirlwind

1. My family background Had I looked back, I would have shared the fate of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt; a pillar of salt made of her tears for all that is lost. Franz T. Csokor, December 17, 1938 (Hussong, 1998)

My use of the image of the whirlwind throughout this book will mean more if I begin with the circumstances that brought my parents to live in Israel, where I was born and lived most of my life. My parents did not look back when they left Germany in 1933, nor were they paralyzed by loss, as was Lot’s wife. Their strategy was to try and move forward once they had left. Having lived a good life as young intellectuals in Germany during the twenties, they were initially surprised by the Nazi rise to power. My father describes it in his diary (written in 1978, one year before he died): We were so completely caught up in the charms of skiing that we did not grasp the importance of the event…The next day we arrived in Munich and found the whole town covered with Nazi flags and swastikas. Back in Hamburg we went to a concert, showing off our deep tans, still ebullient. Our enthusiasm (today I would call it euphoria) left us quickly when we met our relatives and Jewish friends. They were gloomy about the political developments. (Legacy of Silence, p. 3).

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Still, my father shortly thereafter made his decision to emigrate. My mother came to comfort me. I still remember our conversation vividly. I said, “You should know, Mother, they start with a boycott and they end with a pogrom. I shall definitely leave Germany.” She answered, “How can you say this? It will be over in a few months.” (ibid.). My late brother, Michael, who was born in Germany in 1932, and I (born in Haifa in 1938) wondered many times in our adult lives how our parents managed this rapid transition from jolly ski enthusiasts to very early émigrés. In particular, we wondered why they chose Palestine as their destination. For, as my father noted, “we had never been Zionists or shown any interest in Palestine before” (ibid., p. 4). It was a family legend that our mother did not want to go to Palestine, but she was an anglophile and our father convinced her that it was a British Mandate. This legend corresponds with what we both overheard our mother saying in the fall of 1947, when the British Mandate was about to end and the British military were getting ready to leave through the Haifa harbor: “Let’s leave with the British—I do not trust the Middle East without them.” But at that point, neither my father nor my brother nor I wanted to leave Israel with the British. In deconstructing part of our father’s historic choice, it emerges that he was probably not as decisive as we once thought he was. After his death we found a letter he had written to the Nazi authorities in 1933, trying to convince them not to apply the Goebbels law of April 1, 1933 to him (preventing non-Jewish patients from seeing Jewish physicians). He cited his service during World War I as a paramedic in the German Red Cross as evidence of his German loyalty. Only after his request had been totally ignored did he make up his mind to leave. But why did they decide to immigrate to Palestine? We know that one Jewish couple among their Hamburg friends decided to go to Brazil, while another couple went to Shanghai. Was it an adventure of youth, or a calculated risk, a far-sighted vision of the enormous, approaching danger? Was there a Jewish element in that decision after all, or was it a romantic dream about the Orient by liberal, assimilated but also colonial Westerners? Was it perhaps a mixture of

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all these factors? To this day I do not have a single good answer to this question. We only knew that our parents tried not to look back, physically or psychologically. They found out, step by step, “that the past belongs to another world that is gone from us” (Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front). My mother, courageously, went back to Hamburg in 1935 to convince her parents to leave Germany at once with the last available certificates. She traveled with my brother, then a toddler, enticing them with their (then) only grandchild. Her father was a proud German soldier of World War I who probably would never have deserted his Heimat (homeland, in German) on his own initiative, even after the racial Nuremberg Laws had already been enforced. Only during his last years did my father show signs of possible regret or indicate how traumatic the act of immigration may have been for him after all. For example, when my brother was about to build a new house in Jerusalem in the late seventies, my father reacted with distress: “And what if you want to leave next year?” He was recalling that he had built a new house in Hamburg one year before they left (suggesting how safe they felt then about their life in Germany). On another occasion, about a year before he died, when there was a strike of merchants ships’ in the Haifa harbor, our father told my brother and me: “Everything is falling apart here. If you care for your children, I think you should leave before it gets too late.” I cannot hide the fact that this admonition has resonated in my mind during the last few years, when I have felt more and more politically estranged in my own homeland, due to the growing political animosity in Israel toward the Palestinians and toward my own work with them. But I no longer believe that there is a place on earth that could give me and my family a refuge or the relative safety that my father found by leaving Germany and going to Palestine. It turns out that he did the right thing at that point in history, but I find that chaos is everywhere today. And so I feel that we must stick it out in Israel, working things through until, at some point in the future, belief in the possibility of more positive relationships in this small and hurting land—between Jews and Arabs and among Jews and Jews— materializes. I am afraid that my restlessness, as a descendant of the émigrés and survivors of the Holocaust, reflects my surrendering the illusion of a peaceful and stable haven. I have not experienced that

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“other world that is gone from us,” the world that our parents once experienced as safe and predictable. For my brother and I, the Holocaust was already a historical fact, and after it the world seemed chaotic and unpredictable, and the people who live in it no less so. My parents did not have an easy life when they arrived in Palestine. There were too many practicing physicians, so my father opened an automobile garage for the first years, until he joined the British army in 1940. He was away in North Africa most of my early childhood. My mother, who was an excellent musician and pianist and an openminded intellectual, had to raise two little boys and take care of her parents who moved in with us, all crowded into a tiny apartment. My mother and father had to cope with these hardships in a narrow-minded ideological climate of monolithic Zionist zealousness that was not their cup of tea. German Jews were not particularly welcomed by the Eastern European-dominated Zionist Jewry. To some extent, this was the latter’s revenge for the way German Jews used to look down upon them as Ostjuden (Jews from the East, mainly Russia and Poland) who arrived in Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. But amidst the real whirlwinds of that era, the horrors of the war and the Holocaust, our parents did succeed in creating a relatively happy and secure environment for my brother and I. I remember a home filled with classical music and books; nature walks; and abundant humor. In spite of the hardships and chaos of that era, I count myself among the lucky ones. My brother and I grew up in a home that prepared us to make our choices later in life. This privilege was denied many other children of our times. As a child, I was lucky to have grandparents, unlike most of the children in my age group. Thanks to my grandparents, I learned to speak German, resuscitating the language when I started to conduct interviews with the descendants of Nazi perpetrators in 1985–88. From my grandpa, during our endless walks in Haifa and on the Carmel, I got my love for stories, which may account in part for my later professional interest in storytelling and listening. As I see it, my parents left Germany early enough to provide my brother and I with a sense (or illusion) of physical safety and cultural continuity and late enough for us to know that there was no way back, no Jewish European past to be continued. Giving us this was easier said than done; they did not and probably could not provide

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5

us with a sense of psychological safety. This could be one source of my restlessness. I think that my late brother and I, while growing up in Israel, knew in our hearts that our parents still longed for something that was gone forever. I remember two trips to Europe with my mother, first to England in 1951, to visit her family there, and later, in the mid-seventies, when I joined one of my parents’ trips to Switzerland, where they would go after they received their reparation payments from Germany, as they could not stand the summer heat in Israel. On both trips I could feel my mother suddenly awaken emotionally once she arrived in Europe and smelled the European climate (physically and psychologically). She would suddenly become a different person, less estranged and depressed, much more alive and happy. My father reacted a bit differently. On one hand, he was seen in Israel as a “yekke” (an nickname for a German-born Jew, often derogatory, hinting at an inability to adjust to Israeli norms). He was marginalized by his accent, his disciplined behavior, his urge for rational argument. But he worked hard to become a part of the system, including the Zionist vision, which he had not been a part of earlier on. He joined the Haganah (pre-Israel armed forces) and was recruited as a physician in Haifa during the 1948 war. Later, during the 1967 and 1973 wars, he was proud to replace the physician of the kibbutz I lived on when our local physicians were recruited to the reserves. Yet I recall his groaning at nights after he came back from the British army and joined the Israeli health-system unions as a physician. There he had to struggle not so much with his patients as with the bureaucrats who had little respect for the medical autonomy of a pedantic German-speaking physician. Still, both our parents created the narrow bridge for their sons to move into the future, relatively unscathed.

2. Starting my journey: From embracing the collective to breaking away At some point I had to distance myself from the German atmosphere at home and all its complexities for me. I wanted to become a real Israeli sabra,1 according to the criteria of that era. I went to an agricultural high school, changed my family name to a Hebrew one, and joined a kibbutz in the desert, as far away as possible from where

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my parents and brother lived. (Michael went to study in Cambridge, England, right after his military service.) I joined the military as a combat paratrooper and pathfinder. In the kibbutz I worked with and later took charge of the fruit trees, and I recruited new young members to the kibbutz. I believe those years of constructing a monolithic Israeli identity as a part of a collective enterprise were very important for me, enabling me to develop a certain independence (one might say counter-dependence) from home, the environment that had such a rich and deep impact on me as a child but also estranged me from the Israeli social milieu to which I aspired. During those years in the kibbutz I achieved a certain sense of safety and stability: Working with good friends in the fruit trees—irrigating, pruning, and harvesting; importing new varieties from abroad—to me represented a special combination of creativity and stability. The collective home, its socialist ideology and the agricultural work, having friends and beginning a family—all these fit into a wholeness, a gestalt of “being an Israeli” without question marks. It seemed then like realizing a dream. My first personal whirlwind as an adult came during the wars of 1967 and 1973. I emerged a wreck. In the 1967 war I lost a dear friend who had managed the fruit trees with me, and I had my own very difficult military experiences during the 1973 war, fighting on the Golan Heights and later remaining for almost six months in the Sinai desert. The stability and the dream were gone. I felt that things were falling apart, and I went into therapy. There, I was ready to acknowledge the fact that instability in Israel would not stop as a result of my being part of the kibbutz: I had simply created my own safe haven and avoided seeing beyond it. In a way, I had used my first ten years on the kibbutz to ignore the winds that continued to whirl around and within us. The therapy helped me to move a bit outside the addiction to the collective and try to stand on my own feet. It also helped me reintegrate my earlier years and my German background into my self of the time. I started to question some of my monolithic Israeli identity constructions. By this time, however, I had three children. It was not easy to go through this process as a parent, expected to give solid answers to the young ones while reformulating my own ideas. They were looking to me for strength and accountability, and I felt unable to live up to their needs in this respect. But I still tried to change the world in a naïve way, even when it was not as solid as it had seemed before, by becoming politically ac-

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tive in the Israeli left. I probably assumed that everyone around me should go through a similar process of collective identity deconstruction. I was still too young to understand the power struggle in the Israeli society I was entering into with my new ideas and activities. I remember writing an article as early as 1970 in favor of the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It appeared in the weekly publication of the kibbutz movement. The following week, one of the leaders of our movement, Israel Galili (one of the ministers in Golda Meir’s government) came to give a speech in my kibbutz and warned the members of the “bad weed” growing in the kibbutz that needed to be “uprooted.” This was the political climate within the Labor Party in those days: no direct confrontation, but indirect remarks aimed at undermining anyone who thought differently and denied the legitimacy of their point of view. Sometimes, when I think of the crisis in today’s Labor movement, I recall those days when it seemed as strong as a rock and destined to lead the country for eternity. In parallel to my relatively naïve political attempts, I started my undergraduate studies in behavioral sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. We were the first group of students to study these topics, at a relatively young university. Our teachers came here from more established universities in Israel to try out new academic endeavors, to which the conservative establishments were inhospitable. Most of the students were in their thirties, relatively experienced in life, and we did not accept the theories we were taught without discussing and questioning them. I greatly enjoyed this opportunity to learn psychology and sociology and to think critically about myself and my society. At the same time, I also learned to do research properly. It was during these years that I actually started my professional journey. I began what I consider my second career (the first one being my work as a farmer). I was acquiring new theoretical tools to understand the chaotic world around me and in myself, in a way that challenged me, and I was ripe for the challenge. In addition to my university studies, I joined the seminars of Prof. Robert Tannenbaum, who came from UCLA to teach group dynamics and organizational development to kibbutz members. He and his colleagues assumed that nothing would be more natural for the kibbutz movement than to embrace their methods in order to design processes of change in the movement (Shelhav & Bar-On, 1985). I took part in these seminars, and the critical thinker in me did not let

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me live through the experience in peace. How, I began to wonder, do we know that the change a person talks about really took place? Perhaps he was influenced by group pressure and once the group disappears, the effect vanishes. Or, if people do not talk about what is going on inside them, how do we know that they are “resisting change”? Perhaps they have no words to express what they feel. I lived with people in the kibbutz who had such difficulties, and I knew that people differed in their abilities to recognize and articulate their own emotions. Certain assumptions of organizational development seemed too simple to me. I had doubts whether people who lived with each other in such close quarters as on kibbutz, could suddenly “open up,” and if they did, I had doubts whether they would be able to handle the “Pandora’s boxes” of their repressed pasts. But then it was too early for me to formulate an opinion or a way to accomplish change in kibbutz society, taking these reservations into account (Bar-On, 1977). In the kibbutz clinic where I gained my practical education as a therapist, we studied family therapy and paradoxical methods of systemic approaches (Elizur & Minuchin, 1989). We watched videos of Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir, and the Milano School. These were the closest methods to what I was looking for. I was especially intrigued by the paradoxical method of giving patients two conflicting messages simultaneously, as a response to the “double-bind” messages that families convey (Bateson, 1966). (For example, a mother tells her son how much she loves him, while her underlying message is one of distance. The son has no way to reconcile this double message. The therapist(s), usually in a family therapy setting, responds by also providing two contradictory messages, such as “I think you should do this, but the other therapist thinks the opposite.” Having more than one option validated pushes families to make choices. Had I become a therapist, I would have chosen this way to cope with the chaos within families. But I was not ready to focus solely on individual and family therapy, and I could not give up my interest in social processes.) For example, I learned that an unusually high percentage of cases at our clinic were referrals from one particular settlement. Thinking in system-oriented terms, rather than about the individuals, I wanted to find out what had happened in that community that led a relatively large number of broken families to seek professional help. In a way,

Introduction

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this ran against the basic trend of the profession—the more work we got, the better. Yet this was actually the beginning of a very interesting search and ended up with my understanding something new about Zionism of the 1970s. I interviewed a few people I knew who lived in that settlement and asked them about the history of the place. They all referred me to Peretz, the founder of the settlement, from whom I heard the following story of its origins. Peretz (a distant relative of the famous Jewish author Y. L. Peretz) was originally from England. In childhood he was often ill, so his parents sent him to recover on an island in the Gulf. There, special varieties of high-yield tomatoes were grown in hothouses. Peretz learned the techniques, and when he married he decided to immigrate to New Zealand to teach farmers there how to grow hothouse tomatoes for export. After his daughter grew up and immigrated to Israel from New Zealand, he and his wife followed her. He approached Raanan Weitz, at that time the director of the settlement department in the Jewish Agency, and told him that he had the experience and expertise to get a yield of ten tons of tomatoes for export from a quarter acre of hothouses. Weitz was skeptical, but in one season Peretz proved that he could do what he had promised. An overwhelmed Weitz asked, “What do you need to have a whole settlement produce such a yield?” “I need a new settlement with half an acre of hothouses for each family and I need English-speaking farmers,” was Peretz’s response. “It is too late for me to learn Hebrew.” Peretz also demanded that they have post-secondary educations in order to “be able to develop the necessary expertise in a short time.” Without any further hesitation, Weitz gave the instructions to his department to build a new settlement in the western Negev desert, and he sent a search committee to interview and choose educated English-speakers with enough Zionist zeal to immigrate to Israel and grow tomatoes. These were still the seventies, the days of enthusiastic and idealistic Zionism, and the committee found people who were willing to come and fulfill Peretz’s dream. It actually worked quite well for a few years, but after some time problems started to emerge: Some people wanted to stop growing tomatoes, while others began leaving the place. Families started to disintegrate. While listening to Peretz’s story I started to understand the connection between the potential distresses of educated English-speak-

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ers who suddenly had to commit their lives to growing tomatoes in the desert, in the name of Zionism, and some family crises we were observing at our clinic. I told Peretz before we departed, as I thanked him for the fascinating interview, “You may know a lot about tomatoes, but you understand nothing about human beings.” I then took the initiative and discussed my analysis with the leadership of the settlement. I suggested that they, as part of their long-term responsibility for the people in the settlement, should encourage people to at least partially return to their former academic skills or develop small industrial plants related to their skills. But at that time (the late seventies), no one was receptive to such psychosocial perspectives. The leadership of that settlement was still absorbed in the Zionist ideological discourse about redeeming the land and people. Collective zeal was still more important than the psychological wellbeing of the families. This was my first lesson about the limits of psychologically oriented intervention in an ideologically dominated social context. The rest of the book describes how I encountered this limitation again and again.

3. Professional path-finding through the whirlwinds “The idea that any human life moves serially and progressively from a determinate beginning, via a middle passage toward an ethically and aesthetically satisfying conclusion, is as artificial as the idea of the river running straightforwardly to the sea. Life and rivers periodically flood and run dry; rapids alternate with calm stretches, shallows with depths; and there are places where eddies, counter-currents, undertows, cross currents, backwaters and dark reaches make navigation unpredictable.” (Jackson, 2002, p. 22).

My work at the kibbutz family therapy clinic had implications for my future interests in research. There I encountered the first families of Holocaust survivors whom I tried to help and gained my first experiences in a new field that would later engage my interest for many years (Bar-On, 1995b). There I also formulated the research question that led me to my doctoral dissertation. I asked myself: How do people manage a crisis, without going to therapy? My life experience (at home, on the kibbutz, in the army) pointed to the fact that many people manage in crisis situations without seeking professional help.

Introduction

11

Perhaps people who come to the clinic are the exception rather than the rule? We psychotherapists know how people deal with psychological distress when they tell us about it at the clinic. But to what extent do these patients also represent those who do not come to seek help? I knew that before there were clinics, there were other supports—the clergy, for example—as well as friends and supportive family members. But in our secular world, how do people manage crises or stress when they do not talk about it with a professional? I looked at my father as an example. He had many crises in his life. He had to face the suicide of his father when he was 14, make the decision to leave Germany in 1933, and endure the separation from his siblings and mother who went to the United States. He had to struggle with the inability to practice medicine after immigration to Palestine, his painful return from the British army, his divorce from my mother, his first heart attack while living alone, and then remarrying (my mother). I asked myself—how did he manage these events all by himself, never seeking professional help? How do most people manage in such situations? And what does managing actually mean? Do they, as a result of their crisis, develop new ways of thinking that helps them overcome the crisis? Or do they hold on to what they have? Does overcoming one crisis enable them to cope better with future ones? What does it mean to effectively manage different crises? Do some develop such capacities and others not? Does surviving crisis reduce the ability to live in less-critical life situations because you became addicted to the critical situations? I looked for a crisis that did not imply seeking professional help, and the physician in my kibbutz suggested heart attacks. Most people, especially men who get their first myocardial infarction when they are relatively young, have no previous notice, especially when they do not suffer from high-blood pressure or diabetes. It must be a psychological crisis no less than a physical one, but they usually do not seek professional help. This is what brought me to develop the thesis question of my dissertation: What subjective theories do people develop around their first heart attack: Why did it happen and what will help them come out of it? Some of the patients developed complex theories that partially accounted for their recovery, helping them learn the boundary between what they could and could not control in terms of the past, and how to link their strength with that of others around

12

Tell Your Life Story

them to negotiate the future. The perspective of others was dysfunctional; they saw themselves as having no control over what had happened and would happen, and this correlated negatively with their recovery. The story appears in the Indescribable and the Undiscussable (Bar-On, 1999a). After I finished my dissertation, the kibbutz expected me to return and work in the barn, which I did for some time. But I was already too far into my new academic interests to be content. The kibbutz approved a short post-doctoral Fulbright scholarship trip to the United States in 1983. I started off by visiting Prof. Bernard Weiner at UCLA, as I had used his approach to attribution theory for my doctoral dissertation.2 During my short visit there I was overwhelmed by the reputation of the department, the solidity of its mainstream approach, the rich laboratories, and the range of doctoral students from all over the world. At that time, the UCLA social psychology department was bigger and of course much more illustrious than our entire behavioral sciences department at Ben-Gurion University. The latter encompassed all the psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists at the university but was not well-known and suffered from a sense of marginality at that time. Traveling on a small plane from Los Angeles to Eugene, Oregon, where Prof. Baruch Fischhoff would host me at the Decision Science Research Institute that he then co-directed, I felt I was facing a crisis and had to make up my mind which way to go. I knew that at BenGurion University I would never have the affluence and fame possible at UCLA’s mainstream social psychology department. I could either try to make my laboratory at Ben-Gurion a small and poor copy of those at UCLA or I could go another way altogether. At 45, I was not particularly young anymore, at least not young enough to be starting off in a place like UCLA, competing with all the young and brilliant post-doctoral students I met at Weiner’s laboratory. But I felt that I had some life experience that could be useful, and I still had my brain, heart, and two hands, and it was up to me how I would use them to find my own path in this complicated academic world. I was ready to take the risk of giving up the more conventional path, for the sake of doing something on my own which would be meaningful. A year and a half after that trip I left the kibbutz where I had been a member for twenty-five years, and I started my study in Germany, interviewing the descendants of Nazi perpetrators.

Introduction

13

In order to be able to develop my own contextualized constructs, I needed mentors who would support me along the way. I was already an admirer of Stanley Milgram’s systematic experimental approach to basic questions about human evil-doing.3 I used to teach my students in social psychology every single manipulation Milgram used in his laboratory obedience studies, as well as discussing the ethical and conceptual issues that his studies raise (Miller, 1986). I met other mentors through their writings: Kurt Lewin, Gregory Bateson, Jerome Bruner, and Kenneth Gergen. But I also needed personal and ongoing interaction. David Herbst and Don Schön were two mentors who encouraged me to go ahead with my non-conventional research topics and methods. They were both interested in learning processes in practice and theory, but they represented two different versions of that kind of dialogue. In retrospect, I think they were my two anchors, my reference points in the process of searching my way between intervention and research, between the intra-personal and the social, interpersonal through the “counter-currents, undertows, cross currents, backwaters and dark reaches” to which Jackson alludes. They gave me the courage to follow through with my questions. Neither was dogmatic and both had the breadth and intellectual depth to understand my questions and did not disregard them as strange, impossible, or irrelevant, as other colleagues did. David Herbst, with a social commitment to the welfare of simple people, worked “bottom–up”. Don Schön had a more top-down approach, working mainly with the managerial level of organizations. He had the knowledge and wisdom to do rigorous research. He formulated the problem of “technical rationality,” with which he struggled most of his academic career, trying to establish an alternative that would not be less “scientific” but would cope with the depth of human experience (Schön, 1983). But when I reflect on my relationships with David and Don from today’s perspective, for me they also represented coping with the Old World Order, with the concept that the “other world that is gone from us” that I mentioned in the introduction. They represented the possibility of coping with the complexity I was struggling with, even if they did not have the opportunity to live through the post-cold war struggles we are faced with in the beginning of the twenty-first century. They operated from a social context in which there was evil (the Nazis) and there was good (the free world of which they were a part). Later, that division was imposed on the cold war: the Communists

14

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became the evil ones and the Western democracies represented the good. In that regard there was a difference between Don Schön and David Herbst, the latter being more deeply associated with Europe and the Third World and more critical of American domination and materialism. But, at the same time David was even more fearful than Don of the intentions and the evil capacities of the totalitarian Soviet Union (as one can learn from his essay on totalitarian logic), as was Hanna Arendt (1958). Unfortunately, he did not live to see its disintegration in 1989. This polarization between good and evil framed their worldviews. But their way of coping with it was to address the variety of crosscurrents and undercurrents in the rivers of life, which the mainstream polarization of their time did not recognize politically or scientifically. In that sense they prepared me for a post-cold war complexity that they themselves did not have a chance to experience. Today we struggle with good and evil being much more intertwined and less obviously separable. On the personal level, when I try to find my way today, I still identify with David’s marginality and Don’s centrality. Searching for a conceptual framework, I am inclined to link myself to Don’s top-down reflective mode as well as to David’s moral way of approaching power relations from the perspective of the less fortunate. My dialogue with both was essential to my quest, as was my dialogue with other mentors and colleagues whom I encountered during my journey and do not mention explicitly in this book. My own first step to struggle with my perceived limitations in comparison to the American mainstream in psychology was to delve into specific areas that interested me, evaluating how people actually coped with situations such as first heart attacks or the after-effects of the Holocaust a generation later, in relation to existing theories or constructs such as causal attribution theory or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I soon found out that the deeper I inquired into a specific context, the less informative these generalized theories were, and so I had to start to develop constructs of my own. For example, the subjective theories I identified, formulated by the patients who coped better with heart attacks, did not match the dimensions Bernie Weiner spoke about, but rather combined items of the separate dimensions. Yet these subjective theories accounted for the recovery of these patients better than the theories of their

Introduction

15

physicians (Bar-On, 1999a). Similarly, I found that the concept of PTSD told little about the working-through process of descendants of Nazi perpetrators facing their parents’ silencing and that of the society around them. In response I developed such constructs as the “double-wall phenomena” or “paradoxical morality” (see chapter 2). I went back into the field, trying to test and refine them, moving back and forth between practice and theory several times. I learned that in practice theories had to be contextualized to relate to specific groups of human beings. Mainstream psychology did not favor this, as it was looking for generalized “basic processes” that could account for human behavior. I was not willing to compromise on studying real-life issues in favor of achieving abstract scientific standards, trying to imitate the natural sciences. In order to continue on my own route, I had to be up to date not only with publications in clinical and social psychology, but also in related sciences—history, literature, philosophy, and sociology (Bar-On, 1999a). The nature of my psychological research interests had both historical and sociological aspects. Investigating the intergenerational aspects of the Holocaust and the 1948 war required historical knowledge. I also had to ask questions about the social roots of silencing of certain voices as other hegemonic voices were allowed to overrule them. And because I relied on the accounts I got by interviewing people, I became interested in questions of language—its limitations (in terms of the expressions of emotions; see Bar-On, 1999a, chapter 4), and its special contextual characteristics. This brought me to the second step of my professional journey: taking a greater interest in qualitative research methods, especially in biographical interviewing and analysis (Rosenthal, 1993; Leiblich et al., 1996). The focus of my scientific inquiry became the possibility of listening to people’s stories, their personal accounts, and being able to analyze what they would tell (and what they would not). I already had a sense of this from my early therapy sessions, when I had listened to a Holocaust child survivor and felt that what she told me was more valuable than what the theories told me about how I had should define her as neurotic or psychotic. But then I did not yet have a name for the method I sought. That came much later, through my interviews in Germany (Bar-On, 1989), and later still through our interviews with three generations of families of Holo-

16

Tell Your Life Story

caust survivors (Bar-On, 1995b), and my participation in the TRT group process. At that advanced stage I valued biographical methodology as a tool that enabled me to study intergenerational transmission and working-through of traumatic events like the Holocaust. But I have matured since the ideological and monolithic phase of my life, and therefore could not define myself as an ideologically oriented post-modernist, as did some of my colleagues in Sociology or History who were looking for a kind of scientific revolution—moving away from conventional methodology. In any case, the post-modernists in psychology were almost non-existent (Bar-On, 2001a). Nor did I rule out the possibility of conducting quantitative research, as did some of my colleagues on an ideological crusade in favor of qualitative methods. I found myself a kind of go-between, rather than belonging fully to one of these schools. My third step was to publish extensively. I found out that if you do not publish your own material, you perish, not in the usual sense of failure to advance up the academic professional ladder, but by being marginalized and forgotten. The power of the mainstream in U.S. psychology lies in its self-sufficiency: It is acknowledged because everyone knows the literature and the hierarchy of salience and the places where the mainstream is best advocated. If you do not belong to the mainstream, people will not cite your work and tend to forget you, even if they found your work interesting. The only way to struggle with this was to continue to publish, to come up with new data, and to hope that some of it would break through the boundaries of silencing and forgetfulness. Here, I also had to contend with the fact that I lived on the periphery, first of all, in Israel, away from the centers of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but even more so in terms of Israel’s distance from the American psychological center. For me, writing became a means of communication. I developed my ideas and molded them, sending what I wrote to colleagues, discussing the ideas, rewriting, and sending them out again. For example, I tried to write a theoretical book—The Indescribable and the Undiscussable (Bar-On, 1999a). It took me more than fifteen years to complete this book. I started to write one chapter right after I finished my dissertation, during my Fulbright stay at MIT, working with and learning from Don Schön. I continued my conversations with him and with David Herbst and several other colleagues in the years from 1983 to 1998. During these

Introduction

17

years, many of my conceptualizations changed as a result of the clinical practices in which I was involved, the people whom I observed, the dramatic changes that took place in the world around me, and probably changes in myself as well. Writing became a very important way for me to find my way, rethinking and reflecting once more on things I experienced and digested. The last step that I recall in this professional journey was establishing a core group of young researchers, mainly doctoral students, who were inspired by my research approach to develop their own subject matter between the world of practice and theory, using some combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. I hoped that they would start to publish and advance in their academic careers, finding their own ways in this complex professional world. I was restless until I had proof of their abilities to find jobs and post-doctoral positions and to publish their own studies, even within the competitive American academy (Bar-On & Chaitin, 2001; Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002; Lazar, Amir & Bar-On 2000; Litvak-Hirsch, Bar-On & Chaitin, 2003; Glasner & Bar-On, 2004). Until then I feared that the role model of my own peculiar path-finding could cripple them academically; that by using my own non-conventional journey I would push them into a dead-end alley. It would be too simple to say that I gave up on mainstream psychology. Whenever I heard an interesting lecture in our department or read an article by one of the brilliant young researchers who would come out of their laboratories and explain how variables were controlled and how they succeeded in measuring one effect against another, I would feel that same envy that I had known after visiting UCLA in the eighties. I was, however, trying to deal with a messy world of human beings, figuring out where evil begins and where it ends, how being a survivor of man-made trauma was transmitted from one generation to the next, and how the trauma gets worked through. The experimental research sounded so much more compelling than my muddled material in terms of its scientific merits. But as untidy as my data was, it dealt with the complexity of real-life situations, with people who were living in pain and searching for some relief yet were either unable to find it or unable to learn from others who had discovered new ways of coping. I was not willing at that stage to trade: to be a better scientist according to certain scientific measures, giving up

18

Tell Your Life Story

the complexity of real-life experiences. I was determined to learn how to study them and thereby learn to cope with them. It took me many years of searching out my own way, feeling a bit of a stranger, to figure out that perhaps it is mainstream psychology which is going through a crisis, one related to me only marginally (Bar-On, 2001a). Not only is it moving in directions that I lack the resources to be part of, but in its quest to imitate the natural sciences, it is developing into a science with which I cannot identify. I find the wish to create a science that can translate or reduce the human mind and body to a totally measurable scientific endeavor is today stronger than ever, and the messy matter of human beings’ real-life situations no longer figures as important in that science. I dare to predict that, if this quest for ideal science continues to dominate the funding policies and academic promotion policies in psychology, in a few years neuro-psychology will be integrated into biology, decision-making will be relegated to economics, clinical psychology will move more into medicine, and pharmacology and social psychology may be attached to sociology. Psychology as a unified scientific effort to understand the complexity of human beings in real-life circumstances may vanish. The integrity and the subjective self-definitions of human beings, which cannot be reduced to one variable or another, may become obsolete as subjects of inquiry. It is too early to say if this is only the movement of a pendulum in one direction, and it will find its way back in the coming years, or if this represents an irreversible and deterministic development.

4. Navigating the book In Chapter 1, I describe some of the major issues in my methodology, as it slowly started to emerge through my various research and intervention projects. I explain my abductive approach, in the tradition of grounded theory (Peirce, 1995; Levin-Rosalis, 2000; Glasser and Strauss, 1967). Though most of my study has dealt with conflict situations—between Jews and Germans; between Israelis and Palestinians; between traditional enemies in Northern Ireland and in South Africa—I do not claim that I have developed a one-size-fits-all theory about these situations and studies. This field is so complex, dynamic, and chaotic, and our studies are so contextualized that I am afraid we

Introduction

19

do not yet have a complete theory in this field. I return to this issue in my last chapter. Chapter 2 presents two modes of storytelling when it comes to the German–Jewish context after the Holocaust. First discussed are biographical narratives that were created through interviews with Holocaust survivors in Israel and their descendants and through interviews with descendants of the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities in Germany. What is common to these biographical narratives is that they were usually created out of silence, a subjective silence stemming from emotions of shame, guilt, pain, or fear, as well as from social silencing or a “conspiracy of silence” (Danieli, 1988) that did not enable the subjects to tell their stories in public. After these stories were told and retold, I tried to bring the two sides into a dialogue, a very long and often tedious process. The two groups (representing their collectives) had never encountered each other in dialogue in all the years since the war. Initiated in 1992, the TRT group (To Reflect and Trust), as it became known, had its last meeting in 2003. What was special about that group, in addition to the storytelling method that developed, was its timing: The dialogue in the micro setting of the TRT group took place before it was possible on the macro level, but it was well synchronized with collective “working-through” processes that took place in the German and Jewish societies during the nineties. The TRT micro group process was later accepted by the Jewish and German societies and was therefore informative regarding future developments on the macro level. Later, we will see that such synchronization is by no means inevitable. When similar micro processes are examined in the Israeli–Palestinian macro social context, the societies do not accept them. This has been particularly true in the recent years of the renewed violence. Though I devoted many more years to the German–Jewish dialogue, most of this book concerns the Israeli–Palestinian context. This is due to both its immediacy and its relevance to other current conflict or “post-conflict” situations, as well as the fact that I have written extensively about the earlier studies elsewhere (Bar-On, 1989, 1995b, 1999a&b; Bar-On, Wegner & Kutz, 2000). It may be noted that the introduction and initial chapters, detailing my family history, my kibbutz experiences, and the beginning of my professional development, as well as the research in Germany and the TRT group, hardly

20

Tell Your Life Story

mention the Palestinians and the Middle East. I think this reflects, to some extent, the psyche of the descendants of the European Jews. Even in Israel, we are much more engaged with our Western heritage than with our Middle Eastern reality. To change that requires effort; it still does not come naturally to most of us. In spite of my earlier political awareness (on the formal level), I became conscious of this deficiency and became interpersonally involved only relatively late in my life and work. My research and practice in Israeli–Palestinian dialogue was conducted as part of peace-building efforts. Chapter 3 tells about my work with Prof. Sami Adwan at PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), which started after the Oslo Accords in 1993. I will first focus on our work with a group of teachers, Jewish–Israelis and Palestinians, who undertook a difficult mission in the midst of the violent conflict. The mission was twofold: to listen to each other’s stories and to use the positive feelings that emerged to facilitate a joint task, creating a school textbook composed of two narratives—one Palestinian and the other Israeli. The textbook is intended for classrooms on both sides so that the children will be able to respect the narrative of the Other and realize that while it is different from their own, it need not be threatening or humiliating. This is an example how a project can start from the bottom-up, in a micro setting, but aim higher, awaiting the time when the political situation will allow top-down processes to be implemented by politicians and policy-makers. In a second project, families of Palestinian refugees and Israelis were brought to PRIME for a first encounter during the last weekend of 2003. The two families of refugees originally came from the Beit Jubrin area in the south of Israel, and were driven out or fled (depending on which narrative one espouses) in 1948. The two Israeli Jewish families have lived in a kibbutz in that region since that time. Grandparents, parents, and children from each family participated in the encounter. When I became involved in studying the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in the mid-1990s, I tried to use my experiences from the TRT group and implement them in the new context of a students’ workshop at my university. Chapter 4 reports how much more constrained storytelling and listening are when a conflict is ongoing and the power relations between the parties are asymmetrical. The political tension and the new outbreak of violence between Israel and the Palestinians

Introduction

21

limited the possibility of transferring what was achieved in this micro setting to the macro social level. Yet these students, all Israelis, whether Jewish or Palestinian, will continue to live in one state, as a majority and minority respectively, whatever happens just beyond Israel’s borders, and thus they will have to reach a modus vivendi; to develop a narrative to bridge the differences between their conflicting stories. Chapter 5 will take us back into the interviewing mode, and also back to my birthplace, Haifa. In a kind of closing of a circle, I returned there for interviews during the chaotic years of 2000 and 2001. The professional purpose for the interviews was to reconstruct the diverse narratives that have existed in Haifa for scores of years, though some of them have never been acknowledged and respected. The narratives epitomize missed opportunities for dialogue that could have developed on the local level had the conflict not suppressed them by mobilizing the local tales to serve the national ones. Conditions once were ripe for dialogue: Haifa has a very special history of having had a mixed Jewish–Arab population ever since the turn of the twentieth century. This study also served to show me again how personal and social realities are interrelated; how what happened many years ago and was not worked through can still affect today’s reality. The concluding chapter presents the difficulties of generating data that should bring about change in a political reality that is, however, as yet unable to digest the information and promote a new path. First, I present a few of my students’ studies. They constructed biographical narratives that the Israeli society cannot yet address and work though, burdened as it is with the demands of the conflicting realities it encompasses. Examples are seen in the testimony of soldiers who fought in the Intifada or who suffered from battle shock, and Holocaust survivors who were rejected for supposedly not fighting for their survival and thus falling short of the heroic standards of the emerging Israeli society of the 1950s. I argue that some of the Jewish-Israeli population’s lack of sensitivity to its Arab and Palestinian neighbors reflects its inability to cope with its own “weaker” elements and to realize what that inability has cost it. The ideological emphasis on Zionism and collectivism came at the expense of the psychological well-being of even the hegemonic Ashkenazi part of the Jewish population. In that sense, it is likely that even many years after we reach a satisfactory political solution with the Palestinians, the personal and social processes of working through the unresolved pain

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Tell Your Life Story

of the past within the Jewish population and between the Jews and the Palestinians will continue. A place and a time for acknowledging and legitimizing the pain must be found. Otherwise, sooner or later, the lack of resolution may be expected to disrupt the process of living with the Other. I will try to summarize personal, psychological and political aspects of the different studies and practices. I contend that although they were developed in two specific contexts—German–Jewish and Israeli–Palestinian—the methods of practice and research that developed and the processes and outcomes involved have some relevance to other “post-conflict” situations. Nevertheless, one always has to be careful about drawing inferences, as each conflict has its specific history that must be studied carefully before any parallel can be deemed applicable. I suggest that this psychosocial practice and research, through storytelling and construction of narratives, is a useful way to deal with the complex social and psychological phenomena of national and ethnic conflicts. There are two caveats. One must be ready to invest the time and compassion needed to address the complexities with sensitivity. And one must be willing to take responsibility for confronting problems that politicians and other academics try to put aside as unsolvable or irrelevant; though accusations of politicized research are inevitable when peace-building activities and the raw emotion engendered by conflict situations are the subjects of inquiry.

NOTES 1 The sabra is a tropical fruit with a thorny skin. It became the common idiom for the New Israel Jew whose exterior is tough but is soft within.

2 While I tried to evaluate how cardiac patients attributed their heart attacks to internal versus external, and controllable versus uncontrollable causes, the model Weiner developed accounted for students’ successes and failures, following Heider’s model of subjective lay-theories (Weiner, 1974). 3 In his most famous experiment, Milgram told subjects to give electric shocks to “pupils” seemingly engaged in a learning task. He found that about twothirds of the subjects were willing to obey his instructions to escalate the shocks, to point of supposedly endangering the lives of the “pupils” (whose reactions were in fact staged).

CHAPTER 1

Developing a Methodology: Narratives and Stories

One might ask—how do we know that what I was doing was research at all? How was the subjective work I describe in this volume different from producing poetry or fiction? My answer is that I try to generate data systematically, usually data that could not be generated through other modes of inquiry. And my purpose is to learn about psychological and social processes, and to develop theoretical constructs that could help in understanding other, similar situations. In this form of data generation, the context—creating a safe “potential space” (Winnicott, 1988) between the researchers and the interviewees—is a necessary condition for obtaining useful information. This approach does not exclude the use of other, more quantitative methods; I did use some of them in the course of my research in Germany and in Israel, and they yielded important results. These are not, however, the subject matter of this book. Storytelling as a mode of inquiry introduces some basic questions. Should one accept the narrative of the storyteller at face value, or should one look behind the words, searching for the untold stories behind the told ones (Josselson, 2004; Jackson, 2002)? I would suggest doing both. On the one hand, it is important to give space to the subjective (sometimes even fragile) language and construction of the interviewee, and not overpower it too early with our too-strong theoretical concepts (Bar-On, 1995b). On the other hand, we should also learn to look into subtexts that illuminate the narrative, to better understand the situation and the person caught in it. In my research in Germany, I first deconstructed the interviews with the descendants of Nazi perpetrators, trying to learn about their moral rationalization and the processes by which they worked through their pasts (Bar-On, 1990). Only after that deconstruction did I write Legacy of Silence

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(1989), in which I tried to reconstruct the interviews, presenting the interviewees in their own words verbatim, as I first met them, and letting the readers decide for themselves in terms of analysis and the search for hidden meanings. This brings up a more basic question that William James has already addressed (1976: 35): To what extent can verbal language, which is serial, represent the simultaneity of different feelings and emotions (Bar-On, 1999a, chapter 4)? Jackson (2002: 30–34) suggests the idea of storytelling as journeying. The story can take different routes at different times, some of which we can figure out through the one route that we hear taken verbally. Jackson further suggests that traumatic life experiences break the journey and so the storytelling is also broken. This is reminiscent of Langer’s expression “ruins of memory,” relating to the accounts of Holocaust survivors (Langer, 1992), as well as my concept of the “double wall phenomena” (BarOn, 1995b), described in chapter 2. Many of the narratives in the following chapters represent such “broken” accounts. Some of my Palestinian- and Jewish-Israeli students learned their parents’ or grandparents’ stories only by interviewing them for my seminars. Jackson addresses another issue related to storytelling: differentiating between the public and the private sphere of stories (2002). Here he relies heavily on Arendt’s concept of power relations (1958). From Jackson’s perspective, in conflict and power relations the public overtakes the private, thereby creating boundaries that collectives try to defend. He writes: Power relations between private and public realms imply a politics of experience. While storytelling may help us reconcile fields of experience that are, on the one hand, felt and belong to ourselves…and on the other, felt and shared or to belong to others, stories may just as trenchantly exaggerate differences, foment discord, and do violence to lived experience. For every story that sees the light of the day, untold others remain in the shadows, censored and suppressed (2002: 11). Jackson actually suggests that the told story of one party in conflict may silence the story of the other party, especially when the former is in a dominant position. This is similar to the notion that in asym-

Developing a Methodology: Narratives and Stories

25

metric power relations the “potential space” (Winnicott, 1988) of one party could take away the “potential space” of the other party. In some of the studies that follow, this issue is addressed by recreating that “lost space,” by giving attention to silenced voices (of Haifa residents; refugees; Holocaust survivors and their descendants; descendants of Nazi perpetrators). To listen to these voices requires that the more powerful party, whose stories did not give space to the silenced voices, create a space for them on account of their own stories. To hear the Other entails trying to understand how the stories one grew up with undermined those of the other party. I therefore suggest that one way to overcome the power imbalance between told and untold stories is to try and develop a dialogue between them. In chapter 4, we will see how Jewish students became aware of the fact that their parents’ and grandparents’ stories excluded those of the Arabs living nearby at that time. By listening to the stories of the Arab students (told in the name of their own relatives), the Jewish students were able to reflect upon and acknowledge what was missing from their own stories. This process demands creating a safe space, moving the group back and forth between the comfort of the uni-national setting (whereby each party meets separately and can express itself without fear of the reaction of the other party) and the bi-national setting, where mutual trust grows gradually. Usually, one has to choose the individuals who are willing and ready to try and cross these boundaries when the conflict is not yet resolved (as is still the case in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or as was true of the German–Jewish context after the Holocaust). In such situations, eliciting storytelling and listening becomes not the task of the researcher but of the participants in the dialogue groups themselves. By telling their stories to each other they try to overcome the abyss created by the “paradigmatic narratives” (Bruner, 1990) of their societies during the intractable conflict between them. We will see how in both the German–Jewish and the Israeli–Palestinian contexts individual stories replace the paradigmatic narratives and how these stories can create a kind of a narrow bridge across the abyss. Here a new issue arises: What stories are “good enough”, those which can fulfill this task, and what stories are “bad enough” that continue to support the conflict and the schism between the groups? (Maoz et al., 2004) This is discussed in chapter 4. Perhaps some pri-

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vacy and some of the uniqueness of the individual story gets lost in this process—according to Arendt, some stories become “de-individualized” in order to become “fit for public appearance” (1958:50). Even before an open dialogue between parties in conflict can take place, when asymmetric power relations persist it is necessary to first empower, recover, and legitimize the stories of the oppressed party, by creating the setting for this in the uni-national context. For these stories may have been “reduced in their own eyes to the status of nonentity” (Arendt, 1944:114). This was the case with stories of Holocaust survivors (see chapter 2), as well as with stories of Israeli–Palestinians and Palestinian refugees, as we will see in chapters 4 and 5. A different approach to narratives in conflict is presented in chapter 3. Instead of trying to create a “bridging narrative” through dialogue, we developed an experimental school textbook incorporating two distinct and separate narratives (a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian one) simultaneously (Adwan & Bar-On, 2004). Here, the assumption is that the conflict not only created boundaries between the stories of both sides but actually created a process of negation and delegitimization of the other’s narrative. When moving from conflict to post-conflict situations, an important intermediate step in developing a more respectful relationship between the parties is recognizing and legitimizing the separateness of the Other’s narrative. Toward the end of his book Jackson comes back to the importance of the personal and unique meaning of storytelling for the storyteller and listener, resisting the more dominant tendency, which Arendt described earlier, toward de-individualization of the story: I want to suggest that without the perennial conversion of cultural narratives into stories that speak to the private and idiosyncratic concerns, such narratives lose their viability. My emphasis here is therefore less on the process that put stories into public circulation than on the ways in which individuals draw on extant narratives to create meaning peculiar to themselves (2002: 267). I suggest that this could actually be the therapeutic aspect of the process of storytelling and listening: People who tell their own story thereby repossess it, so that it contributes to their self-esteem. By taking their story out of the public domain, they create their own pri-

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vate sphere, especially when the interviewer or facilitator allows the uniqueness of the personal story to emerge and take center stage. Though I would emphasize that interviewing is different from therapy and dialogue groups are not therapy groups, I still can see therapeutic effects, among which is that new “privatization” of the story, away from the collective canonical narrative. Uniquely, the personal stories recall Jackson’s words at the beginning of this chapter: “Life and rivers periodically flood and run dry; rapids alternate with calm stretches, shallows with depths; and there are places where eddies, counter-currents, undertows, cross currents, backwaters and dark reaches make navigation unpredictable.” It is important to emphasize here the abductive, rather than inductive or deductive nature of this process of telling and listening (Peirce, 1955; Levin Rosalis, 2000). That is, in most of my studies reported upon here, the theoretical product was a result of the process rather than the starting point. While in many quantitative studies hypotheses derive from existing theoretical structures and are confirmed or contradicted as the data is generated, the process suggested here is an explorative one. The data is generated in order to develop new, yet-unknown theoretical constructs. This does not mean that there are no previous theoretical explanations or thoughts that apply to a given situation. But this method requires putting them aside at least until after the newly generated data is analyzed, in order to see if other, unexpected theoretical explanations can work. For example, I was familiar with psychoanalytical theories about the traumatic aftereffects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants (Bergmann & Jacuvy, 1982), but my question was how individuals constructed these traumatic experiences in their own life stories, and to what extent their different constructions accounted for their coping styles later in their lives (Bar-On, 1995b). New theoretical postulates were even more necessary in the case of my interviews with descendants of Nazi perpetrators, as that population had not been investigated systematically earlier. No a priori theoretical assumptions could be made in this regard (Bar-On, 1989). Another way in which my work differs significantly from the usual quantitative analysis lies in the fact that my collaborators and I do not usually see the mean or the average as the best representation of the population or the sample studied. We assume that there are several

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qualitative clusters or groupings that represent the sample better. Our mission is therefore to identify these clusters and try to understand their theoretical significance. For example, to account for some of the variance in the ways that residents of Haifa have reconstructed their past, especially after 1948, I clustered the diverse narratives in chapter 5 into five groups. This does not exclude further sub-grouping or different clustering altogether, but it enables discussion from today’s perspective of several qualitatively different ways in which people in Haifa reconstructed their past. Our generation of data is highly contextualized, in marked contrast to the psychological or sociological mainstream that tries to decontextualize data generation in order to understand basic processes, whether in the brain or in the society. This could be seen as the main shortcoming: I can talk about Haifa, the Beer-Sheva Jewish–Arab students’ group or the German–Jewish TRT group, but I cannot generalize from these examples to processes in their populations, without studying them in depth. Still, the quality of the theoretical outcome should outweigh that shortcoming. Through the generation of new and deeper understanding, we may be able to change the discourse of such subject matter. Thereby generalization in the quantitative sense will become less central compared to the issues that the qualitative analysis raise.

A closer look at my methodology While the stages of my methodology may not be different than those of any mainstream methodology, there are differences at each stage. The four phases of generating and handling the material are data generation, data analysis, interpretation, and writing. Data is generated through interviewing (as described in chapters 2 and 5), studying group processes (chapters 2, 3, and 4), or in the narrative construction phase (chapter 3). In the next phase it is subjected to thematic, biographical, or other formal analysis. Following this, interpretation yields the theoretical product. Finally, the findings of the research are presented in writing. These phases are discussed in more detail below.

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Data generation: The interviewing process The interaction between two people, that is the interview, is an art. Describing and analyzing the process could in itself take a whole book. While the interviewer sets the stage (widening or narrowing the topic, using or avoiding leading questions, and establishing the place and the length of the interview), the process is still an inter-subjective activity and both parties are active participants in it. Both asymmetric and symmetrical elements comprise the setting. The interview may, however, turn drastically asymmetric if the interviewers impose their dominance in the way that they formulate questions, in not letting the interviewees express their feelings, and later, in using their role as analysts and interpreters to suppress the interviewees’ subjective language and emotions. I favor the biographical method developed by Rosenthal (1993), in which the interviewer opens the interview wide at the outset—for example, “Please tell me your life story, starting wherever you would like”—and then lets interviewees narrate their life stories (the “main narration”) undisturbed. Clarifications or questions of interest to the interviewer come after the main narration. As noted earlier, it is the responsibility of the interviewer to create a relatively safe space for the interviewee to be able to talk openly about difficult issues (especially when traumatic experiences hover in the background of the interview). The construction of a safe space includes technical aspects— such as securing a quiet place, providing adequate time, and arranging high quality audio-taping—as well as emotional aspects—acting curious, being emotionally attentive but also spontaneous, giving interviewees the feeling that their narrative is unique and important. I found that some of my young students were excellent intuitive interviewers when the subject matter really interested them. The language barrier can be a major obstacle in the interviewing process. In Germany I spoke German, but in Haifa I relied on the help of Nabeeha who spoke Arabic with my Palestinian interviewees and thereby helped them feel more “at home.” The precise and immediate transcription of the text is absolutely essential for the following steps of analysis. Before the interview takes place, the interviewer should provide a formal contract for the possible use of the interview (stipulating,

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for example, the use of pseudonyms and false biographical details in publications). From my point of view, the interviewer should be committed to giving interviewees transcripts of the interview but not his own analysis or interpretation of the text. I know that some of my colleagues, however, would also try to get the interviewee’s consent to both (Lieblich et al., 1998). I advise delaying the introduction of videotaping until after several interviews have taken place and relationships of trust have been established. The interviewer should provide the rationale for approaching the particular interviewee. This is not always an easy task. In my interviews in Germany, I used the rubric of “family memories from the Third Reich,” to enable my interviewees to talk or not talk about their atrocity perpetrating fathers (as most of them, at that time, did not define themselves as descendants of Nazi perpetrators). There are several ethical dilemmas involved here, which I have discussed elsewhere (Bar-On, 1996). The history of my research and that of others provides examples of studies that were framed too narrowly (“Tell me about your experiences during the Holocaust”), ignoring the possibility that the interviewee wants to frame the life story differently, not in the context of the Holocaust). There were also times when it was difficult to hide more specific intentions (such as in interviewing three generations in the families of Holocaust survivors). The interviewees may of course develop their own assumptions about the interests of the interviewer and they may try to respond to these assumed interests, ignore them, or divert attention away from them. Sampling is a major issue, especially as my colleagues and I do not use random sampling procedures in our qualitative studies. We usually use one of two methods. In theoretical sampling the active aspects or variables are defined a priori or while interviewing, and interviewees are chosen to represent these aspects (Rosenthal, 1993). In Germany, I interviewed more than ninety interviewees, and I tried my best to ensure that they would represent different socio-demographic and psychosocial aspects of German society in relation to the Nazi era. (I became aware of some of these aspects only during the interviewing process.) But I was also limited by the names I could get at that time and the people who were willing to be interviewed (the acceptance rate among those approached was 90 percent). The second method is called snowball sampling: One interviewee

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leads you to the next. This is especially useful when one does not have easy access to the tested field. I used this method for my study in Haifa, most intensively among the Arab interviewees, who were well-networked among themselves and knew of each other. There are, of course, other methods as well: One of my doctoral students interviewed a whole population for her topic: Israeli army officers who after retirement from the army became school principals (Alfi, 2002). Data generation: Group processes and narrative construction The data gathering procedure in dialogue groups or in a task group (such as the teachers’ group in chapter 3) is quite different from individual interviewing and may change from one context to the other. Until 2000, we usually tape-recorded our TRT group meetings. However, as we never reached an agreement on how to write about our process, I did some of the analysis and summary myself (Bar-On, 1993; 1995a). In a book published about the process in 1998, several members of the group wrote their own texts reflecting upon their experiences (Bar-On et al., 2000). Another article (Albeck, Adwan & Bar-On, 2002) provided guidelines for dialogue groups, based on the TRT experiences. Only after 1998, when participants from the three other geographical areas of live conflict joined the group, did we bring in observers and evaluators who generated their own data, through questionnaires (Maoz & Bar-On, 2002) or by writing up their own summaries of the process. When the Palestinian– and Jewish–Israeli student group discussed in chapter 4 met in the aftermath of the violent events of October 2000, we did not tape-record the process, believing that the situation between Jews and Arabs was too sensitive at the time and the students would not have agreed to it. Therefore, the accounts of this group are based primarily on our records as facilitators and the students’ own writing about the process. In addition, Tal Litvak-Hirsch, my doctoral student, interviewed all participants at an early stage and at the end of the group process (Litvak-Hirsch, Bar-On & Chaitin, 2003). We did, however, tape-record previous such groups at the university. Shoshana Steinberg wrote her dissertation based on the transcriptions of these tapes, as well as the diaries of the students and written material generated by the facilitators (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002).

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In the teachers’ task group reported on in chapter 3, there were two different kinds of data. Records of the group process itself are based on the reports of the facilitators, teachers and observers as once again the situation of that group was too delicate to enable systematic tape-recording. The second form of data is the text that the teachers produced—the two narratives—in parallel to the group process. The dilemmas of choosing the participants for such groups and the dilemmas involved in facilitating such a joint process—in creating the “potential space” (Winnicott, 1988) for members of the groups to enter a meaningful dialogue—are described in the following three chapters. Data analysis: Interviews1 I find it very important to emphasize that moving from the interviewing phase into the analysis phase can represent a crisis. As an interviewer, one gets involved in the storytelling of the interviewees. One tends to identify with them and feel emphatic toward them. As an analyst, one has to look at the interview from a distance, to be able to disassociate oneself from the emotions expressed and also think critically about what has been said and how. I usually try to accomplish this transition while working on the transcriptions, but sometimes it also requires time and the possibility of “ventilating” about the interviewing phase with someone else. My students have the privilege of talking about their interviews in class, before entering into the data analysis phase. I think it is important to help people move through this transition, lest the analysis be otherwise hampered. The analysis need not necessarily reflect a distancing, but the interviewer still has to create that option, when needed. Biographical interviewing assumes that interviewees construct their own narrative within the space that the interviewer opens up. Therefore, the analyst will focus on the strategies the interviewees use while constructing their narrative (Rosenthal, 1993). This does not imply that they use a strategy consciously (though this could happen too). It only suggests that the choices the interviewees make—what to talk about and what to omit, how to move on with their story in time and space—are not coincidental. I and my students or colleagues usually proceed with three levels of analysis:

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1. A chronological one (the life history), for which we extract all the calendar dates that the interviewees mention in their main narration, and events associated with a specific time or age. 2. A linguistic analysis, in which we differentiate between three basic forms of speech: descriptions or reports (which are more emotionally detached), argumentation (the narrator seems to be addressing a hidden interlocutor), and stories (which have a definite beginning and end in time and space, a drama, and, usually, deeper emotional involvement). 3. A sequential analysis of the biographical data, identifying the topics discussed in each “paragraph,” starting from the beginning of the interview and moving forward step by step. Through systematic documentation of the chronological data and the linguistic forms, and through the sequential analysis, we can start to generate hypotheses as to why a date or form or topic was mentioned in that specific way. The sequential analysis of the narrative also helps us test the hypotheses; we ask how the sequence of the narrative confirms them or fails to bear them out. For example, one subject (Laura, chapter 5, Bar-On, 1995b) did not mention any date in her life story in Libya prior to her immigration to Israel in 1950. Anya (ibid., chapter 4) used only argumentations for most of her life story. Genia (ibid., chapter 1) started her narrative asking in broken Hebrew, “Shall I tell you that I did not have a chance to know what the word mother is?” Each of these narrative styles generated different hypotheses. While some were confirmed in the sequential analysis, others were not. The final product of this long and sometimes cumbersome process is being able to identify certain strategies that the interviewees use to construct and reconstruct their narratives. In situations such as studying three generations in families of Holocaust survivors, our hypothesis could relate to the links between the generations, looking at what has been transmitted and what has been worked through from one generation to the next (Bar-On, 1995b). Data analysis: Group processes The processes within dialogue groups are difficult to analyze, for the data is chaotic by nature. Many people speak, reacting to one another, and mostly not in a systematic fashion. One possibility is to focus on

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the interaction itself. For example, one can examine to what extent members of both Jewish and Palestinian groups have an equal opportunity to express themselves; to interact with members of the other group (Maoz, 2000a, 2000b). Or, one could explore power struggles within the group (Maoz et al.; 2004) or the relationship between the group process and conflictual events outside the group (see chapters 3 and 4). One could focus the analysis on two members, representing the two sides of the conflict, when it can be proven that they act as representatives of their groups (Maoz et al., 2002). Alternatively, one could focus on content: To what extent is the discourse more ethnocentric at the beginning of the group process and more dialogical later (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002)? Or, to what extent did members of one group learn to respect and accept parts of the other group’s stories, incorporating them into their own self-description (LitvakHirsch et al., 2003)? One could also try to assess to what extent the stories told in a group represent silenced stories that had not been made public before the group started to meet (see chapters 2 and 4). Interpretation of the data: The theoretical product The theoretical product of abductive qualitative research methods usually emerges from the laborious process of data generation and analysis. But this formulation oversimplifies what happens in reality. For example, when I started the TRT group and when I began the interviews in Germany, I had certain theoretical knowledge and expectations that I could apply when gathering new data and in analysis. Still, I believed that I did not know enough about the new phenomena that I encountered and I allowed myself to be surprised. This enabled me to develop new theoretical constructs as a result of a systematic review of the data-generation and analysis, which I describe in detail in the following chapters. One problem is that interviewers, facilitators, and later analysts and interpreters are themselves part of this process; part of the data they generate. Therefore, colleagues play an essential role by being there during the data generation and analysis. Different people will come up with different hypotheses and are less likely to get caught up in a loop of a specific or a priori mindset that can yield poor or redundant outcomes. Through my own research and that of my gradu-

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ate students, I learned how fast the temptation to interpret operates, unintentionally, and how we have to resist by returning again and again to the raw data, staying as open-minded as we can. For many of us it is difficult, perhaps even frightening at times, to endure the ambiguity of not yet knowing something fully, letting the data genuinely “speak for itself.” But each time we reach a new theoretical understanding as a result of our restraint, our confidence in the value of this process grows, and with it the willingness to resist the temptation to say something definite too early on. I formulated new theoretical constructs through the different studies presented in this book and could sometimes also implement them retroactively. For example, when Fatma Kassem and I analyzed group process among our Palestinian-Jewish Israeli students (see chapter 4), we came up with the idea of the “good enough story,” The concept echoes Winnicott and Ross’s research on what constitutes a “good enough mother,” (that is, a mother who provides enough empathy, love, and structure to nurture her child’s development, even if her parenting is sometimes, or even often, inadequate). We asked who decided in the group what a “good enough story” was. We looked at which interactions and storytelling events created this process. The idea had not come up earlier, during the TRT process. Yet I found it interesting to reflect back on the process of the TRT group through this new prism of “good enough stories.” In chapter 2, I tell about the TRT encounter in 2003 when I raised this question. Still, I am careful not to claim that I now have a theory about the use of storytelling in chaotic conflict situations that could be applied across the board. I believe we are not there yet and had best be aware of this deficiency. We may have still a long way to go before being able to make such a claim. Writing up the findings The crisis I experience when it is time to write up results in a way that makes sense to readers is similar to the crisis between the interviewing and the analysis phases. For a professional audience, explaining involves supplying proof of how one reached the theoretical conclusions, based on the analysis of the data. This is especially important if the reviewers are from a quantitative background (Belgrave

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et al., 2002). On the other hand, there is no sense in overburdening readers with all the details of the analytic process. The challenge is to design a middle way in order to tell the story of the research in an interesting and compelling manner. Often this has meant letting go of the analysis and interpretation phase before starting to write, which represents a new stage with its own rules and dilemmas. The task becomes even more difficult when writing for a non-professional audience, as one must then be less concerned about scientific proof and more concerned with transmitting a theoretical or political message that the research helped formulate. For example, as I already mentioned, when I wrote Legacy of Silence I omitted almost all analysis and interpretation of the data. The verbatim accounts of the interviewees were given center stage, also included, though to a lesser extent, were my reactions while listening to these stories. For me this meant completing a cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the stories of the descendants of the Nazi perpetrators and their chaotic social context. I felt that they had a powerful message to convey, and I became convinced, through my own earlier attempts to tell their story, that they could do it better than through neat scientific analysis. In some of my writings, my analysis appears only where I felt it was essential to understanding the link between the text and my theoretical conclusions. I have again tried to focus on the verbatim accounts of some of my interviewees and group participants. You, the reader, will have to judge in the following chapters the extent to which I have succeeded in this mission.

NOTES 1 There are, of course, many other ways to analyze interviews—thematic and content analysis, global and microanalysis (Rosenthal, 1993; Lieblich et al. 1998)—which I will not discuss here in detail. I used some of these alternative methods in my study in Germany and in Israel (Bar-On & Charny, 1992; Bar-On & Chaitin, 2001).

CHAPTER 2

Reconstructing Narratives Out of Silence: Beginning a Dialogue Between Germans and Israelis

Usually we relate to narratives as given texts. They are there in written or oral form, so that we can read or listen to them; we analyze them and infer what they mean for us. But one of the characteristics of intractable conflicts is the silencing or repression of narratives. Silence may ensue as a result of a trauma, such as being a victim, albeit a survivor, of the Holocaust.1 Or it may be a result of the moral trauma of knowing oneself to have been a perpetrator (Bar-On, 1995a). Usually the subjective reasons for silencing the traumatic event—feelings of shame, guilt, fear, loss—interact with social reasons, together creating a “conspiracy of silence” (Danieli, 1988) or “undiscussability” (Bar-On, 1999a) that does not “allow” people to narrate their stories even if they felt the need to do so—and usually they do. The reasons behind the silence are often different for the survivors than the perpetrators. The former suffer more from existential “survival guilt” of having lived while many of their family members did not (Krystal, 1968; Levi, 1986). The perpetrators try to conceal from their offspring and others the atrocities they once committed, in order to maintain a positive image in the eyes of the younger generation. The results, however, are similar: The silencing usually transmits the trauma to the following generations (Bar-On, 1989; 1995b). Even if, as some contend, the silencing of these traumatic events was functional during the early years (Breznitz, 1983), enabling the traumatized person to carry on, scholars generally agree that at later stages the same silencing becomes dysfunctional, especially when it leads to intergenerational transmission of the effects of physical or moral trauma (Danieli, 1998). Therefore, our first step as researchers or interveners may be to reconstruct narratives out of the silence, before the narrators of the conflicting parties can enter into a dialogue with each

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other (Jackson, 2002). This chapter describes the process of reconstructing narratives in relation to the Holocaust, both on the Israeli as well as on the German side, as a pre-condition for dialogue. As I have written extensively about my interviews with Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Israel (Bar-On, 1995b) and with descendants of Nazi perpetrators in Germany (Bar-On, 1989), I will describe these more briefly. My focus, later in the chapter, is on the group that brought together both sets of descendants into a dialogue. The chapter ends by telling how, as an outcome of this dialogue, members of the combined group attempted to widen it, bringing in others who are on opposite sides of communal conflicts. These experiences suggest that to use narratives and storytelling in conflict situations, they must first of all be reconstructed out of the silencing, by using biographical interviewing and analysis (Rosenthal, 1993) in each context separately. Only after these narratives have been established in their separate, relatively safe environments can one attempt to bring them into dialogue. At this second stage, the storytelling and listening become part of a group process. When carried out in an atmosphere that promotes a sense of trust and relative safety, the process of reconstruction of the narratives will continue, and its impact may go beyond the small group setting.

Reconstructing narratives out of silencing: Israeli-Jewish Holocaust survivors It took Jewish society in Israel at least forty years to recognize that the Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel shortly after World War II were usually tacitly encouraged to keep silent about what they had experienced (Davidson, 1980; Segev, 1992; Bar-On, 1995b). As we have seen, the survivors had their own reasons to repress their wartime experiences. And the social silencing was characteristic not only of Israeli–Jewish society, but also of Jewish society in other countries to which the survivors immigrated (Danieli, 1980). However, Israeli– Jewish society had its special reasons to silence the Holocaust survivors: By the Israeli yardsticks of heroism of the ‘40s and the ‘50s, they had failed to fight for their survival. Beginning in 1986, I held an annual workshop at my university on the “psychosocial after-effects of the Holocaust on second and

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third generations.” In these workshops, students were asked to interview one survivor and one child of a survivor and encourage them to tell their life stories. I assumed that at this stage of Israel’s social development, these stories could be told in the relatively safe setting of an interview. The students had to transcribe these interviews and bring them to the classroom, and most of the year we would listen to the stories and try to learn from what the interviewees told and how the young interviewers were affected as they listened. The process helped the students transform the Shoah from the public anonymous domain of the “six million” into concrete and private experiences of individuals (Arendt, 1958). Over the years, some students used this course as an opportunity to interview a parent whose story from the Shoah they had never heard before. Entering the classroom with the transcribed interviews, some of them would say, “I knew already bits and pieces of this story before, but I never could construct a whole picture as I did this time. He told me the whole story since it was a university assignment.” It could be that knowing that there would be someone responsible to assist the son or daughter to absorb the story helped the parent narrate it in a more open way, including the less pleasant parts. In 1991, one of my students, Nathan,2 a kibbutz member who had no immediate family members affected by the Shoah, decided to interview a man with whom he had worked in the kibbutz’s cow-shed for fifteen years. He knew only that that man had been in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but no details beyond that. When Nathan came back from the interview he was shocked, not only by the story that he heard in the three-hour-long interview, but by the fact that he had worked with this man for fifteen years and never heard anything of those experiences during the Holocaust before. Since Nathan also had to interview a descendant of a Holocaust survivor, he decided to interview the man’s son, with whom he had grown up in the same children’s house on the kibbutz. This time he was even more shocked, when he discovered that even the son knew almost nothing of his father’s life during the Shoah. For their final paper, Nathan and a classmate tried to find out why the Holocaust survivors in this kibbutz never told their story in public. The two students decided to interview all the veterans of the kibbutz about the settlement during its early stages.

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The amazing story that emerged sheds considerable light on the collective silencing of the Holocaust survivors in Israel of the late 1940s. The kibbutz in question was founded by a group of some forty young Israeli-born youth, in the mid-1940s. After two years, in need of more people, they were complemented by a group of another forty young people who had just come from Europe, after surviving the Holocaust in Romania and Poland. The two groups struggled together through the 1948 war. When the kibbutz was attacked by the Jordanian army and Palestinian militia, the young people surrendered after heavy fighting and became prisoners of war in Jordan. While in captivity, the new group’s candidacy period of one year came to its end, and the veterans had to decide whether to accept them as full members of the kibbutz. There was an assembly in the tents of the Jordanian prison camp at which the veterans decided not to accept the Holocaust survivors’ group, as they were not “good enough.” They were good enough to fight during the siege, to get killed, to go together to captivity, but they were not good enough to become full members of the kibbutz. After everyone returned from captivity, they rebuilt the kibbutz in its new location, though many members of both groups left the kibbutz. The Holocaust survivors who stayed at the kibbutz were finally accepted as full members, but the feeling of not being “good enough” remained. This was the reason each gave in the interviews for never telling their stories in public for so many years. Moreover, the survivors were the ones who recalled that painful aspect of the kibbutz’s past, while the other veterans hardly remembered it when they told their stories of the early days. After I read the paper, I asked if Nathan would now tell the kibbutz members about it and thereby initiate a dialogue between the two groups of oldtimers. Nathan replied that he was afraid it was too early and he would choose a later occasion to do something about that painful unresolved chapter from the past. This was in 1992. Readers will have to hold their breath and wait for the concluding chapter of this book to find out how it was partially resolved, after more than ten years elapsed. Even if one considers this an extreme example of the silencing of stories of Holocaust survivors in Israel, it highlights how this social construction of the dominant Israeli-Jewish norm worked. Certain

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stories were silenced over the years, while other stories, mainly those of resistance and heroism, were told again and again. A second story from another student in the same workshop, a couple of years earlier, demonstrates how difficult it could be for survivors themselves to narrate their stories, even when the social pressure was not the major factor that silenced them. Feeling the pressure of the humiliation, hunger and dehumanization, survivors could not find words to narrate these experiences. Scores of years, perhaps a relationship with a loving spouse, or raising children who have become parents themselves are often prerequisites to a survivor regaining the necessary self-respect and confidence to find the words that transform the traumatic experience into a story that he or she can tell without distancing people: without becoming re-traumatized once more (Bar-On, 1995b). Aunt Bella told her niece (my student) how she spent most of the years of the Shoah going from one camp to the other. She could hardly remember all their names and eventually became the only survivor in her entire family. Relatives died in the work camps or were taken away to the gas chambers. She lost track of the passing time and lost so much weight that she could hardly go on working. One night the prisoners were again called to board the cattle cars to another location. She was so used to this that it had no special meaning for her, but for the fact that there was fresh hay on the floor, which surprised her. The passengers traveled all night long, and in the morning one of them observed that there were no longer German guards on the train. Even more surprising was the fact that when they arrived no one shouted at them to go out. They slowly climbed out of the train. It was a beautiful, sunny day and a man standing in front of the train, wearing a white suit and a white hat, approached each of them, bowed, and took off his hat to address them. Numb, the women did not believe what they were seeing. This is how Bella found out that the war had ended. The man, she said, was from the royal family of Denmark. He had come to address the first Jewish women survivors who arrived in his country that morning. Bella described how after a couple of days she continued her trip to Sweden, where she was assigned to a rehabilitation home as she had no relatives who could take care of her. This time she traveled by a regular train for the first time since the outbreak of the war. She de-

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cided to celebrate this event and went to use the train’s restroom. But when she entered she saw a face and immediately retreated. This happened again a second time, and again she was surprised, but retreated. Only by the third time did she understand that she was looking into a mirror and seeing herself. She had not seen herself in a mirror for three years. Though she had seen how devastated her fellow inmates in the camps all looked, she could not believe how emaciated she herself had become. Symbolically, this was her first confrontation with the harsh post-war reality. It epitomized how much more Bella had to face, with no living relatives, all alone in the world. How to continue living? Where? What for? Not recognizing herself in the mirror was something Bella had not been able to speak of all those years, until her niece came to interview her for the university course with me. The social silencing and the self-silencing combined to create the “conspiracy of silence” that meant that only certain stories were narrated, stories that were acceptable both for the narrator and for the people who listened to them. One of these stories came from Nurit, another student of mine, working on a different research project. Nurit wanted to interview Israeli–Jewish immigrants who went back to visit their original home countries. She and I had a hypothesis that such visits could facilitate a kind of psychological separation process, overcoming the previous disruption and forced severance and thereby easing adjustment in Israel (Bar-On, Sadeh & Triester, 1995). As part of that project, Nurit found Anat, a former child survivor from Warsaw, who had just come back from her first trip to Poland in 1994. She interviewed her for nine hours, in three sessions. I cite here only two short pieces of that remarkable extended interview. Anat (a pseudonym) and her mother were the only survivors of a large family that lived in Warsaw prior to World War II. They survived the war together under the most difficult conditions. The mother, involved in underground activities, hid the three-year-old Anat in a coal storage cellar while she was smuggling Jewish children out of the ghetto to place them with Aryan families. Anat would spend hours and sometimes days alone in the cellar. The mother had very special ways to keep Anat going during her long absences. For example, she made her daughter a doll to take care of as if it was her own child, while the mother was gone.

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At some point, on one of her dangerous excursions, Anat’s mother was injured by German soldiers. She sent a young man from the underground to pick up Anat and bring her to the Aryan side of Warsaw, where she was recovering. The youth came to the cellar, and although Anat was trying to hide, found her according to her mother’s instructions, and put her into a coal sack to take her through the streets to her mother’s hiding place. This is Anat’s account: He put me into that sack, and the sack was very dirty on the outside from coal… And he began walking with me on his back. We walked for a very long time. All of a sudden, I remembered that my doll remained there in the storage room! I began yelling to him: “Sir, sir!” And he [said] nothing! And I began hitting him a bit on the back, and he [did] nothing. [He] continued, and I began hitting him harder. I saw that he wasn’t responding, I began yelling! …and he couldn’t go on because I was really screaming. He went into some dark alley, opened up the sack, and took off the cover,[and] said to me: “Tell me, are you crazy? Do you want them to kill you and me?!” Then I told him: “I don’t care! The doll, my daughter.” She was called Jozia…So he told me: “Leave me alone about dolls. Now you are driving me crazy about dolls. I am making such an effort…do you think that this is so easy?” …I asked him: “Won’t we go back to get my child?” Then he told me: “Of course we won’t go back, get into the sack quickly, and we’re off! And if you yell, you’ll see what I’ll do to you.” I got out of the sack. I threw away the coals…And…I screamed at him: “What a disgusting person you are. Do you think that a mother can leave her child forever? Never go back for her? What kind of person are you? That is unacceptable…I am going back.” And I began walking! And he got so scared and said: “Okay…we’ll go back and take the doll. Get into the sack and behave …” And we went and brought her…he walked all that way back… we reached someplace on the Aryan side, one of the suburbs of Warsaw, and there was Mother really injured. She had helped a group of children escape, and they shot at them, and some of the children were killed, and she was wounded. But she couldn’t walk around with a bandaged arm and bandaged shoulder on the street.

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Tell Your Life Story So she sent him to bring me. And when he told her the story about the doll…she hugged him and told him: “You went back with her only because you are a child yourself. You should have slapped her bottom!” And I heard that. I said: “No! No! A mother can’t leave her child.” My mother cried and hugged me and hugged me…

In our study of parenthood during the Shoah (Bar-On & Chaitin, 2001), we analyzed Anat’s story. We showed how a child who went through those extremely difficult times with a close adult, one who took care of her psychological as well as physical needs, had more vivid emotional memories to tell of that very young age, compared to other less fortunate children who had to go through horrific events all by themselves or with adults who did not or could not care for them. It seems that Anat’s mother had an unusual sensitivity to her daughter’s emotional needs and not only her physical ones. This relationship helped Anat remember details from the age of three or four which many of us would not be able to recall. In turn, these early emotional memories helped Anat cope with later events in her life. A second story about Anat involves the time she went to a kibbutz following her mother’s death from cancer shortly after their aliyah to Israel when Anat was about twelve years old. Though Anat did not get along with her relatives in Jerusalem, at the kibbutz she adjusted very well and very quickly. She lived with and studied in a class made up of both orphaned child survivors of the Holocaust and children who were born on the kibbutz. She learned Hebrew immediately and changed her name, trying to adjust to her new social milieu. One of her teachers, Benyo, used to invite the orphaned children to his home in the afternoons, since they had no parents to go to. After a while Benyo began to tell Anat, “You have to learn to cry again.” Surprised, Anat reacted: “You really make me laugh, you know. After all, when someone cries they are told, ‘Don’t cry, why are you crying?’ And you—when someone doesn’t cry at all, what do you say ‘cry’?” But Benyo persisted. After some time he suggested that a psychologist friend in Haifa help Anat learn to cry again. Anat would laugh and decline his suggestions, but finally she went, for Benyo’s sake. She sat for an hour and did not utter a word, nor did the psychologist. So she came back and told Benyo, “What a waste of time and money, leave me alone.”

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But Benyo persisted and asked her try once more. By the third visit to the psychologist, Anat cried for the whole hour. She went to Haifa every week for a whole year and would sit and cry throughout the sessions. Sometimes she would start to cry in advance, on the bus, and she felt embarrassed when people would ask her what the matter was. Once, her roommate in the kibbutz asked why she always returned from Haifa with red eyes. Anat replied that Benyo made her go to a psychologist and there she cried every week. The roommate asked her, “Can’t you cry here?” Anat went back to Benyo and said, “Perhaps I do not have to travel to Haifa anymore and can cry here now.” But he responded, “Perhaps you can, but this is not the same crying. Keep going.” Beyond the poetic beauty of Anat’s story, I feel that it has validity for our current discussion. Anat learned to cry in the context of having lost her family. A teacher who was sensitive to her needs (which she was not even aware of) gave her an early opportunity to mourn, an opportunity that many other children did not have. How many children felt they were being taken care of while going through the inferno, as Anat felt the love of her mother? How many adults knew at that time what the orphaned children needed (but could not feel or utter), as Benyo sensed in relation to Anat and the other children he cared for? How many adults today cannot cry or even talk, after so many years, because they never had an opportunity to learn to cry and thereby mourn the loss of their families and childhoods? What other kinds of deformed emotions evolved, as a result? One could, of course, deconstruct Anat’s story. Perhaps she never psychologically separated from her mother, or she might have invented parts of her story, which would diminish its validity. I think that such an approach could be reasonable under normal circumstances, but it does not take into account the abnormal situations Anat had to overcome. At the same time, what Anat can tell us is relevant to our society today; many of survivors, especially child survivors, with no mother to take care of them at the critical moments and no Benyo to send them to learn to cry again, after the horror has ended, could not even reconstruct the images in their minds. They had to drag themselves through all the terrible times by themselves (as in the case of the kibbutz that Nathan told us about), feeling alienated from the so-

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ciety around them and probably from themselves as well, during and especially after the Holocaust (Bar-On, 1995b). I am afraid that these breakdowns of memory are still felt today, both in the culture of the victims as well as in the culture of the victimizers and the bystanders. To some extent, many of us are still emotionally incapacitated as a result of these events that happened more than sixty years ago—for some of us, before we were born. It is not clear to what extent we have learned to cry about what was done to our people or about people imposing violence on others in our name. This incapacitation can take different forms. One survivor might become an eternal victim “enjoying” (or more accurately, suffering from) the secondary gains of such continuous victimhood. Others might deny the victimization by emotionally distancing themselves from any sign of weakness.

The legacy of silence in German families It is interesting to reconstruct, after almost eighteen years, what I thought and felt when I first went to Germany in August 1985 to begin my study. I was looking for descendants of Nazi perpetrators to interview them and understand how they live with their fathers’ legacies. One thing that already struck me then was that at the time there was no such phrase in the German public discourse as “children of perpetrators.” It became a public issue only in 1987, when Peter Sichrovsky’s book, Born Guilty, came out and Doerte von Westerhagen published an article about children of perpetrators in Die Zeit. While looking for interview partners (a fascinating process in itself), I used to travel from one place to the other in Germany, mainly by train. For a Jewish person this was a stressful process in and of itself, because of the associations with the role of trains in the Nazi extermination process, and I had to learn to live with it. I remember that certain interviewees’ names frightened me as well, in light of their fathers’ crimes during the Nazi era, and I had to remind myself that I was only going to meet their children who most probably had done no harm to anyone. What disturbed me most was the feeling that I was searching for something that no one was really interested in. I would walk out of an interview that was emotionally intense, and people in the street went about their daily lives, seemingly quite good ones, and there was

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no reminder of what the interview was about. During my evenings in Germany, being mostly alone, I would listen again and again to the tapes I had recorded during the day, as if to convince myself that what I heard during the interviews was real and not a product of my imagination. At that time I was an outcast in many ways. Academics in Germany advised me against conducting this study, for there would be endless methodological obstacles. Even some Israeli academics at my own university tried to hinder me, insinuating that conducting such a study could impede the process of my getting tenure. Some were thinking only of my own good, but they also disliked the study. Only a few lay people, mainly in Germany, encouraged me: “If you feel you can do it, go for it. Perhaps the time is ripe, and a German scholar would not be able to conduct such interviews.” I had the support of Tammy, my wife, and a couple of friends and colleagues. But they would rarely ask about details of the study, unless I imposed it upon them. Even they may have felt that evil is contagious. Changes over the last two decades have been quite drastic. Political changes such as the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall opened up new avenues for re-examining the past. As the generation of the sixties matured politically, they needed to look anew at their earlier accusations against their parents’ generation, trying to get closer to “How could it have happened?” Getting closer to those evil deeds of ordinary people is difficult because it has implications for oneself: “If ordinary people like my father did it, perhaps I would have as well, had I lived then.” These social changes had an impact on my interview partners. Some of them went public and quite courageously tried to get some attention for their own “stories.” They were courageous in the sense that although the Holocaust had become an acknowledged fact in Germany, something people felt guilty and remorseful about, this was only on the collective level—as if, by virtue of their collective admission of guilt, private family issues should be kept out of it. It was difficult to bring the stories to the attention of the pubic, for exposure could mean that people in the audience had similar hidden chapters in their own family biographies. For example, I once gave a lecture at a psychoanalytic society in Koln, Germany, and invited two of my interviewees, Monika and Hil-

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trud, to join me. I could sense a lot of tension in the room, which I attributed to the psychoanalysts not liking my way of doing things— showing a video and bringing my interview partners with me. But after Monika and Hiltrud spoke about their histories, the interviews with me, and their participation in our group, one of the psychoanalysts said openly, “After listening to you, I can admit that in this respect you are much further ahead. I know now what I have to work on. I will not confront my past here, in front of everyone, but thank you for sharing your experiences with us.” In another example, Martin Bormann, the son of Hitler’s deputy, published an autobiography after he retired from school teaching. He gives many lectures every year, in schools, churches, and even in prisons to neo-Nazis. He feels it is his mission to share his experiences and learning with young people in Germany and Austria so that they can “learn from the past.” The most striking support for my method of inquiry has come from some of my interview partners, who kept in contact with me through correspondence or through mutual encounters in the groups they initiated as a result of the interviews and later the TRT (To Reflect and Trust) group. They were able to give me the feeling that I did not just “use” them for my scientific interests (which could be legitimate in other circumstances), but that they gained from the process and are interested in finding ways to continue what we initiated in our first encounters. They have taught me a lot about their own working-through processes (Bar-On, 1990). After Legacy of Silence was published, first in English (1989) and later in German (1994, 1997, 2003), I started to receive scores of letters every year from people who asked for my help: Could I help them find a therapist? Could I help them find information about their father’s activities during the Nazi era? Could they contact one of our TRT group members or join the group themselves? I find it quite disturbing that so many people in Germany still have to seek this help from me, as an outsider. I assume this must be either because of the lack of support systems in Germany or because they have felt threatened trying to get help in Germany to work through this part of their family biography. I learned how the chaotic aftermath of the Nazi era continues to reverberate in some people’s minds and souls. For example, one German man wrote me that only when his father died did he find out

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that his grandfather was Jewish. His father was the one who turned his own father in to the Gestapo. The grandfather, however, survived the camps and lived only seventy kilometers from his son’s family until he died in the mid-1970s. The grandson wrote me that his father never told him about his grandfather and so he never met him. Now that he knows about it, could I help him find his way back to Judaism? Another example: A German woman called me up one night: She found out that her father, deeply involved in the Nazi crimes and afraid of the Allies’ revenge, gave her mother an order to kill their first two children—and the mother complied. She herself, born after the war, was named after both of them. Her mother died shortly after her birth, and her father remarried and wiped out the memory of his former family. Could I help her find out what her father’s role was in Nazi Germany? An Israeli woman, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, called me after she read my book in Hebrew and asked me to “deliver the message in Germany” that while she was in a concentration camp she encountered three “nice” Germans who helped her in different ways, and not only cruel ones. She has no way to talk about these experiences in Israel, but when I go to Germany I should let them know. There were other exciting references to Legacy of Silence over the years: One of the only names I did not change in the book was Parafianovo, the setting for Rudolf ’s story in chapter 7. I could not find any survivor of the massacre there, but I thought that perhaps including the place name would lead to contact from someone who survived. In 1992, while on sabbatical in the United States, I received a phone call from a reader, and he told me that his neighbor, an 80-year-old Jewish farmer, said he was from Parafianovo. It turned out that when they rounded all the Jews in the village to execute them, this neighbor jumped into a woodpile, and a local woman working there saw it and covered him with additional wood. Thus he survived, the only remaining Jew from that village. These personal contacts helped me formulate my own ideas about the study in Germany and Legacy of Silence. The ways in which descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust had coped with their parents’ legacies were unknown, so these personal stories of war, killing and survival needed to be told in the descendants’ own voices. In a

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way, the semi-public possibility of formulating these stories (as in my study or later in the TRT group) engendered the possibility of their later privitization (Arendt, 1958; Jackson, 2002). In specific social contexts, storytelling can help the teller work through some aspects of the traumatic past, especially when a person “from the other side” listens. These contexts also serve to elicit other stories that had been hidden in people’s minds and hearts for various reasons, waiting for the right moment and setting to be told. Letting the stories be heard in the narrator’s authentic voice does not necessarily contradict formal analysis and the development of theoretical concepts. In order to move from the interviewing to the analysis, one needs a method. I carried out most of my conceptual work not in Legacy of Silence, which presented individual stories, but rather in articles that followed, discussing the ninety interviews that I conducted in Germany. I identified seven kinds of moral arguments that my interviewees employed in their interviews (“The Holocaust never happened/The Holocaust was justified”; “The Jews did it to themselves”; “Things like Auschwitz also happened before and after”; “We suffered too”; “My family was not involved”; “My family members did it [but I am different]”; “I cannot be sure that I would not be involved as my father was, had I lived then”) (Bar-On & Charny, 1992). I found five stages common to their descendants’ working-through process: (1) knowing something about what happened and one’s father’s involvement in the atrocities; (2) understanding the meaning of these facts (having a historical, social, religious, moral, or psychological frame of reference); (3) responding emotionally, whether negatively or positively, to the facts and their significance; (4) being torn between contrasting emotions; (5) integrating knowledge of the facts, their meaning, and the conflicting emotional responses (BarOn, 1990). And I also analyzed the role of the phrase, “We suffered too” (Bar-On, 1990); the role of bystanders in the Holocaust (BarOn, 2002a); and the function of the indescribable and the undiscussable as basic impediments between the children of perpetrators and their social context (Bar-On, 1999a). I then developed the concept of paradoxical morality: perpetrators (such as Ernst in chapter 1 of Legacy of Silence) tell about their involvement in one atrocity. Their guilt and shame connected to this

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atrocity helps them maintain self-respect, for it provides evidence of their sense of humanity, a humanity that would be absent if they repressed all such memories. The single event, however, helps them repress the rest of the evidence and memories. If they recalled all of them, they would probably disintegrate emotionally (Bar-On, 1989). Another of my concepts, the double wall phenomenon, concerned both the survivors and the perpetrators: they would erect a wall between their past traumatic or atrocious experiences and their present life. Their children who grew up sensing these walls built walls of their own. When, at a later stage, one side wanted to open a window in their own wall, they usually met the wall of the other. I had to learn to distinguish between the clear-cut definitions of victim and victimizer in the case of the Shoah, and the much more complex situations in current conflicts. In the latter, victims and victimizers are on both sides, and sometimes they are even the same people. And the conflicts are ongoing, while the Shoah ended close to sixty years ago, though it continues to reverberate within people’s minds and souls. The current conflicts are asymmetrical in terms of power relations, while most survivors of the Shoah have re-established themselves financially and politically. I also learned how powerful victimhood can be, and how difficult it is to move out of this state of mind. This is especially true when parts of the collective to which the victims of the past belong have, in the meantime, become victimizers of other groups (Bar-On, 2001b). Beyond all these developments, I had to learn to accept the slow pace of social change. Sometimes I have the feeling that although we know much more than we knew eighteen years ago about the silenced stories in families with a Nazi past, we are still at the beginning of the road. In the meantime, so many new problems have emerged that we can easily be overpowered by them. Some people may say, why deal with unresolved issues of the past when the new issues of the present are so pressing? My answer is that we have to learn to do both, for focusing on one without the other will not enable us to understand the world we live in, where we come from, and where we are heading.

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Bringing reconstructed narratives into a dialogue: The TRT group process The Circle Like a magnet the center holds us there compelled,

We all know it. We drink from it. We cry in it.

Poised on the edge of A well of stories of details of torrents

It is always there

An enormity so vast.

This is the place where the whirlpools freely swirl. This is the place where the torrents are contained. We reach around full circle Hands join.

The waters start to calm. written by Sarah, after our first encounter in 1992 The TRT (To Reflect and Trust) group followed the German selfhelp group that met from 1988 until 1992. The German group was initiated by ten of my previous interviewees, those who came to a conference in 1988 at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. I invited all ninety interviewees to this conference and promised them that there would be no name tags and that they could remain anonymous. But most of them declined my offer for various reasons. The interviewees who came to the conference were probably those who were already prepared to face such semi-public exposure. When they met and shared their family stories, they immediately took interest in each other. They decided to meet again and did so quite regularly, once every two to three months in private settings, for the next few years. This unexpected byproduct of my interviews was, at that time, the only group of descendants of Nazi perpetrators that met regularly in Germany to discuss the legacy of their fathers and their difficulty in discussing these issues openly in their country.

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The idea that this group would also encounter Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors came up only in 1992. It was not even originally my idea, perhaps I could not have imagined such an encounter. That meeting brought the two groups of descendants into dialogue for the first time. In the process of getting acquainted, the group developed its own mode of storytelling and listening in a supportive atmosphere that helped members of both groups work through issues they had not succeeded in confronting earlier (Bar-On, 1993; 1995a). This single group managed to accomplish more than one might expect in the harsh atmosphere between Jews and Germans that was the legacy of the Shoah. It is important to remember that this kind of psychosocial work was possible because outside the small-group setting, the larger society was witnessing a parallel attempt to acknowledge the painful political agenda and initial asymmetry between Germans and Jews. On the existential level, that asymmetry has been overcome to a large extent: Most of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have succeeded in re-establishing themselves, financially and socially, in their new host countries over the last five decades. What was left to work through were the scars that still affected their souls and minds, and the souls and minds of their descendants. The Germans, whose ages ranged from 44 to 62, were older on average than those in the Jewish group, with an age range between 26 (two students) and 53. Bernd,3 the son of a high-ranking Nazi official, taught religion in a vocational school until he retired. Monika, a special education teacher, was the daughter of an SS general. Hiltrud, a daughter of a physician who had charge of the euthanasia program in his district, facilitated groups of parents who had lost a child (as she herself had). Her daughter, Antonia, studied clinical psychology. They came to only a few meetings. Renate, a lawyer, was a daughter of an Einsatzgruppen commander. Fritz, a former high school teacher, was the son of a Gestapo commander—and married to an Israeli woman in the group, Maya, who died of cancer in 1994. Helga, a bank attendant, was a daughter of a railway worker who had been stationed in Lamberg during the war. Kurt was a professor of education; his parents had not been actively involved in the extermination process. Igmar, a psychodramatist, was the daughter of an ammuni-

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tion factory engineer. (A resident of the United States, she did not participate in the original German self-help group). The Jewish group included two members—whose parents had survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and/or Bergen-Belsen—Jean, a psychotherapist, and Chaim, a radiologist. The parents of two other members of the group survived in work camps and in hiding—Jonathan, a psychiatrist, and Chava, a student of psychodrama. The parents of Sarah, a family therapist, survived the Nazi era by fleeing to Russia. Fleeing from Germany to the United States saved the mother of Danya, a psychiatrist. In all these families, most of the other relatives were murdered in the Shoah. Tamar’s parents were born in Israel and Nathan’s in Argentina, yet quite a few members of their extended families also perished in the Shoah. Tamar was studying sociology and worked with women training to become teachers during their military service. Nathan was a kibbutz member working in education, and whose graduate degree was in organizational behavior. In 1995, Chanan, an Israeli artist and a son of a Holocaust survivor, joined the group together with Antje, a teacher from a German student group that originally met with Tamar, Nathan and Chava’s Israeli group. Probably not by coincidence, the helping professions (teachers, psychotherapists and psychiatrists) were dominant in both groups. I did not select these people from a larger sample; the German selfhelp group existed already and the Jewish members were the first ones whom I approached during a sabbatical in Boston in 1991–92. I met Jean, Sarah, Jonathan and Chaim while giving some presentations and getting to know “One Generation After,” a Boston-based support group for children of survivors, and its dialogue group with Boston-area Germans.4 I met Danya at a psychoanalytic conference in New York, where she spoke about her experience as therapist to the son of a Nazi. I approached my students, Chava, Tamar and Nathan by mail, based on my experience with them during their encounter with a German student group. Igmar approached me, showing me her videotaped work with an Israeli psycho-dramatist. I refused only one Jewish person who asked to take part in the encounter, as I felt that her uncontrolled aggression toward Germans would keep her from fitting into the setting. Prior to the first encounter, some members of the German group became quite anxious: Did I plan to bring in the media? Their sup-

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port group had experienced such interventions before, and they were sometimes misused for sensational purposes. They opposed an earlier plan for the encounters to be facilitated by an “objective” professional facilitator. One of them said, “No one is objective about the Shoah. Those who try to be objective have a problem with it themselves.” Some, fearful of becoming part of a research plan manipulated by outside hidden persons or ideas, even resisted the idea of the workshop being documented. The videotaping was cleared only after assurance that any use of the documented material would require the group’s consent and that the members who did not wish to be photographed could sit in the cameras’ “blind spots.” These practices, very unusual for a German self-help group, showed special sensitivities, born of earlier difficult experiences, as well as exhibiting their interest in sharing responsibility while structuring the encounters for openness and success. At the first encounter, the participants introduced themselves in turn in a circle. This process took almost the whole four days, inaugurating the storytelling and listening method that came to characterize the group. At the last morning session, a few of the group members who had spoken first felt the urge to fill in details they had left out in their more abbreviated initial presentations. A lot happened during the round of listening. More and more people in the group reacted emotionally to each other’s stories, asking clarifying questions, coming up with their own associations, providing emotional support to each other in difficult moments, and sharing their feelings, anxieties and apprehensions. I opened the workshop by noting that our spoken language would be English, though it was not a mother tongue for anyone. It was symbolic of our situation in general, as it can be difficult to find words to express what we want to share with each other, irrespective of language. But I did not know then that the English language would become a serious obstacle for quite a few of the German participants, and that some of them would later say that their limited understanding of English was their primary reason for leaving. The group as a whole had decided to avoid systematic translation procedures, as it felt that much of the emotional content of the words would be lost. And yet this was still arguably a Jewish-dominated setting in which only the Germans who coped well enough with the language “survived.”

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Perhaps not by coincidence, it was Maya who started the process by telling the story of her childhood. Trapped in a ghetto in Ukraine, she was rescued by her gentile grandmother, with the assistance of the local Gestapo commander, who the night before had ordered the execution of all the Jews in the ghetto. Maya was a kind of “living bridge” between the two groups long ago. As a Jewish child survivor, married to the son of a Gestapo commander, who had lived in a silent German society for more than twenty years, she had long experience with this unusual convergence of struggles with the after-effects of the Holocaust. Maya had also played a monitoring role in the German self-help group, and she was a key figure from the outset in determining the criteria for what was a “good enough story” in this group. We will look more closely at this concept in later chapters. Soon the room filled with other stories. Bernd grew up in the midst of the Nazi leadership, unaware of the atrocities his father planned and executed until after the war, when he was about 15. He reacted, after living for two years with a simple family of Austrian farmers who were devout believers, by converting to Catholicism and becoming a priest, though his father despised and fought against religion. In the group, Bernd provided detailed dates and events, as if these could help calm his overt anxiety. Though he later left the priesthood and married, Bernd, like a few other children of perpetrators in the group, had no children. Hiltrud spoke, as would many others outside this group, of the feeling of carrying “bad seed.” For many years she did not know why she did not want to have children, but once she started to question her father’s role during the war, with the help of her husband, it became clear to her that her father’s ideas about pure Aryan blood hindered her. She was afraid to transmit some of that to future generations. One by one, the stories of the children of survivors unfolded. A few spoke of their protected childhoods; the devastating details of their parents’ experiences in the Holocaust were not revealed until later, when the offspring were willing or able to face that part of their family’s history. Jean, for example, spent her childhood in Germany but went to a boarding school in England where she later married, subsequently moving to the United States. Only when she had joined an American group of children of survivors and heard their stories did she go back to Germany with a tape recorder and interview her own parents. Her

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father arrived in Auschwitz with his younger sister, who was torn from his arms, never to be seen again. Her mother, too, was in Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered. Jean’s parents met after the war, in a displaced persons’ camp near Braunschweig, while her father was looking for his sister and other members of his own family from Lodz, which was also her mother’s hometown. Growing up in Germany, Jean was raised with gentile Germans who never mentioned the unpleasant past. She told of a recent visit to a gentile friend from school days, when she decided to finally raise the issue of the Holocaust. The friend’s mother asked her politely how her parents were doing. Jean responded by saying, “Considering what went through, they are doing fine.” Her friend’s mother reacted: “Yes, the war was difficult for all of us.” Jean’s prompt and angry response was, “There is still a big difference between going through the war and surviving Auschwitz.” Stunned, the mother changed the subject and went to the kitchen. Her friend, at first frozen by her mother’s reaction, responded: “This how it always ends. I have never succeeded in bringing up this subject in my family and getting any real response.” For Jean this was a small healing experience—to be able to confront and break through the German silence she grew up with, at least for a short moment. The group needed its breaks, not only to drink and rest, but also to hug each other, cry, and reflect on the stories that had just been told in the meeting room. Still, we all felt the urge to go on. At that stage we could not socialize with other people outside TRT. We hardly managed with ourselves. However, after a short while the two original groups could not be separated anymore: People intermingled, both when the stories were told, as well as in the informal encounters outside the room. Sitting in a circle (as Sarah described so well in her poem), telling the stories, relating stories to each other openly, was a way of being near “the well,” walking on a new path and coping with the whirlpools and whirlwinds. Participants spoke of having been uprooted from their own social context. It was more understandable in the case of the children of survivors who had to recover from physical uprooting: the destruction of the wider family in the Holocaust combined with the severing of ties through emigration and immigration, resettling in a new language and culture. It was more difficult to understand the German partners’ sense of being uprooted though they were physically located among

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their families, in their home country, using their mother tongue. Nonetheless, they felt severed from an elementary feeling of trust and dignity, in the psychological sense, in their own families. They felt that their roots were there, but had been poisoned and therefore could no longer nourish them emotionally. This psychological uprooting was much more difficult to describe, as it was intangible. They felt that it could take generations to get over this sort of poisoning. I did not have to intervene even once as a facilitator during this first encounter. The stories and reactions flowed naturally, and I could participate in the stream rather than direct it. At some concluding phase I took on the role of presenting questions that reflected issues present in the stories and reactions of quite a few members. These included: 1. When and how did I identify the role the Holocaust played in my life? 2. How did I cope with the social estrangement and estrangement from self stemming from identifying this role? 3. Am I allowed to start a life of my own, emotionally independent (neither dependent nor counter-dependent) of that of my parents and their social context? I did not invent these questions. They were “in the air” many times throughout these four days. Still, presenting them for discussion enabled participants to focus, clarify, and test specific nuances. It helped the group create a kind of “collective memory,” beyond the separate individual memories. However, the group members themselves provided a lot of the work of acknowledgment and emotional support; it was not a product of my initiative. The Jews may have dominated the group process, but the emotional support, crying and hugging added a new cultural dimension that had been missing in the German selfhelp group. The first encounter ended with a kind of euphoria of closeness and accomplishment. The group agreed to meet again in the spring of 1993 in Israel and during the following summer in Boston. We decided to seek financial support for the next encounters, including the taping and transcribing of the discussions. I encouraged people to write their own impressions of the group process. A few weeks later I received the poem written by Sarah that appears in the epigraph; it became a part of the group’s collective discourse and memory.

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We considered Nathan’s kibbutz as a venue for the 1993 encounter in Israel. It would be less expensive there, but he asked, “How will our kibbutz’s Holocaust survivors react if they find out who is taking part?” and it was clear that the very different social context in Israel would have its impact on our second encounter. It so happened that Holocaust Memorial day was to occur on the last day of our planned workshop. Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (oasis of peace) was our second choice of venue. As the only settlement in Israel where Arabs and Jews choose to live together, it had its special symbolic qualities. Its workshops for students and others about the Arab-Israeli conflict had continued even during the difficult days of the first Intifada, at the time when the peace process had not yet reached our region. Neve Shalom would play a role in my later work, when I became involved in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Everyone who was at the first meeting came to the second. This meant a lot, proving motivation and providing continuity. Antonia, Hiltrud’s daughter, was the only new admission to be accepted by the whole group. Hiltrud felt unhappy after the meeting in June, attributing it to her poor English. First she wrote that she would not come to Israel, but after Kurt proposed that Antonia join the group and translate for her, she changed her mind. However, it soon became clear that Antonia had an independent outspoken voice of her own, as the only German member of the third generation (until Antje joined the group in 1995). During the interval between the first and the second encounters, Catrine Clay, a BBC producer who had made a film about Monika (which we all watched in Wuppertal), proposed a documentary film about our group. She went to every single member of the group, in the United States, Germany and Israel, and got their formal consent to film our Neve Shalom encounter. It was decided, however, that the German members of the group would retain the right to veto the film being shown on public television in Germany. There is no doubt that having a BBC team film part of our second session, who drew several members away for personal interviews during the breaks, created additional stress in an encounter that was predictably stressful anyway. It was quite obvious to me that the high expectations generated by the euphoric atmosphere after the first encounter would be a problem for the coming session. It was not yet clear whether the group could handle aggression, conflicts and despair. These difficult issues surfaced right at the outset of our Neve Shalom encounter and actually

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occupied most of the meetings. The first issue that came up at Neve Shalom was how the group was going to cope with the contrast between its own process and the hostile reality outside the group. A few people told us about their efforts to share their personal feelings with friends and audiences after the first group encounter. In some cases they got reactions of curiosity and interest, but other times they faced estrangement and even hostility: “What for?” “Why you?” “Don’t you have problems of your own?” “Why deal with ‘their’ problems?” “Who gave you the right to meet with ‘them’?” Here I intervened for the first time. I suggested that there was an apparent dilemma of having to either opt for the isolated cult of a “happy” group, disconnected from its social surroundings, or accept the external hostile or indifferent social norms of the Jewish and German societies, thereby giving up the positive experiences gained through the group process. Was there a way to be open with each other and open a dialogue with the society around us? If not, what would this alienation cost everyone in the group? These questions became central issues of the following meetings. I believe that the most remarkable achievement of this group may be the fact that its members did not choose either of these two options but tried to live with these tensions in themselves, using the group support to withstand the social pressure and assuming that at some point this tension would be dissolved. The following morning this issue came up again in a different form: What do we regard as “effective time”? Specifically, is the time devoted to our group processes “wasted”? Jean felt we should undertake some common tasks outside the group, specifically in Germany. She described the fear and disillusionment of her parents, Holocaust survivors, still living in Germany, having to go through the new wave of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Germany. To go on dealing only with ourselves would disappoint her. Jonathan presented an opposite point of view: If we tried to concentrate prematurely on external activities, we would be running away from the group processes, from learning about our real problems with ourselves and with each other. He shared with most of the German participants an opposite definition of what “wasted” time meant. This was the first sharp division in this group, but not one that strictly followed the original GermanJewish divide. It had to do with our limits and abilities: What, if anything, could we change, in ourselves and in the world around us?

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Other aspects of our limits and abilities to effect change soon surfaced. Danya told us how during her trip to Germany (her first) she had come across an exhibition in Dusseldorf of paintings from the 1930s by Jewish children whose teacher had died in Auschwitz. It turned out that her mother’s paintings were part of that exhibition. She brought the exhibit album back and showed it to her mother, who looked at the pictures very quietly. From time to time she would mention a name and say something like “She lives in Brooklyn” or “That one died a few years ago.” Finally she looked at Danya and said, “Until I saw these paintings, I thought I had made it all up.” Nonetheless, her mother refused to contact the people whose paintings and addresses appeared in the book. I invited the German participants to share with us their feelings about being in Israel for the first time. Now Renate was crying. She had not come to Bernd’s party the night before because she had felt awful since arriving in Israel. She had believed, especially after the previous in June encounter that she would feel relaxed in Israel and could even take some vacation time with her husband before the new encounter. But she was not at ease as she had expected. When, for example, they rented a room near Tiberias, one evening an Israeli family came and ate all their food, which was stored in the common refrigerator. Renate did not protest, lest her accent betray her German origin. “What if they were survivors of the Holocaust?” She could not stand people being nice to her and wanting to talk German with her. She had fantasies before she arrived that if Arabs killed her, it could expiate in some small way what her father had done to the Jews during the Holocaust. Monika and Fritz joined Renate in having their own “archaic” fantasies of willingness to sacrifice their lives in expiation of what their father had done “to you as people.” Monika, however, told Renate that she felt better in Israel than she had expected. Somehow she could now put her father aside after all she had worked through over the past few years, and see the Israeli side, even in the Arab–Israeli conflict. I felt this was a very interesting link. As long as one was still struggling with the atrocious deeds of one’s own father, one could be either only pro- or anti-Israeli in the current conflict. Coming to terms with this legacy enabled a better view of the complexity of both sides. Difficult as these moments were, they also helped us develop our own humor, our refined discourse. The next morning Renate and I

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sat at the same table for breakfast and she told me that a mosquito bothered her the whole night. I smiled and said, “An Israeli mosquito.” Renate laughed, at ease. “Yes, but if I could, I would have killed it anyway.” After a few hours, during one of those serious sessions, Renate suddenly hit her lap and we both burst into loud laughter. “I killed an Israeli mosquito!” she announced proudly, explaining to the astonished group what it was all about. The discussion in the group made things easier for Renate later on. However, the “mosquito incident” was not merely funny when the level of perceived sensitivity between “them” and “us” was so heightened that even the killing of an “Israeli” mosquito by a German required an accounting. Next, the issues of hierarchy and asymmetry were raised. Some German participants felt that the Jewish members dominated the group, through the issues they raised and their fluency in English. “Who is more important” suddenly became the focus of our discussions. Some people noted that a hidden hierarchy of “who suffered more” also exists among Jewish survivors themselves. The problem was how to overcome the natural human tendency to rate or rank suffering or importance, perhaps as part of our effort to make sense of it all. It seems much more difficult for us to accept the variety of experiences, including the inability to rank them. An old tension within the German group surfaced. Kurt and Hiltrud were angry at Renate and Monika, alleging that “whatever the conditions they set out, the group has to accept. They are valued in the group by the Jewish participants because of their fathers’ prominent roles in the Nazi regime.” Monika was furious. “How dare you think this way, after all we have gone through around this issue,” she cried, pointing at Kurt, Helga, and Hiltrud. “You do not understand how terrible it is to have such a father. How difficult it is to live with it. What is happening here now is perverse.” It was a moment of crisis within the German group. We got through it by addressing it, identifying two ways to look at the hierarchy issue. One factor was how notorious the father had been. Another was how difficult the history was for the next generation to work through. For some group members, however, resolution of the tension remained incomplete. Toward the end of the second encounter at Neve Shalom, Renate tried to explain why she was never able to talk about her father in public: “I always start to cry when I talk about my father. I still mourn his loss as my father. How can I manage this in public?” Two

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days later, during a public meeting at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv, she did exactly what she had assured us she could not do. She stood up without any warning, told about her father, cried, and then went on, feeling she had conquered something in herself. Even when a woman survivor attacked her, Renate handled the situation eloquently: “If your mother knew what your father had done, how could she give birth to you?” the woman demanded. Renate answered very quietly, unintimidated, that this question had been on her mind for a long time. She later succeeded in speaking and answering again at Brandeis University and in Hamburg and other places. She said that each time it became a bit easier. Eventually she could also talk about her background “with some friends, even at work.” During the third encounter, at Brandeis, the question of reconciliation was raised. We felt that the term assumed a symmetry and mutuality between Germans and Jews, and so we needed a different word to express the asymmetry between the perpetrators and the victims of the previous generation. Some people also felt that “reconciliation” did not express our work as it has a strong Christian connotation. In the Jewish tradition, reconciliation can take place only between a victim and the perpetrator on a face-to-face basis (Bar-On, 2004). The terms dialogue, reflection and trust were suggested as alternatives, because they could imply both symmetry and asymmetry. These terms described the process rather than the outcome. I return to this issue in my concluding chapter. Jean told of a talk she gave about our encounters. A religious member of her congregation had responded in a moving way, saying that despite the evil that exists as a potential in all of us, we must strive to diminish the possibility of it spreading. We have to learn to look at people beyond our tribal ego perspective. The concept of “tribal ego” became one of the group’s metaphors, along with Sarah’s “well” and Renate’s “Israeli mosquito.” We found ourselves reconstructing our own language and biographies on a new, partially common ground, beyond the tribal ego of each side.

Conceptualizing the TRT group process The process presented here can be described both as an alternative and as complementary to other, political, juridical and ethical processes. It is complementary because it does not replace bringing per-

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petrators to justice or compensating the victims. However, it is an alternative as it was the only process that enabled the participants to work through the less visible social and psychological apprehensions that persisted even after legal and other processes took place. I believe that the questions with which this group tried to cope are relevant for certain current conflicts, as will be discussed later on. What concepts could one develop as a result? Such a rich group process could lead to varied conclusions, depending on the different conceptual frameworks applied. I choose here just a few, out of many that have already been mentioned elsewhere (Bar-On, 1995a; 1999b; Bar-On, Wegner & Kutz, 2000; Albeck, Adwan & Bar-On, 2002). 1. Working through silence and distortion One could easily underestimate the amount of energy required to cope with and work through the distortion of extremely traumatic events and the silence of parents, family, friends, and society at large. “Untold stories,” distorted discourse and silencing persons were highly effective in keeping naive listeners and innocent participants unaware of what people concealed intentionally or unintentionally. This was more obvious within the German context, but we did not lack examples in the American–Jewish or Israeli contexts. I will cite one small example. During the third encounter, in 1993, Renate told us that she had gone back to the archives to study the trial of her father, which she had never read before. This time she learned that another person was stationed as an Einsatzgruppen commander before her father. However, that commander, who did not want to participate in the shooting, “did not fulfill his duty” and he was released after three months. It was her father who had “excelled” and stayed on the job for more than a year. With this new bit of information, Renate broke down all over again. She said that without the help of the group she would not have been able to cope and would have simply “forgotten” it. In Berlin, one year later, she told us that in the meantime she had also read the transcript of the second trial, in which he was acquitted. He was in charge of opening the mass graves during the retreat from the Russians and burning the bodies of the victims to destroy evidence of the crimes. However, the judge in 1962 accepted his ar-

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gument that he was doing the best he could to prevent “the denouncing of his country,” and he was acquitted. Renate felt that the more she uncovered, the more difficult issues would be revealed. She was the only one in her family to try and unmask the truth in her family or social surrounding. Again, Renate emphasized the importance of the group’s support in going ahead with this process, and her relief after digesting the real facts, instead of the distorted family discourse. Working through, in her case, meant trying to find the evidence to help her absorb the significance of the facts and reconcile her conflicting emotional reactions, thereby reconstructing her own “moral self” with awareness of her (still beloved) father’s atrocities (Bar-On, 1990). The dialogue that developed in the TRT group facilitated such individual efforts and gave the support necessary for struggling with the contradiction between the normalized post-war German discourse and silenced individual experiences like the one Renate told us about. 2. Respecting the language of the layperson Members of both groups developed their unique idioms. “Tribal ego,” “the Israeli mosquito,” “Who was more important?” “Who determines the scale of suffering?” All are examples we have seen of the TRT group’s discourse. There was no professional concept that could identify or describe the spontaneous immediate response of participants to each other, in their own language and emotional reactions. Similarly, listening to their stories during the first encounter demanded enormous attention and sensitivity, and no pre-determined conceptualization was rich enough to describe this process. The group developed its own pace for confronting problems, an art of telling stories, reading poems, developing its own humor and gestures. Telling stories helped group members to release tension, elicit support from other members, and reconstruct a more personal discourse in comparison to the external “normalized” discourse that supported the separate “tribal identities” by silencing parts of the past and not identifying the effects of silencing on the present. This was their way of developing a common language, based on acknowledging what had happened in the Holocaust, reflecting on it, but also trying to envision and strive for a different future, for themselves and

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their children. This probably could not have been achieved within the original “tribal identities.” This aspect also had an effect on my own role in the group. I started to intervene at Neve Shalom when conceptual formulations were needed to explain the tension between the group and its social environment. However, I did not try to translate the group’s experiences into professional concepts, but mostly tried to reframe their separate experiences into a common idea or question as I did by providing the questions during the first encounter. Sometimes I tried to propose alternatives to other participants’ interpretations. For example, by proposing that the hierarchy issue was externally imposed and that for us it was not important what the parents had done during the Nazi time but what the descendants confronted and worked through, I offered a positive meaning to an initially negative definition. Similarly, I suggested a move away from identification with the victim, to an internal dialogue between victim and victimizer; a move away from ranking degrees of suffering or heinousness of Nazi crimes, to appreciation of the differences without rating them. These suggestions may have helped reduce tensions and open up closed venues, developing a qualitatively different discourse. However, not everyone in the group welcomed all these proposals, and I did not try to impose them, respecting the right of members to interpret things differently, to look for other directions and especially to proceed at the pace suitable for them. 3. Becoming able to see beyond “the child of...” One of the changes that occurred in this group over the years was what they talked about. In the first several encounters participants related to each other largely in terms of who their fathers or mothers had been, and specifically the roles they had played or what had happened to them during the Shoah or the Nazi era and the ongoing impact of that past. This would be obvious in the initial round of storytelling, usually in the group’s opening session, covering what happened in their lives since the last encounter, but it also figured in the subsequent discussions. It was interesting, as many things had happened in the participants’ lives over such a long period: Some got married, children grew up, and some changed workplaces. Nonetheless, most of these issues were not raised during the first few encounters.

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At the Berlin encounter in 1994, it occurred to me that for the first time participants were speaking in the initial round about other aspects of their lives: their children, their spouses, or their workplaces. They shared pictures of family events. This trend continued in the following years. In a sense, it was a part of the working-through process: seeing each other as more than just the son or the daughter of a Holocaust survivor or a Nazi perpetrator. That part was never forgotten or left aside completely, but other aspects of participants’ lives became a legitimate part of the group discourse and generated a lot of communication and exchanges between participants on a personal basis, in between the meetings—especially once most of the members gained access to e-mail. As other issues became part of the discussion and dispute with the passage of time, occasionally the tension was independent of the group members’ identification as Jewish or German. Two examples, the gender issue and the related issue of male leadership, are discussed below. At the same time, there were certain other issues that were never discussed throughout the life of the group; for example, sexual attraction or tensions between members of the group. Still, the main subject remained the initial one. This was what people came for, and it was the only setting where they could talk about how that dreadful chapter of the past still affects their lives. When it became clear that our meeting in Wuppertal in 2003 might be the last encounter of the German–Jewish group, some participants expressed their sadness about ending the process that was their “well” in the whirlwind: the only place where they could talk openly about these matters and feel safe about testing their reactions. 4. The wider societal meaning of the TRT experience We started TRT with the question of what the effects would be of an encounter between descendants of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, if indeed such an encounter could take place. Would it assist the members of both groups in their own working-through processes? Would it enable the reconstruction of a social bond between Jews and Germans? For most participants of both groups, personal growth went beyond what they had achieved on their own, in their prior group. Yet there was a more difficult question: Did this group mean anything for the wider German and Jewish societies?

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The most obvious answer is found in the projects and initiatives that members of the group started outside the TRT setting during those years. Among them: the seminar that Hiltrud and Antonia, together with Hiltrud’s elder sister, held at Hadamar, where their father had sent children to their death during the so-called “Euthanasia program.” The seminar, organized by the education department of the local Catholic Church, was devoted to the after-effects on families of the father’s role as perpetrator. It was a very successful day and many people in the audience identified themselves as directly involved (second and third generations), actually asking for further assistance with their own problems. A second seminar took place the following year. Chaim started a new group made up of children of Austrian perpetrators and Holocaust survivors. He felt that acknowledgment in Austria of its part in the Holocaust was very limited and that such a group could start the process. Though he had only his personal experiences in the TRT group as background, Chaim initiated the new group on his own, and it met for seven encounters, in parallel to the TRT process. Kurt, Tamar and I worked with Israeli and German students throughout these years. Each national group worked first within its own cultural context. The two groups would meet for two weeks in Israel at the end of the first semester and then meet again for another two weeks in Germany in May. Combining group discussions with personal encounters and pair-hosting, together they also visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem during the trip to Israel, as well as the Buchenwald concentration camp and the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during their stay in Germany. There are less quantifiable answers to the question of dissemination of the group experiences, based on the changes that took place during the “open” presentations in different places where we met in the years 1993–2002. For example, the German members of the group first feared being exposed to the public in Germany, which, they felt, was not ripe for such an open encounter and would label them right away. However, this changed after public exposure in Berlin, Osnabruck, and Hamburg. From the Israeli public, on the other hand, one could sense a certain initial hostility and apprehension at the 1993 public meeting. But there were many more positive reactions during the public events in 1995 and 1999. Political change and the peace process that was then underway may have been among the

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factors that account for this greater acceptance. A generational shift was taking place in Israel as well, and the younger people were more interested in a perspective wider than their own (Segev, 1992). Moreover, the post-cold war atmosphere in the world led to new ways of evaluating the past and how it still affects us. But not all these changes could have been predicted when the group began.

The latest TRT development: Bringing in current conflicts After six years of German–Jewish encounters, the TRT group decided to invite peace-builders who had already worked with victims and victimizers in current conflicts in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Palestine-Israel, to participate in a joint, week-long meeting near Hamburg, Germany, in the summer of 1998 (Bar-On, Wegner & Kutz, 2000). The purpose was to see whether the TRT group process of storytelling and reflecting on the personal and family narratives in a trusting atmosphere was relevant for practitioners in these new settings. It was clear to the TRT members that working-through in the context of current conflicts differs in many ways from working through the Holocaust (Maoz & Bar-On, 2002). They also understood that each current conflict setting had its own biography that must be carefully studied and taken into consideration, and that the three new conflict areas were in different stages of their peace processes. While in 1998 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was already working in South Africa, the peace processes in Northern Ireland and Palestine-Israel were still moving forward and backward in more chaotic forms. It is important to note that TRT had, to that point, dealt exclusively with the intergenerational effects of the Shoah. In this context, the division between victims and victimizers was clear-cut. Holocaust victim and victimizer descendants had met with no immediate agenda of territory and no current power struggle, other than what was still burdening the participants and the minds and hearts of their collectives. Nonetheless, we wondered whether the TRT storytelling intergenerational working-through approach could be relevant for practitioners who struggle with the grassroots peace-building process. Intractable conflicts in the regions noted above have led to intergenerational transmission of trauma, with different levels of collective

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silencing and distortions (Volkan, 1988). We hoped that this sort of dialogue between members of the opposing sides might prove helpful in identifying historical agendas that were still responsible for creating underlying psychological stress in the current conflicts. We assumed that the storytelling procedure might help focus on these issues, in an atmosphere of trust that could enable members of both sides to reflect on their roles in the conflict, particularly the members of the powerful or dominant groups that tended to overlook their part in perpetuating it (see chapter 3). The proposal to bring in practitioners from current conflicts accorded with the wishes of some members of the group to link their work about the past with a current peace process. This was reflected in the choices of the current conflicts. Some members were personally interested in the TRC process in South Africa. Others were interested in the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. For the Israeli members of the group, it was only natural to suggest the Israeli-Palestinian context, especially after the Oslo Accord of 1993. Other proposals were turned down. For example, the Balkans were not chosen, as German members of the group felt awkward about approaching the area in light of the Nazi involvement there in World War II.5 During some of the first workshops (in Hamburg in 1998 and at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in 2000), the meetings focused on the separate conflict groups: South Africa, Northern Ireland and Palestine-Israel. At these workshops, members of the TRT were assigned to each of the three groups. Their role was to model the storytelling and listening modes developed in the original TRT process and to create ground rules for the discussion that followed, which encompassed the storytelling of the practitioners from the conflict groups. This process demanded of the TRT members that they rethink and reflect on their own process and that they formulate the ground rules that had developed over the six years of their meetings. Such rules included letting people tell their stories without interruption; relating to a story and the person who told it without jumping in to add something else; and listening to the different reactions a story elicited among the members of both sides.6 Some of the new participants mentioned that the ability of Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors and German descendants of Nazi perpetrators to enter into a dialogue about their unresolved past inspired them to try and do the same in their current context.

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When the conflict groups started to meet, we soon found that for some of the practitioners it was their first opportunity to hear stories from the “other side” of their own current conflicts. This was especially true for the members of the dominant groups. White members of the South African group now listened to stories of the black participants; Israeli Jews listened to stories of the Palestinian participants, and Northern Irish Protestants listened to their Catholic colleagues. Even more interesting were their reflections on how they had tried to avoid listening to these stories earlier on (Bar-On, Wegner & Kutz, 2000). Perhaps the TRT group context had created the necessary support to accommodate these stories of oppression and humiliation, and their consequences for the dominant side’s self-image. This was not always an easy task. For example, in Hamburg, on the fourth day of the Israeli-Palestinian group, a Palestinian woman from the West Bank, referring to a French revisionist’s writings, asked, “How do you know that the Shoah happened?” This created turmoil in the group. Some of the Jewish members of the group, both original members of the TRT and new Israeli participants, felt that this question not only humiliated them but also invalidated the stories they had told of their own parents. An Israeli–Palestinian woman argued that all her adult life she was fed on Jewish–Israeli stories about the Holocaust, but she did not feel legitimation for telling her family stories of the 1948 war. The crisis calmed down only through the matter-of-fact intervention of Bernd, a German participant who answered the first Palestinian woman’s questions by telling her about his father’s involvement in the Holocaust. It then became clear that the Palestinians from the Palestinian Authority had never learned about the Holocaust in school or elsewhere, and that in their society it was common to think that “the enemies of your enemies are your friends.” The Israeli–Palestinian group at the Hamburg workshop provided a laboratory to test additional questions. For example, what is the connection between the German–Jewish conflict of the past and the current Israeli–Palestinian conflict? It was not easy to answer this question. For the first time, I sat in one room with members of these three groups. It was painful to observe that the Jewish members of this group felt more at ease with the German participants than with the Palestinians, even though there were many ways to account for this: The TRT process had made its Jewish members more familiar with the Germans than with the Palestinians. Trust between these

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two groups had grown over the course of seven years. Then there was the cultural discrepancy—the Jewish participants were predominantly European in origin and felt closer to the German culture than to the Middle–East Muslim culture. But I believe that there was also a deeper psychosocial reason: The Jewish participants felt more comfortable in the role of the victims with their victimizers’ descendants than they did struggling with their simultaneous roles as victimizers of the Palestinians. In the first context, they were the “good guys.” The second role implies also being “bad guys.” Jeanne, a Jewish-American member of this conflict group, who analyzed the group process (Bar-On et al., 2000), described in detail how it was difficult for her to listen and accept the pain in the stories of the German TRT participants, and how much more difficult it was for her to listen to the painful Palestinian stories and to acknowledge the fact that it was her own people who inflicted some of the Palestinians’ sufferings. She wrote (Bar-On et al., 2000): Now that I have had time to reflect on all the events of the workshop, I can see some of the parallels between the Palestinian woman’s feelings and my own, when I first encountered Germans in dialogue. Just as I was unable to accept that the descendants of my own family’s oppressors might have suffered as a result of the second World War, so this woman and probably many other Palestinians reject the idea that Jews may have been victims. They get angry when they hear this. It challenges their worldview, just like mine was challenged by what I was learning about Germans. And for Palestinians it is even worse, because their pain is current and ongoing. It took me several days of hearing more personal stories and learning about the realities of Palestinian life to begin to comprehend what the Palestinian woman was asking for. Having been taught that Israelis use the Holocaust to justify their oppression of Palestinians, it makes sense that they are suspicious of the veracity of such an event in the history of the Jewish people. I used this specific observation in the Hamburg workshop to try and understand current conflicts as a triad in which the third party (in this case the German Nazis) is not present anymore, and yet its ag-

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gression, internalized by its victims and never worked through, explains some of the energy animating their anger toward the Other in a new conflict. This understanding of Jewish-Israeli anger at the Palestinians in their current conflict led me to think about another, related question: Why did the Jews not take revenge on the Germans after the war? I defined this inhibition as a collectively displaced aggression (Bar-On, 2001b). Internalized during the Holocaust (and probably earlier pogroms, throughout the generations in the Diaspora), the aggression that was never fully acknowledged and exorcised, nor worked through, found an outlet within the Palestinian conflict. I believe that this could also be the case in other current conflicts, in which one party (usually a colonial one) used violent oppression and acts of genocide and then moved out, leaving this aggression to continue to reverberate between its earlier victims. Such might have been the hidden role of the Belgians in the recent genocide in Rwanda or the Nazis or the Turks in the current Balkan crisis. This phenomenon, which I defined as “backyard psychology,” would mean that it is of critical importance to address the instigating role of the original perpetrators and symbolically work through it. At the 2002 workshop in Derry, the small groups were designed differently than at the meetings of 1998, 1999 and 2000, focused on the current conflict groups. Each of three small groups was composed of participants from all the various subgroups: the original TRT, Israelis and Palestinians, Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and South Africans. A few factors contributed to this change. After clarifying their main internal agenda in the earlier meetings within the separate conflict groups, some participants felt that the time to mix was now ripe. The requests of members of the Northern Irish group were also a factor; they had expressed interest in such a format back in Hamburg, since they felt more comfortable telling their stories to members of other conflict groups than in their own separate context. Another factor may have been the very tense relationship between the Palestinian and Israeli groups. It was predictable that the tense and violent situation in the Middle East would lead to more difficulties for this conflict group than for the other two. Most Israeli and Palestinian participants had not met since they were at Stockton College in July 2000—meaning that they had not met since the renewal

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of violence in October of that year. A difficult session of this paired group took place the evening prior to the arrival of the other conflict groups. Both Israelis and Palestinians welcomed the idea of the mixed groups, hoping it would diffuse the intensity between them and reduce confrontation over their painful, clashing agendas. To an extent, not only the Israeli group but all the Jews, by association, were under great pressure in Derry. The group members felt under attack even before their arrival; with the renewed occupation of the Palestinian territories, it was clear that the Palestinians would gain sympathy from the other conflict groups, and especially from the black South Africans and the Northern Irish Catholics. And while the previous TRT workshops were held the spirit of Oslo Accords prevailed, this was the first workshop in which the Israelis and Palestinians were back to square one. They could only envy the progress of the other conflict groups in their peace processes. The individuals from these two sides of the conflict could not contain and work through the whirlpool that affected them at that stage and therefore were unable to develop a meaningful dialogue. The others could not find a way to help us out. The tensions within the Jewish TRT group vis-à-vis the Israeli–Palestinian conflict surfaced only when the group met in Wuppertal, the following year. It was interesting to see that at the last two TRT workshops the most heated discussions evolved around issues that were not related directly to the conflicts. At Stockton, tension arose in a session on gender and the issue of decision-making in the group. Some of the women in the group felt that the TRT process was male-dominated, and they protested their exclusion from the decision-making process. A similar outburst at the Derry workshop in 2002, relatively late in the week, revolved around the issue of theory: The less academically and more practice-oriented TRT members opposed developing a theory at this stage, while others felt the need for theoretical structuring of our accumulating experiences. Though these are very important issues, in the context of the TRT process and otherwise, the emotional outbursts had not happened before or after the sessions in either Stockton or Derry. One implication, then, of these sudden outbreaks of emotions, is that the restraint that characterized the process of the small groups accumulated and burst out at a later session that was devoted to a seemingly less central topic in terms of the conflict—be

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it gender or theory. The original TRT group had similar experiences of sudden outbursts of intense emotions around relatively trivial matters, such as meals in restuarants. There it would happen especially after a public session which demanded a lot of restraint while “on stage.”

Afterword I have changed a lot during these twelve years, learning from these experiences while also influencing them. I am grateful to have had the maturity and the patience to follow this process as it unfolded, carefully testing what the next step could be, and what was accomplished or neglected in each one of these stages. I was encouraged by the wonderful people I met in this process. Without their feedback and emotional support, I could not have withstood the difficult moments. One of these difficult moments is still unresolved for me: The frustration of hope for a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so painful that the TRT, with all its accumulating wisdom, could not contain it. This will be the subject of my next chapters: What can be done to bring together members of these two hurting societies, even when hope has broken down and been frustrated again and again during the last decades?

NOTES 1 The terms Holocaust and Shoah both appear in the literature and so are used interchangeably in this book.

2 Nathan later joined the TRT group that is described later. 3 All the names mentioned here are pseudonyms. Some of the names ap-

peared in Legacy of Silence (1989). All the participants of the group are presented by their pseudonyms in this publication as well, even though Bernd, for example, became known in the meantime by his real name, Martin Bormann. The members of the group first appeared with their real names in a documentary, produced by the BBC during our second TRT encounter (April, 1993). The group also presented itself at several public discussions in Tel Aviv (April, 1993); Boston (at Brandeis University, 1993); Hamburg (at the conference Children in War, 1993); Berlin, Hamburg and Osnabruck (July, 1994); Montreal (at the conference Bereavement as a Healing

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Process, 1994); Jerusalem (1995); Boston (1997); Hamburg (1998); Stockton College, New Jersey (2000); and Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland (2002); Wuppertal (2003); and Barcelona (2004). 4 A group of Germans and Jews— not specifically survivors’ and perpetrators’ descendents—initiated by the German consul in Boston and a rabbi. There have been many such groups, in different places around the world. 5 Recently, we received several requests from professionals in the Balkans to implement the TRT experience there, as the formal processes of truth and reconciliation commissions have failed. 6 Most of the ground rules were published in a recent article (Albeck, Adwan & Bar-On, 2002).

CHAPTER 3

PRIME: Peace-Building Efforts Under Fire

How did PRIME get started? In 1994, I participated in a conference in Cairo, one of a few Israelis invited by the Mufti (Muslim leader) of Cairo to discuss religious tolerance, together with Arab and international academics. Today it sounds almost like a dream, but those days were full of hope after the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the Middle East seemed on the brink of change. Religious tolerance would be important to this process. The Mufti of Cairo was bothered by the growing fundamentalist Islamic movement in Egypt and wanted to find out how we thought the phenomenon could be handled more effectively. During the conference, I was hosted together with a few other psychologists by an Egyptian family of psychiatrists (parents and children too). We had a chance to visit their hospital and were quite impressed by what we saw there. We felt also a bit “high,” as if living in a dream that we had never expected to experience in our lifetimes. But shortly after that conference, as has happened so many times in the chaotic Middle East, calamity struck—the massacre perpetrated by the Jewish zealot Baruch Goldstein in the holy mosque of Hebron in February 1995— and the windows of tolerance that had opened briefly in the “double wall” between Israelis and Arabs were shut again. At the conference in Cairo I met Dr. Elia Awwad, a Palestinian psychologist who worked in the Bethlehem area. We were cautious in our initial encounter but wanted to try to do some research together. Meeting again in Jerusalem, at the Notre Dame hotel, a kind of middle ground between the Jewish and Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, we decided to interview a few young members of each of our societies who participated in the Intifada of 1987–93. Our question was how

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they viewed the recent peace process, in light of their previous violent experiences with each other. We planned to transcribe the interviews, translate them into English, and compare them. We met several times and found our interviews interesting but also quite disturbing: These angry young men who participated in the violent conflict expressed great doubt about the intentions of the other side. Perhaps they expressed some of the widespread emotions among the people of both societies. By then there were already signs that the peace process, as a “bottom-up” phenomenon embraced by the people, would not be easily achieved. But we did not want to believe what we heard. We reveled in the euphoric atmosphere, in great need of some hope after all the long years of war and violent struggle. We wanted to believe that the “top-down” Oslo Accords constructed by the politicians would prevail. This small study with Dr. Awwad started my cooperation with Palestinian researchers from the PNA. I think that before the Oslo Accords I did not trust myself to begin this study. Though I was politically active in the Israeli left during the seventies, when it came to personal and professional contacts with Palestinians I hesitated to initiate cooperative ventures. Perhaps I felt shame or guilt about coming from the oppressor’s side. Perhaps I felt that there was something not genuine about trying to conduct joint research with Palestinians as if it were “business as usual,” while the occupation continued and there was no political prospect for a solution. Once there was mutual political recognition in September 1993, I started to look for new ways; to try to create contacts and to implement the knowledge I had developed elsewhere. It was also a time in my life when I looked for a change in perspective. I was afraid of becoming totally absorbed by and identified with research on the Holocaust and the descendants of the Nazis. I wanted to move beyond that into a more contemporary field. I did not seek to disconnect from my research on the Jewish–German conflict (as would have been typical of me when ready for a change twenty years earlier). Rather, I was looking for a way to use my experiences and the knowledge I had gained in order to address current social and psychological issues in Israel that were related to the peace process (Bar-On, 1999b). My initial hypothesis was that to move toward the peace process with the Palestinians would be much more

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difficult for Israeli-Jewish society than people imagined. Transforming the previous enemy into a genuine partner in the minds of the Israelis demanded abundant trust and hopefulness, and I knew from my Holocaust studies that this was not present in large measure in the society (Bar-On, 1998). I had reasons to believe that this was also true for the Palestinians, especially as the situation on the ground had not changed dramatically and the occupation continued to dominate their lives. At the same time, I felt that I was starting all over again. Like many other Jewish Israelis, I did not know Arabic well enough (certainly not as well as I knew German), and I was not very familiar with Muslim culture and tradition. Moreover, in the German context I belonged to the victim’s side (the “good side”), and now I wanted to get involved in a field in which Palestinians and others would identify me with the dominant, victimizer’s side. In 1995, I was approached by a German colleague, Bodo von Borries from Hamburg University, who had initiated a European empirical study on “Youth and History” (Angvik & von Borries, 1997). He, together with a team of European researchers, had developed a questionnaire to investigate how young people in European countries understood their national histories and to what extent a common European history would be able to replace a national one. I was asked to translate and distribute the questionnaires to a random sample of 1,200 Israeli pupils (400 of them Israeli-Palestinians), and I suggested that a Palestinian sample from the PNA be added to the research. When I asked Dr. Awwad, who was not affiliated with a university, if he was interested, he proposed that Prof. Sami Adwan from Bethlehem University join him in investigating the Palestinian sample. We translated the European questionnaire into Arabic and Hebrew and distributed it to a representative sample of 1,200 pupils in Israeli and Palestinian schools. Though the European questionnaire had been already finalized before we were approached, and therefore did not include specific questions relevant to our region,1 we still found this study interesting. Having the safety net of being part of a wider collaborative effort (involving twenty-seven European countries) enabled us to get to know each other better in a joint research situation. One of the statistically significant results of the questionnaire was that the Jewish–Israeli pupils and the Palestinian ones from the PNA

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both rated “peace at any cost” lower on average than did the other national samples, while among Israeli-Palestinians this value received one of the highest ratings in the study. This result confirmed some earlier qualitative results (among others, of the interviews Dr. Awwad and I conducted) indicating that the Israeli Jewish and the PNA Palestinian societies were very far from recognizing the positive value of peace.2 Israeli-Palestinian youth, however, as a minority group within Israel, associate “peace at any cost” with the possibility of improving their situation within the State of Israel; while the conflict rages, they find that they “fall between the cracks” (see chapters 4 and 5). January 1997 represented a milestone in our joint work. The Geneva Foundation invited a group of Palestinian and Israeli practitioners and researchers to participate in a conference in Annecy, France. The organizers wanted us to discuss current joint studies and to suggest new topics for studies that they chose for their importance and scientific merit, which the foundation would finance. Four groups came together during the Annecy days; Dr. Shifra Sagy and Dr. Ifat Maoz, together with Dr. Awwad, Prof. Adwan, and I, formed one of them. We worked eagerly to get our research proposals approved— competing with each other. But to our mutual dismay, no proposal was actually funded by the Geneva Foundation. At that point, however, we had already enough interest in each other to continue our encounters without more external support. We decided to invite six Israeli and six Palestinian researchers and practitioners to meet over a weekend. The location, Talitha Kumi, a Lutheran high school near Beit Jala, enabled the Palestinians to arrive without permits, and for us it was close enough to Jerusalem. There were facilities there for workshops and staying overnight, and the very supportive German school principal, Dr. Wilhelm Goeller, later helped us get permission to host PRIME meetings at Talitha Kumi. We started our meetings by writing down our contemporary history, each of us from his or her perspective. When we read each other’s narratives we found out that they were very different. The differences were not only between Israeli and Palestinian accounts but also within the groups, especially the Jewish-Israeli group. Negotiating over the details (why do you say this about the Balfour Declaration? Why do you say that about 1936?), we learned a lot about each other’s ways of rationalizing and belief systems. We also learned to respect

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different conceptions of events without trying to convince the other side that its narrative was “wrong” or illegitimate. But we learned too that accepting the differences does not mean that you have to agree with everything in the other side’s constructions. This process of getting acquainted through our different understandings of our histories later led Sami and I to initiate the teachers’ project described below. We also enjoyed socializing with each other, going to restaurants in Bethlehem, meeting representatives of the Palestinian Authority. In those days we believed that the establishment of a Palestinian state was “around the corner.” Nevertheless, we could not envision what lay beyond our sporadic meetings—establishing our own institute. For that we needed external intervention. In 1997, Dr. Harald Mueller, the director of the Frankfurt Peace Research Institute, came to see us and a few other Israeli and Palestinian academics and suggested the establishment of a joint research institute. He invited a group of fifteen researchers from both sides to Osmannhausen, Germany, for a weekend in March 1998 to discuss the details. The majority of the Israeli researchers came from Ben-Gurion University and the majority of the Palestinian researchers were from Bethlehem University. The Talitha Kumi group was very much at the center of this activity, and we suddenly found ourselves developing an institute, based on our joint experience of the past few years. Most of us were very realistic and pragmatic in orientation. We discussed problems of asymmetry between the parties— differentials in salaries, equipment, and other resources—and how to try and overcome this. We spoke about academic excellence, creating our own body of knowledge, developing a journal, holding conferences, subsidizing and supporting joint research initiatives. There were also tensions, especially within the Palestinian group—power struggles over who would lead this initiative—but they did not stop the process itself. When unexpected difficulties arose between the German partners and some of the Palestinian participants, however, it seemed that the positive venture was on hold and might not materialize. But at that point Sami and I were not willing to give up on it. I was at Stockton College in New Jersey that fall semester and went to the World Bank in Washington, where my late brother had been a vice president until 1996. I asked one of his former colleagues to support the first confer-

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ence of PRIME, and the World Bank agreed to give us $40,000 as a start-up grant. We decided to invite all the Palestinian and Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on peace initiatives between the two peoples to the first conference in June 1999. We wanted to try to systematically describe and evaluate their work (Adwan & Bar-On, 2001). We recruited Fatma, an English-speaking Palestinian student, to help us with the office work, and Dr. Mueller helped us rent and furnish two rooms at Talitha Kumi School. A donation from a German donor to Ben-Gurion University, Dr. Deichmann, enabled us to purchase computers. We opened a bank account at Bethlehem Bank and hired a Palestinian accountant who worked for the Talitha Kumi School. These steps were our attempt to partially balance the asymmetry around us. We had learned from the negative outcomes of similar initiatives that the Israelis had effectively controlled because the offices, funds, and other resources had been in Israel, replicating the asymmetry between the societies. We invited Dr. Mueller, Dr. Kamal Darwish (then vice president of the World Bank), Prof. Avishai Braverman, the president of BenGurion University, and Mr. Jibril Rajoub, at that time the head of the Palestinian preventive security, to give the opening speeches. Prof. Manuel Hassasian from Bethlehem University and Prof. Benjamin Gidron from Ben-Gurion University gave the keynote speeches about the third sector (the non-governmental sector) in the transition from conflict to peace process. Representatives from some thirty NGOs participated in the sessions. We transcribed these sessions and the lectures and edited the transcripts, publishing our first book eight months after the conference took place. In the meantime, Elia and Sami joined the TRT group, during its first enlarged workshop in Hamburg in 1998. As a result, in October 1999, Sami and I invited the TRT group to hold its next annual conference at PRIME and in Bethlehem (see chapter 2). Though some of the Jewish participants were quite uneasy about coming to Bethlehem, in retrospect they were very thankful for the opportunity and surprised how well they were received and hosted. Again, it was important for us to transcribe the encounter for our second publication (Adwan & Bar-On, 2001). Not everything we tried to do together was successful. While we were still involved in the Youth and History project, we became ac-

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quainted with three Greek scholars who showed interest in developing a collaborative research project. We decided to continue the Youth and History project in another form and work with groups of Greek, Turkish, Palestinian and Israeli teachers on how the Other on the opposite side of one’s conflict was represented in the classrooms, through festivals, literature, symbolic activities and so forth. We assumed that seeing a conflict other than their own would allow the teachers to develop a more positive perspective that could ease the tension between the parties in their own conflicts. Being very ambitious, we included Israeli-Palestinian teachers in the Israeli group and teachers who work among the Turkish minority in the northern part of Greece in the Greek group. We called the projects “Two Conflicts—Four Partners,” and we applied for funding from the MEDA-Democracy program of the European Union. At that time Greece was the only full EU member among the participants in our project. Though the Europeans approved the project and promised to finance it that year, the money arrived only some two years later. By then the Israeli and Palestinian teams, which were already working at full capacity without financial support, were almost finished, while the Turkish and Greek teams had just started. The relationship among us exploded at the first joint meeting of the four groups at Talitha Kumi, in June 2000 (there were several meetings of the Palestinians and the Israelis during their joint work, but most of the Israeli-Jewish teachers had stopped attending. There were many hard feelings between the researchers at that meeting and it seemed that instead of this project helping to build bridges, it actually intensified the gap between the Israeli and Palestinian teachers. We learned from that experience not to start a project before the promised financial aid is available. We also learned not to undertake such over-ambitious initiatives as bringing together two conflicts, especially when the local situation is so tense and complicated. For me there was another important lesson. It was the first time that I saw what happens to an Israeli-Jewish group of teachers when they are put in a position of a minority among a majority of Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian teachers. It was evident how threatened they felt. Their reactions became more and more defensive, to the point that they actually vanished from the project. I concluded that if one wants a group that is used to playing the dominant role to

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be involved in a learning process, prior preparation and support is essential. Sami and I also got our families involved in our relationships and visited each other. In November 1999, my youngest son, Haran, was about to join the Israeli air force rescue unit. Haran befriended Sami’s oldest son, Tariq. Before Haran’s recruitment, Sami invited us all to a Bethlehem restaurant. During the dinner Sami got up and said, “I know how concerned your parents are for your health and safety, as you are joining the army. But now, since we are friends, I will be concerned just as they are, because we are now one family.” I still choke up thinking about this unusual event and Sami’s generosity, when Haran was going to join the army that was still controlling most of the Palestinian territories—the army that Sami himself fought against not many years earlier. Later, when Israeli tanks invaded Bethlehem during the Intifada in the fall of 2000, and my wife and I were abroad, Haran, knowing what we would do if we were around, called Sami to ask how he was doing. These small personal gestures still mean much more to me than the big events that were taking place around us; they symbolized the possibility of true friendship and trust in the midst of the hell we were entering. In February 2000, we held our third conference on Israeli and Palestinian school textbooks. We were honored by the participation of the president of Germany, Dr. Johannes Rau, who shared with us his experiences of the German–French commission to change the school textbooks of the two countries after World War II. In April 2000, with the support and help of Dr. Mueller, we received our first grant from the German government to document and evaluate the work of all the Palestinian and Israeli NGOs concerned with environmental issues (Adwan et al., 2004). We recruited two post-doctoral students, Dr. Fida Obeidi and Dr. Julia Chaitin, and two assistants from each side, who developed a research plan, and started to interview representatives of these NGOs. While we were in the interviewing phase, the second Intifada broke out, at the end of September 2000. Suddenly it was dangerous to meet at Talitha Kumi, as there was shooting on the road there. Sami’s area was under constant curfews and fire and he suffered from severe restrictions on his movements. I was supposed to go with him to two conferences in Europe, and I found myself standing there

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alone, apologizing for his inability to come, hampered by my own government. Some of the NGOs we were interviewing, which used to cooperate with each other, stopped their joint programs. Quite a few of our own membership gave up and lost interest in our joint projects. Sami and I were each attacked as “traitors” in our own societies for our cooperation or for “normalization with the enemy.”3 I had to become much more attuned to Sami’s “public relations” problems, as he was in a much more complicated situation in his own society than I was in mine. But we were stubborn and determined to continue our work and our personal relationships. I used to call Sami whenever something happened on their side, and he used to call me whenever something happened on our side. This meant that we spoke almost daily. We tried to continue to meet, at Talitha Kumi (not telling my wife that I was traveling there), or at the border checkpoint. Sometimes I succeeded in smuggling Sami into Jerusalem (distracting the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint by chatting about how they could gain admission to the university the next year), while at other times he would smuggle me into Bethlehem for PRIME joint business transactions at the bank or just to show me what was going on after an Israeli attack. We also had our moments of crisis. We internalized so much frustration and anger that things could not always work out well for us. There were days on which we met and Sami was so angry that he could not hug me as usual. Once, during a workshop with Palestinian and South African ex-prisoners, Sami took the role of translating from English to Arabic for the Palestinians, and I felt excluded and bereft of my co-facilitator and got angry with him. At other times Sami felt that I was dominating a discussion with journalists or a session at a conference where we both had to present papers. Once, in northern Italy, where my wife, my granddaughter, and Sami’s daughter were participating in the Kids’ Guernica project,4 he delivered a talk that I considered Palestinian propaganda. Angered, I told him that I expected when we came together we would represent our joint work and not a one-sided picture. We did not speak for almost a month but then happened to meet again in Jerusalem, at a reception held by Sari Nusseibeh at the New Imperial Hotel.5 We had lunch together and decided to resume our work and relationships.

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In early 2001, with the help of Dr. Julia Chaitin, we had written four proposals for the Wye River People-To-People exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department, and in June we were notified that we had a three-year budget for two of the proposed projects: an international workshop and a refugee project. We decided to transform the international workshop into a teachers’ project that would develop a joint school textbook and to develop the refugee project into two parallel projects: the Haifa project, a part of which is described in chapter 5, and a project interviewing Palestinian refugees in the Bethlehem area who left or were driven out of the Lachish area in southern Israel in 1948, as well as the Jewish immigrants who settled in the same area around that time. The rest of the chapter describes in some detail the teacher and the refugee projects. Essentially the original ideas that Sami and I developed generated a lot of international interest. The projects also justified our “wartime” strategy of working slowly and quietly on relatively small projects, creating “islands of sanity” before coming out with public statements. This strategy differed from that of certain other joint efforts that were overambitious, spreading their resources too thin and then “burning out” because the situation became so hostile and frustrating that they could not maintain the volume of their activity.

“The disarmament of history”: Separate but interdependent narratives6 Among other issues, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict rotates around the question of which narrative describing the history of the conflict is “true”—the Israeli or the Palestinian one? In the last few years, considerable effort has been invested in attempts to create a narrative that bridges the two separate and conflicting accounts (Pappe, in press). Sami and I assumed that there was no possibility of developing a bridging narrative in the near future, other than among a few exclusive, elite groups that would not be representative of our two populations. And we did not want to target a highly self-selective audience such as the German–Jewish TRT group, but rather to develop an educational project applicable to the wider young population in Israel and Palestine. We were interested in the young people who

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were exposed to demonizing images of the Other daily, especially after October 2000. How could we do something to counter that ongoing demonization? One small step forward, we believed, would be to educate Israeli and Palestinian children to learn, acknowledge and respect the historical narrative of the Other, without giving up their own narrative. Contradictory narratives are not peculiar to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. In periods of war and strife, societies and nations tend to develop narratives that from their perspectives are the only true and (morally superior) accounts. These narratives morally exclude (Opotow, 2001), devaluate, and sometimes dehumanize the enemy’s narrative. When the enemy’s narrative is described at all, it is presented as morally inferior, and the enemy is depicted as faceless and immoral, with irrational or manipulative views. In conflict situations, “the experience of identity invariably evokes codes of exclusion, difference, and distinction. Belonging to a collectivity always concerns the delimitation of that collectivity and the application of the logic of conflict and contention” (Tawil, Harley & Porteous, 2003). These narratives become embedded in everyday culture, in the national and religious festivals, in the media and in children’s school textbooks. School textbooks are one of the tools in this psychological warfare. They impart the values, goals, and myths that the society wants to instill into the new generation (Apple, 1979; Bourdieu, 1973; Luke, 1988). “The basic working assumption is that there is a dialectical relationship between schooling and violent conflict and that this relationship needs to be explicitly recognized and explored for the process of educational change in the wake of civil strife and to be a meaningful contribution to post-conflict reconciliation and peace building.” Therefore “…it is a major concern in post-conflict situations to avoid replication of educational structures that may have contributed to the conflict.”7 (ibid., p. 3) However, by the time our project began, Palestinians and Israelis no longer saw themselves in a post-conflict situation, especially not after the failure of the second Camp David summit in August 2000 and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in October 2000. The state of affairs as regards Palestinian textbooks is complex. Since the early 1950s, Palestinians have been using Jordanian schoolbooks in their schools in West Bank and Egyptian ones in the Gaza

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Strip. This reflects, to some extent, their collective identity problem: they were denied a voice of their own, at least on the level of school textbooks. The use of the Egyptian and Jordanian schoolbooks continued after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, but the texts underwent censorship. It was not until the Oslo Accords that the Palestinians gained a voice of their own in this realm (Jackson, 2002). The Palestinians began preparing their own schoolbooks right after the establishment of the PNA in 1994. In the 2000–01 school year, the first Palestinian-produced texts, for grades one and six, were introduced. Each year the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center, under the supervision of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, has produced textbooks for two more grades. These books are gradually replacing the Jordanian and Egyptian ones. The Palestinian educational system is a centralized one. This means the Ministry of Education is the sole producer of the school textbooks and all schools use the same books (IPCRI report, 2003). Israelis have a longer history of producing their textbooks, going back to before the State of Israel was established. Because the Israeli system of education is less centralized, schools and teachers are able to choose textbooks from a list of books that the Ministry of Education has approved. To a more limited extent, teachers have the freedom to choose the text they want to use from the open market. A comprehensive analysis of narratives in Palestinian and Israeli history and civic education (Adwan & Firer, 1997; 1999) shows that the texts reflect a culture of enmity. The terminology used in the texts has different meanings. What is positive on one side is negative on the other side. For example, the 1948 war is called “The War of Independence” in the Israeli texts, while in the Palestinian texts it is called “Al-Nakbah” (the Catastrophe). While Israeli texts refer to the first Jewish immigrants to Palestine as “pioneers,” the Palestinian texts refer to them as “Zionist gangs” and “terrorists.” The heroes of one side are the villains of the other. Each side aims for total exclusion of the Other. Most of the maps in the texts eliminate the cities and towns of the other side. The texts reveal delegitimization of the other side’s rights, history, and culture. There is also no recognition of the other side’s sufferings. The Holocaust is barely mentioned in Palestinian texts.8 Likewise, the plight of the Palestinian refugees is ignored in the Israeli texts. Some of the texts even fail to agree on

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such facts as the number of 1948 Palestinian refugees. Israelis write that there were between six and seven hundred thousand Palestinians who became refugees as a result of the 1948 war, while Palestinians write that more than one million Palestinians became refugees. We chose to develop a new and innovative school booklet containing two narratives, the Israeli and the Palestinian, around certain dates or milestones in the history of the conflict. This would enable pupils to learn the conflicting narrative, in addition to their own familiar narrative, as a first step toward acknowledging and respecting the Other. We also planned a column of empty lines in the center so that the pupils could write their private narratives in between the two public ones (per Arendt, 1958). We expected that through the process of developing the narratives with the teachers from both sides in joint workshops, the verbal expressions would become less hostile; more sensitive to each other; interdependent but still separate. This meant a real, basic change in our assumptions about historical truth and its logic. There can be more than one logic and narrative to account for the same historical events. For example, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 is a historical fact, but its construction within the Zionist and Palestinian narratives is essentially different, and much of what actually happened later and how it was perceived by both sides in the conflict was based on that early different construction. The idea of developing two narratives was linked to the proposed political two-state solution. In other post-conflict contexts (such as South Africa) in which a single-state political solution emerged, one may think in terms of developing a bridging narrative (such as that which emerged from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission). However, when there are two societies that wish to live separately, side by side, a two-narrative solution seems more suitable. We had to consider the roles of teachers while developing such a new textbook. Studies show that teachers have more power than do the mere written texts in forming children’s understandings and value systems (Naveh & Yogev, 2002; Angvik & von Borries, 1997). As a result, this project has focused on the central role of the teachers in the process of using shared history texts in the classroom. The teachers were to develop these narratives and try them out in their ninth- and tenth-grade classrooms, after translation of the booklet into Arabic and Hebrew. Through their mutual interaction, we hypothesized, the

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teachers would become more sensitive to each other’s pain and thereby able to develop more interdependent narratives.

The participants Sami and I, together with two history professors, Prof. Adnan Mussallam (Bethlehem University) and Prof. Eyal Naveh (Tel Aviv University and the Kibbutzim Teachers Workshop in Tel Aviv), chose the team to work on this project. The team included six Palestinian history and geography teachers, six Jewish Israeli history teachers, and six international delegates, as well as one Jewish Israeli observer. Most of the Palestinian teachers, hailing from Hebron, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, had never before participated in dialogue encounters with Israelis. Several of the Israeli teachers, who teach in high schools in the center and north of Israel, had participated in previous encounters with Palestinians.

The workshops with the teachers: Working at a time of violent conflict All the participants convened seven times for three-day workshops. In August 2003, they met in Anatalya, Turkey; the other encounters, in March, June and August 2002, and January, April and September 2003, were all at the New Imperial Hotel on the eastern, Palestinian side of the Old City of Jerusalem. The fragility and chaos of the political and the military realities meant that it was often unclear until the last minute whether the Palestinian teachers would get permits to enter Jerusalem or even if they would be able to reach the offices where the permits were issued. Some of the workshops were called off several times, but each time we found ways and the energy to succeed in making them happen at the last moment, except for the planned March 2003 workshop, which was delayed due to the war in Iraq and took place one month later. As the project operated within the reality of the conflict, it is critical to note the contexts from which the participants came. First, while the situation on both sides was bleak, difference and asymmetry existed with respect to its intensity on the ground (Maoz, 2000c). For Palestinians, the situation had an unrelenting effect on day-to-day life.

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Living under the thumb of the Israeli army meant restricted freedom of movement, curfews, border checkpoints, and fear of shootings, killings, and house demolitions. More recently, it has meant hardships caused by the construction of the extended barrier that Israelis call the security fence, and Palestinians call the wall. Many Palestinians suffered serious losses and have seen their own homes or those of relatives damaged. For Israelis, Palestinian suicide attacks brought fright, loss and desperation. Israelis began to fear riding buses, and going downtown or anywhere with crowds. At the height of the tensions, many on both sides even feared sending their children to school. The Israeli participants had to become even more attentive to the Palestinian limitations—restricted movement and being threatened for their participation in such a joint project. With more freedom to move, the Israelis had to take care of obtaining permits for the Palestinians, bringing the permits to them, and helping them get to the meetings. Such freedom is a problematic “advantage,” as it gives the representatives of the powerful side even more power. Therefore assistance had to be carried out tactfully, in a matter-of-fact manner without much talking. And because members of an oppressed society react more aggressively to people who are seen as “betraying the common cause,” or advocating “normalization,” as it has been defined in the Palestinian public discourse, it was important that the Palestinian teachers maintain a low profile and not draw too much attention from their own social surroundings. A Palestinian teacher described the hardship of participating in such workshops amidst the ongoing occupation and violence: I live in Adna (a village) and I teach in Ramallah. During the week I stay in an apartment together with five other teachers from different disciplines. Because of the closure I cannot return home. My friends were surprised that such meetings would take place when there is an Intifada, and people are killed. This period is very hard for all of us. The questions that are raised are: Why is this being done now when many people are martyrs? It is a tormenting experience. We have a good time together here, but when we go home we hear that something else has happened. There is a contradiction between meeting and trying to build some trust and the outside circumstances that definitely do not help. I have to go

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through humiliating experiences every day. I feel that I have a split personality; I live two lives. Difficult as it was to participate in such a project while feeling humiliated and under attack, there were also expressions of hope and persistence: A Palestinian teacher commented that “we should look into other ways of resolving our conflict, and this project is an example of such a way.” One of the Israeli teachers said during the fourth workshop, “This work over the past years has been my only source of hope in the current desperate situation.” We decided in those years to avoid the media and both the Palestinian and the Israeli ministries of education. When people get killed by suicide bombers on the Israeli side almost every day or when people are under curfew and have to move through checkpoints and risk being killed by Israeli army assassinations or shootings, the public in general, and the ministries of education in particular, are haunted by the violent conflict and paralyzed in terms of the peace process. We therefore assessed that premature publicity would hamper the possibility of continuing our work, rather than accommodating it. In December 2003, an article about the project was published in an Israeli local paper (Zomet Hasharon, January 2, 2004). Prof. Naveh and a few teachers had been interviewed for the article. As a result, the teachers received letters from the Israeli Ministry of Education, banning the use of the booklet in classrooms without its prior permission. It was interesting that the Israeli establishment was the first to react in such a way.

Getting started In the first workshop, in March 2002, teachers became acquainted with each other by sharing personal stories, starting with “the story behind my name” and continuing with stories such as that recounted by the Palestinian teacher from Adna. It was not easy to listen to stories filled with painful moments caused by the other’s violence or oppression. But it was an essential process under the extreme conditions in which we operated because it enabled the teachers to later work together on their joint tasks more openly (Albeck, Adwan & Bar-On, 2002). The outside asymmetry of power relations and violence had

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to be acknowledged through personal storytelling experiences before a pragmatic task-oriented approach with more symmetrical expectations could be introduced. It was necessary to envision a different (post-conflict) future in order to accomplish this task. Such an act of envisioning could take place after people were able to share some of their pain, fear and mistrust, but it had to be done at each workshop anew because of the intensity of the negative events in the intervals between the workshops. The events also eroded some of the closeness reached during the workshops themselves. After the story-sharing and a joint dinner that provided needed time for relaxation and unwinding, we formed three mixed task groups. Each task group created a list of all the events that were relevant to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and chose one event to work on. In the plenary the teachers discussed their lists and preferences and chose three events. One mixed group focused on the Balfour Declaration of 1917, another on the 1948 war, and the third on the first Intifada of 1987. A program was set up so the groups could communicate and coordinate the relevant narratives for review at the second workshop. Professors Naveh and Mussalam gave their professional view of how such narratives should be developed and what should comprise them. It was the role of the international participants to do some of translating when necessary, to summarize the task groups’ work, and to write an evaluation at the end of each workshop. Evening strolls in the Old City of Jerusalem, which none of the participants had been able to enjoy in recent times due to the severe security conditions, added an important dimension to our workshops. In a way, we felt as if we were in a self-created bubble, disconnected from the hostilities amidst which we usually lived. At the second workshop, in June 2002, teachers developed their narratives, working some of the time in the original task groups and some of the time in uni-national groups. We devoted time to continuing our personal acquaintance and joint walks, as these became important elements of our work, especially given the hostile atmosphere outside. Between the second and the third workshops, the narratives were translated from English, the language of the workshop, into Hebrew and Arabic. During the third workshop in August 2002, the teachers had their first opportunity to read both narratives in their own native languages,

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as they would present them to their pupils in the following year. This time, most of the work was done in the plenary. We expected it to be a very difficult encounter, as the teachers were caught in a dilemma of accountability to their own societies and the hostile verbal expressions of these societies toward the Other, versus the sensitivity to the narrative and feelings of the Other developed during the workshops. The dilemma we anticipated was similar to that in which the TRT was caught during its second workshop in 1993: Was it necessary to either become a cult of sorts, disconnected from outside realities, or else give up the joint experience? Yet interestingly enough, all the teachers, and not only those who had created a given narrative, accepted them. Surprisingly, most of the questions posed during these sessions were informative: Was the translation precise? Who was the person mentioned in 1908? Why try to describe this event so briefly, while the others are described at length? At that stage there were almost no attempts to delegitimate the other’s narrative. As we saw it, the fact that each side could feel safe with its own narrative made it easier to accept the other’s narrative being so different. But we anticipated more difficult issues popping up when the narratives were presented to the pupils in the classrooms and the teachers returned to the group with their reactions. While we were convening, we learned of the sudden death from cancer of one of the participating Palestinian teachers from Hebron. There was some deliberation over whether we should stop this third workshop, but the Palestinian teachers felt that he would have liked them to continue, and they elected to stay and continue the joint work. The whole group later decided that his picture and a dedication to him would be on the opening page of the forthcoming joint booklet. The groups departed with the task of introducing corrections to their narratives as a result of the discussion and developing a glossary for teachers and pupils, to define terms with which the other side might not be familiar. In February 2003, the booklet finally came out in Hebrew and Arabic after some unplanned delays due to the difficult political and military situation. (The English version came out in June 2003). An example of the first part of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, covering the 1917 Balfour Declaration, appears in the appendix. The teachers started to test it out in their classrooms, which meant that

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in this experimental phase hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian pupils were already exposed to the new booklet. (Despite the objections from the Israeli Ministry of Education, each teacher found ways to introduce the material.) The January and April 2003 teachers’ workshops were focused on sharing the pupils’ first responses, making corrections, and supporting the teachers in their work, and in August and September 2003 they started developing three additional narratives around new time periods (the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1967 war).

Discussing the classroom experiences The fifth workshop, in April 2003, started with the teachers reporting on their pupils’ responses to the two narratives. In general, the teachers reported that presenting the two narratives caused surprise in the classroom, generating interest and curiosity but also some resentment among the pupils. Reports of the pupils’ more difficult reactions were shared first by two of the Palestinian teachers and then by two of the Israeli teachers. The Palestinian pupils’ responses were affected by the difficult realities of their everyday lives under curfew and occupation. It was much harder for them to listen to the other side’s narrative than for the Israeli pupils. Khalil (P-M)9 reported some of his pupils’ reactions to the Israeli narrative of the Balfour Declaration: “They have no place in our land.” “If they suffered from persecution, why do they do it to us?” “I am not sorry about their persecution by gas (during the Holocaust).” “This is our natural right; this is the land of our fathers. Who gave them the right to settle in our land?” “Arabs are never taken seriously. The British chased us out and brought others instead.” “There was a commitment by the British to bring the Jews to the land. They should not have done it.” “They do not have a historical right in Palestine. Our right dates from ancient times.” “Britain was a big country then. They committed themselves before the League of Nations, the way the UN is in the hands of the Americans now.” “They see us as aggressors, but we are the original inhabitants of this land. They came from far away and they are aggressors.” Khalil tried to defend the Israeli narrative: “This is their story.” But then his pupils wanted to know what he thought about the validity of the Israeli arguments. Here is what followed:

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ESHEL (I-M): Did you find yourself representing the Israeli side? KHALIL: It is not easy when you do not agree. When I taught the history of the Maccabees (Jewish heroes during the Roman Empire), it was easier. But when I talk about 1948, it’s harder. It is like when you said that your pupils saw you as a traitor. But the pupils know me, just as your pupils know you. We can sense some of Khalil’s dilemma of not wanting to appear untrustworthy in the eyes of his pupils, who wondered why he would teach a text that he did not believe in, a text that represents the other side’s point of view. Why would he not just denounce it? Sonia (P-F) also had a difficult time, for she too identified with some of her pupils’ arguments. SONIA: I taught the 1948 narratives. The pupils raised many questions about the subject. Some were angry and some were sad, because they live next to a refugee camp (housing 1948 refugees). They were angry about the Israeli narrative. Some of them were ready to listen to the Israeli narrative. The majority were resistant. They asked, “Why should we accept the Israeli narrative when the reality is that there is no security for our people?” SHAI (I-M): So the problem was not with the narrative, but with the reality. SONIA: In the Israeli version they read about the terrible things that the Jews suffered in the Holocaust. At the same time they ask: Why do we have to pay the price for their suffering? In this exchange, Shai tried to differentiate between the narrative and the reality, but Sonia’s answer shows that the differentiation was not valid for the Palestinian teachers and pupils at that point in time. By sharing the reactions of pupils who could not accept the Israeli narrative, Khalil and Sonia were also expressing some of their own reactions to these texts. Still locked up in the conflict, that reality colors their reactions. The Israeli teachers also reported that their pupils expressed difficulties and resentment: ESHEL: I taught the three narratives in my 12th grade class for one week, which was not enough time. My pupils are 18 years old, be-

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fore their army service. There were different reactions. Some said that they do not want to get to know the Other: “Look at their narrative… There’s no basis for talking. We came here to learn about our history and we are not interested in theirs.” Some expressed doubt that the teachers on the other side also taught their pupils the two same narratives. Some labeled me as left-wing. Some were curious about the other side’s story. Some of the pupils took the booklets home to read, although I did not ask them to do so. NAOMI (I-F): The children said something that reflected what I felt: that the Palestinian narrative is not history. It is propaganda. They said: The narrative is always attacking the Israeli point of view. In the Palestinian narrative we see how much wrong the Israelis did, and what about them [the Palestinians]?…After the first lesson, the pupils said they had thought that it would be interesting, but it is only blaming us and being victims without offering any solutions. The exchanges show that the teachers on both sides were confronted with issues of their own credibility in the eyes of their pupils: If these texts are “enemy propaganda,” why teach them in class, especially at this time of violent conflict? Now the teachers themselves were reflecting critically on the narratives they had created and agreed about earlier. Suddenly, arguments came up that had not been addressed before: “Why do we have to pay the price for their Holocaust?” “Our narratives are facts, theirs is propaganda.” This created a crisis among the participants over the purpose of the project. If the narratives simply replicate the conflict over legitimacy, what is the sense of teaching them in the classroom? Moving out of deadlock At this point the group could have easily fallen apart, each side justifying its own narrative and delegitimizing that of the other side, following the negative reactions of some of the pupils. But that would have undermined everything they had put into the project up to that point. The choice was whether to move forward, clarifying anew the goals of the project, in order to be better prepared for future classes, or to move backward into the ethnocentric narrative that supported the conflict (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). In a way, the reactions of

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the pupils helped the teachers express their own negative emotional reactions which they had tried to restrain or could not express earlier. Interestingly, this did not cause the group to regress to the ethnocentric discourse that dominated the societies they lived in. This crisis actually created a new stage of self-examination that was necessary for the process to move on. It was also helpful that not all the pupils’ reactions were that critical or full of resentment. Some of the teachers got also supportive feedback: RACHEL (I-F): I want to bring a different perspective, because I have more comments from my pupils. A few of them said that it was important for them to see that there is also another side. Some said that it made them hate more, since the Arabs have hated us for so many years. One pupil said that he understands that it’s like every conflict; there are two sides to each story. They argue, but it opens their minds. I see that it works. ESHEL: First, it is a good booklet. It is an achievement, but it should be improved. It is like two blind people shouting their story without listening to the other. One thing that is lacking is dialogue. Most of the dialogue that we had among us did not enter the booklet. ABDEL HALIM (P-M): We should not have high expectations….There are ups and downs. Things that we see as facts, you see as propaganda. NAOMI: I do not say that propaganda contains no facts, but it is only a partial picture. Now the discourse among the teachers took a turn. The teachers made some new observations: The narratives they had created represented more extreme views than those they expressed in their earlier encounters and they needed to create a dialogue between the narratives. Instead of mutual exclusion and expressions of hostility, they needed to introduce some level of mutual inclusiveness. Instead of “propaganda,” a new term was introduced: “partial picture.” The teachers showed incentive to continue and try to work out a way to introduce changes into their original texts. Also, they reacted to some specific sensitivities expressed by their pupils. For example, some of the Palestinian pupils did not want the Israeli flag on top of each page

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(marking the Israeli narrative) and were willing to give up their own flag appearing over their narrative. Therefore, both flags were taken out of the booklet. The following quotations show how the new narratives were developed with the previous discussion in mind. SARA (I-F): We should tell the story that we believe in, but the question is how to tell it. What is your goal when you write it in a certain way? You wrote, for example: “One day before the Intifada broke out, an Israeli driver deliberately ran over Palestinians…” Deliberately—what is the purpose of this phrasing? RULA (P-F): It is true. This is how the Palestinians saw that incident. It was not seen as just an accident. ESHEL: We saw it as an accident. They saw it as a deliberate act. EYAL (I-M): This is the kind of dialogue that we should develop, and at the end we will decide if the word “deliberate” stays. It was still hard for some of the teachers to accept that one’s side’s accident could be a deliberate act of violence for the other, as in the case of the event that sparked the 1987 Intifada. But a discussion developed, and teachers from both sides expressed their feelings and thoughts more openly, trying to redefine what this project was actually about. They did not aim to create a bridging narrative, but rather a better dialogue between the separate two narratives, creating some interdependence between them. They tried to resolve conflict by developing a pragmatic approach to the narratives themselves. The two narratives could be rewritten again and again, according to where the teachers were in their own process and in relation to what was happening outside the workshop. EYAL: We have to think about what our final goal is. If nothing changes and the feeling of victimhood remains, there is not much sense in presenting both narratives instead of one. We cannot just congratulate ourselves for presenting the two narratives; we have to continue to work on improving them, while we ourselves change in this process. ADNAN (P-M): Yes, but we have to be realistic about what we can expect. The conflict goes on and we have to go through this phase before we go to the next one.

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SAMI: At a conference in Mexico we were asked how we can promise that this book will not instigate new hatred. We have to be careful about this. We have to think about how to change our self-centered attitudes. I see myself in the process in comparison with the beginning. I have the impression that something has changed in each one of us. Clearly, the current violent situation outside does not help. DAN: I agree with Eyal that just writing the texts is not enough. The narratives are necessary but not sufficient. I would put the finger on legitimization. We have to help pupils learn to deconstruct texts. When pupils deconstruct only the text of the other side, we have to point out that the opposite side can also deconstruct their text. Legitimization of the other side’s narrative is very important. It is important that the pupils become more critical about the texts that they are presented with: news and newspapers. Up until this stage it seemed that each side wanted to tell its own story, and to include in the story only the elements that it saw as important. By the end of the April 2003 workshop there was a feeling of readiness to negotiate and to reach an agreement about events or issues that both sides wanted to mention, taking into consideration the sensitivities of the other side as well. There were additional crises when the group started to discuss the narratives of the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1967 war. At the August 2003 workshop in Anatalya, Turkey, two new Palestinian teachers joined the group, in place of Yussuf, the teacher who died in 2002, and another young teacher who could not continue with the project. They developed the Palestinian narrative of 1967 and the Israelis were shocked when they received the Hebrew translation. They felt that expressions such as “Zionist entity” or “aggressor” instead of “State of Israel” were humiliating and they objected to graphic descriptions, such as that of prisoners of war murdered by Israelis in the Sinai. The Palestinians felt they needed longer texts, while the Israeli teachers were concerned with the ability of the pupils to absorb them. There were serious discussions around the graphic descriptions of killings (for example, the 1929 massacre of Jews in Hebron and in Jaffa). The teachers were not always able to reflect on the underlying dilemmas (their need to support their side in the conflict versus the

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attempt to move out of it; the feeling of insecurity about legitimation from the other side; the fear of moving too far from the dominant view within one’s own society). But the teachers did not give up and tried to find compromises on each issue, respecting the view of the other, while not giving up what was important for them. It was suggested that these dilemmas be discussed at length in the planned teachers’ guide. Sami and I gave credit to the teachers for what they had achieved and supported them by acknowledging how hard it is to teach the two narratives in the midst of a violent conflict. Both sides tried to teach their pupils to look at the other side’s narrative as legitimate though the reality outside the classroom did not accommodate this spirit of cooperation. However, Sami and I, as well as Profs. Naveh and Mussallam, also stressed the point that the situation is not yet ripe for solution and that the aim of this project is not to create a bridging narrative. We pointed out that it is normal and predictable that at least some of the pupils would have initial negative reactions to the other side’s narrative, and that at this stage simply making the pupils aware of the other side’s narrative is important. We sensed that the abilities of the teachers to withstand their pupils’ pressures and to encourage them to look differently at the other’s narrative varied.

The project’s future An interesting development was the international interest in this project. The booklet has been translated into Italian and French and is being considered for translation into German, Swedish and Spanish. In January 2004, Sami and I went to Italy, meeting near Naples with local teachers and their pupils who had studied the booklet in Italian. They claimed that it helped them understand some of the major issues of this conflict that were not clear to them earlier. Reform rabbis in the United States showed similar interest. We insist that teacher training is essential for the success of such additional projects. During a May 2003 conference in Wuertzburg, Germany, on Family Constellations, the authors led a workshop in which German therapists were asked to role-play the Israeli and Palestinian teachers developing their texts around two dates (1948 and the 1987 Intifada). It was a very powerful exercise, and the participants agreed at the end

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that they learned a lot about the conflict and the difficulties for each side of reconciling. A similar workshop was organized in June 2003 in Rejika, Croatia, for a group of practitioners from fourteen countries. They also said that it helped them reflect on their own experiences, and they were very impressed by the project. We suggest that the project represents a genuine if minimal peacebuilding initiative, an attempt to make a difference from the bottom up, in a situation that has seemed almost hopeless (Maoz, 2000a; 2004). The teachers’ motivation to continue this process, despite the difficult situation and some of their pupils’ harsh reactions, is an indicator of how important the process is and what it has achieved. We do not consider this group of teachers unusual; we feel they are representative of some typical Israeli and Palestinian teachers. It was interesting to observe the initial response of the teachers from both groups: When they had their own narratives, they felt more open and secure about accepting the validity of another one. Perhaps the difficulties are an indication of how psychologically insecure both societies are when it comes to their own national identities. After all, the Palestinians never had a state of their own, and Israel as a state has existed for little more than half a century. This mutual insecurity is one of the basic social-psychological characteristics of this conflict and may in part account for the need to have two separate narratives at this stage. Still, when the teachers were confronted with their pupils’ reactions, they found that their separate narratives were still embedded in the conflict, creating some negative reactions among the pupils of the other side. This realization (which they had not paid attention to earlier, when developing the narratives) demanded that they modify some of the expressions and contents to make the narrative more inclusive rather than exclusive; more interdependent, sensitive to each other’s special needs and sensitivities. Now that the two narratives have been developed for all six time periods, and the teachers’ guide is ready, we plan to guide a formal evaluation comparing, for each teacher, the bi-narrative classes with single-narrative classes. In the near future we would like to hold a conference at PRIME to summarize the first experimental phase. In the following phase we hope to recruit more teachers and make use of the first group’s help as facilitators. Perhaps by then the political situ-

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ation will change enough for the ministries of education to be able to adopt this concept and practice, thereby moving this project from the micro, bottom-up level to the macro level. We believe that five important factors contributed to the success of this project: 1. The timing of the project—amidst harsh violence there was an urgency for a positive approach to counter what we experienced outside our workshops. The fact that we always first allowed for expression of the harsh conditions in the form of storytelling may have helped the teachers become more involved in their mutual tasks. 2. The leadership of the project modeled the serious possibility of joint endeavors with academic, professional, financial, and managerial symmetry—something rarely experienced in similar projects previously (Maoz 2000a, 2000b). Clearly, Sami and I were further ahead in our own dialogue, thanks to our long-term commitment to PRIME which had started several years earlier and which we maintained even under the pressures of renewed violence. 3. The creation of two concrete texts (with the empty space between them) that can be handed out was very important for pupils and teachers who have difficulty with abstract discussions and evaluations. 4. The teachers’ presentation of their pupils’ responses gave them a legitimate way to express their own feelings toward the other side’s narrative, which they had not dared to articulate openly earlier. This enhanced the subsequent group process. Citing the most extreme reactions enabled an open discussion during the fifth workshop about the two narratives, Palestinian–Israeli relations in the past and present, and the goals of the project and realistic expectations about it under the current circumstances. After getting everything out in the open and having the other side listen, both sides were ready to start a dialogue on a different level; to hear, negotiate and cooperate in a less monolithic way. 5. We tried to develop a dialogue by establishing and clarifying the differences between the two narratives. While elements that humiliated or de-legitimized the Other were removed, the separateness of the texts was maintained. In contrast, in the TRT group, as described in the previous chapter, the main goal was to create a dia-

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logue between life stories from the two sides of the abyss so that a bridging narrative could eventually emerge, enabling the parties in conflict to contain each other’s stories in a more positive way. The current project was aimed at a wider population of teachers and pupils that would likely not reach the kind of dialogical moments that characterized the TRT group. Still, the expectation remained that a more respectful and positive view toward the Other would bring results with the help of this strategy. We acknowledged that peace could only be a result of both sides winning. A “peace” in which only one side wins has no value for us. Sami said: “The disarmament of history can happen only after the disarmament of weapons. But one can prepare it now.” Events of the last years have highlighted the fact that we are still very far away from a comprehensive peace agreement. Still, a peace-building process fromthe-bottom-up, involving face-to-face encounters between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, had the effect of creating an “island of sanity” under fire, in the midst of the chaos and whirlwinds of our region. Furthermore, using the booklet created by the group as a teaching tool provided a concrete way to amplify the effects of a face-to-face encounter between the teachers. Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” We have no doubt that a small group of committed teachers—Palestinian and Israeli—can change the world when the time is ripe.

“The sun in Deheisheh Camp is not like the sun of our village”: Location as the focus of an encounter between kibbutz members and Palestinian refugees It was a cold Friday morning in late December 2003 and a very unusual one at Talitha Kumi School near Beit Jala. Sami Adwan had left his work at Bethlehem University and I mine at Ben-Gurion University for an encounter bringing Palestinian refugees together with Jewish Israelis living in the areas from which the refugees originated. We were nervous about this first-time venture. It reminded me of how I felt in 1992 before the first encounter of the TRT group, when descendants of Nazi perpetrators met for the first time with descendants

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of Holocaust survivors. We had prepared for this meeting for many months, but we could hardly believe it could take place. Over the last two years, Sami’s team had interviewed Palestinians in the refugee camps around Bethlehem who originated from the area known as the Lachish region in Israel and fled or were expelled from there in 1948. Nathan and Dr. Julia Chaitin interviewed Jewish Israelis—members of kibbutzim (collective farms) and moshavim (cooperative farms)— who settled in that area after 1948. Some of the Jewish interviewees immigrated from Kurdistan, Morocco, Yemen or European countries in the late forties or early fifties and were sent to settle in the region, while others were Israeli-born and volunteered to settle there after the kibbutz they established was captured by the Jordanian army and destroyed in the 1948 war. Sami and I concluded long ago that the problem of the Palestinian refugees is the most difficult one in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In the Oslo Accords they were not mentioned at all. The later Geneva Accord suggests that the refugees will have to give up their right of return (though there are still different interpretations of this statement) and will have to be compensated. Living in Israel would be one of five possibilities for resettlement, but only upon Israel’s terms, as regards both numbers and the pace of repatriation. Sami and I felt that the interpersonal aspect—recognizing the stories of lifelong misery and longing, and recording them—is critically important, whatever the political solution may be. But for many Israelis, listening to the refugees’ stories represents a direct threat to their own right to live on the land, which they see as a Jewish state. From their perspective, had Israel absorbed the refugees in large numbers, the Jewish majority would have been overrun and in addition to a Palestinian state beyond Israel’s boundaries, there would be another Palestinian state within Israel. So listening to stories is not always a simple act of respect. It may have deeper consequences for the listener. Sami and I also wanted the refugees and their family members to realize what happened on their land, or around it, after they left or were driven out fifty-five years before. Listening to the Israeli stories would entail realizing how things have changed and that it may not be able to reverse today’s reality. Still, we felt that these processes have to take place on an interpersonal level, in which people face each other in a genuine way.

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Aware of these issues, Sami and I decided to test our new approach with location as a binding factor, seeking to bring together people around a place—the refugees originally from that place and still longing to resettle there, and the Israeli Jews who have lived in that area since the Palestinians had been expelled or fled during the 1948 war. It was part of our philosophy that one has to bring together the past and the present of such a location in order to think of a different, less painful future. In both the Palestinian and Jewish traditions, location and the connection to the house and the land, has a special significance. For Jews this is the result of generations of wandering in the diaspora; for Palestinians it is integral to their collective identity, as they aspire to a state of their own. And we knew from our earlier studies (Adwan & Bar-On, 2001) that both societies are very much centered around family traditions, the stories that are transmitted from one generation to the other. So we decided to choose two families from each side, three generations in each family. We wanted to maintain an intimate setting that would enable all participants to speak and listen to each other, without the need to split into subgroups to ensure that everyone could chime in. Despite our nervousness, because it was the first encounter of this kind, we invited a professional film team to document the whole encounter. We chose a Palestinian team to make the process more comfortable for the refugee families, who were more sensitive to public exposure. They would have associated an Israeli or even a foreign film team with their negative experiences of being filmed and interrogated by the Israeli army. In addition, we decided to hold the meetings in Hebrew and Arabic, with consecutive translations, even if this took more time and energy, so we chose two professional translators. We were aware of previous difficulties with using English as a neutral language or using Hebrew, the language of “the occupier.” We chose Talitha Kumi School as a middle ground, not only because PRIME is located there, but because Israelis can reach it without going far into Palestinian National Authority territory (which they are not allowed to do), and the Palestinians can enter without a need for permits or passing through Israeli military checkpoints. The school has comfortable facilities for seminars and meals and even lodging, though it was clear that at this stage of physical insecurity, people would prefer to go home at night and come back each day. We were also worried be-

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cause the evening before the encounter, after a period of relative calm, a suicide bomber killed four Israelis near Tel Aviv, and we did not know what restrictions (and negative emotions) this would bring to our encounter. But despite all the worries, the participants arrived, and at ten in the morning all of us sat down around a long table. On one side sat two Palestinian families (one represented by three men and the other by three women), three generations in each family. On the other side were two Israeli families, one represented by three men and the other by a grandfather and his daughter and granddaughter. At the far side sat Nathan and Said, the interviewers of both sample populations, opposite Sami and I. Shimon and Nader, the translators, also sat on the outside, opposite each other. Two guests, Oyvind Wistrom, a professor of education from Norway, and Dr. Julia Chaitin, sat away from the table. The film crew, with all its equipment, surrounded us. After a short introduction in which we welcomed everyone and explained our intentions in terms of storytelling and listening (as well as providing the schedule for the day), we asked everyone to introduce themselves. The two Israeli families were from Kibbutz Revadim, in an area adjoining the Lachish region. The Etzion Bloc (not far from Deheisheh) where the original Kibbutz Revadim was founded, was not included in the Israeli part of the UN partition plan of 1947, and when the Jordanian army captured it in 1948, its Jewish settlements were destroyed. After Israel recaptured the area in the 1967 war, some Jewish settlements were rebuilt on their old sites. However, the left-wing Kibbutz Revadim decided not to rebuild beyond the 1967 border, which its members believed should become the future border between Israel and Palestine. Amir, a man in his fifties, was born in Revadim and served many years in the army, including in the occupied territories. He held managerial roles in the kibbutz. His father Zeev, 77, born in Tel Aviv, was a founder of the kibbutz and among those captured and held in Jordanian captivity for nine months. His grandson Adi, 17, a high school student, had participated in a Jewish-Arab trip to Germany. Uri, 76, grew up with Zeev but was not taken captive in 1948. He was active in Israeli-Palestinian activities for many years. His younger daughter, Tal, 32, a teacher in Jerusalem, studied education at David Yellin Col-

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lege. Adva, 24, Uri’s oldest granddaughter, had lived in England for a few years, came back to do her military service, lived at the kibbutz for a year, and was soon to travel abroad. Nathan, 47, the secretary of Revadim, was the interviewer of the Israeli group. A participant in the TRT group from the beginning, he described what that had meant for him and what it meant for him now to be present at Talitha Kumi. Of the Palestinian group: Abu Nimer, 77, born in Tel A-Safi not far from the present Kibbutz Revadim, spoke of his four daughters, three sons, and “scores of grandchildren.” A resident of Deheisheh refugee camp, he had very good relations with the Jews prior to the 1947 UN partition plan and the 1948 war. He listed a few names of the places and people he used to meet then. He expressed his hopes for a peace that would enable his family to return to their village in Israel, as even “the sun in Deheisheh camp is not the sun of my village.” His son Aref, 49, married and the father of four children, lived in Al-Aza refugee camp. This was his first encounter with Israelis. Jailed for several years during the first Inifada, he continues to seek a solution that preserves the honor of the Palestinian refugees. Nimer, Aref’s son, 11, was the youngest among us. It was amazing to see how attentively he sat for the whole two days. Um Yasser, 76, was born in Beit Jubrin and lives in Al-Aza refugee camp. She has four sons and four daughters. In 1948, she became a refugee in a single day that changed her life completely. She would have no problem living with the Jews in peace, she said, if she could live on her land in the place where she was born. Fatma, 47, her daughter and the mother of five children, lives in Al-Aza camp, and works at the university in Abu Dis, studying the refugee problem. Her daughter Mona, 22, studied at Bethlehem University and teaches at the school in the camp. Said, the Palestinian interviewer, is Um Yasser’s son. Married with three daughters, he has a master’s degree in education and is a principal at the local high school. This was his first extended encounter with Israeli Jews. We take our first coffee break. It is interesting to watch the spontaneous interactions. The three elderly men stand on one side of the room, enthusiastically exchanging names and memories and looking at documents that Abu Nimer brought with him. It turns out that Abu Nimer’s family is related to Al-Azi family members, whom Zeev and

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Uri knew (they in fact played a role in their stories, as we were to hear later). They had never had an opportunity after 1948 to discuss these events and names. The younger women from both groups stand at the opposite corner and talk in English: They observe that Adva and Mona look very much alike and find out that each has a twin: Mona, a sister, and Adva, a brother. There is an intensive exchange elsewhere in the room as well, and the initial feeling is one of magnetic pull… In the following two days we hear all these people’s stories, one after the other. We start with the older generation. The Palestinian stories of the refugees are filled with the pain and suffering of many years. Abu Nimer tells about the good old days of the British Mandate when he learned, alongside Jews, to become a policeman. He admired Ismail, a family member who did not leave during the war, making him a hero and a source of envy to everyone else who could not or did not stay behind. Um Yasser’s deep blue eyes fill with tears; she cries as she tells of her traumatic departure as a child from the family’s land and home. They believed then that they would be gone only for a few days, but the few days had turned to fifty-five years. Their life before 1948 had been relatively peaceful. Um Yasser’s face radiates dignity and warmth; she must have been very beautiful in earlier years. Both she and Abu Nimer pull out documents they brought with them, showing their legal ownership of the land and houses; a family tree. Abu Nimer even shows a map of his village and all the families who lived there, and another map of all the villages in the area. As refugees his family lived at first in caves and tents and huts, exposed to the summer heat and the cold and wet of the winter. Soon after they had finally built a stable home in the refugee camp, the Israeli occupation of 1967 drove them out again. They returned after another period of wandering. Their current home is tiny and dark, on the street without pavement or garden. The roof is the only open space they have, and even this was partially taken by Israeli soldiers during the second Intifada.10 They feel humiliated and lament that “refugee” is a derogatory label within the Palestinian society. Their visits to the sites of their original homes are painful: It is hard to be only half an hour away and know that the place is vacant, and yet they cannot settle back there. On one visit, when a child wanted to pick some fruit from what had been their vineyard,

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the father remonstrated, “Don’t do that, it does not belong to us anymore.” However, they succeeded in educating their children, and they maintain their dignity as a family, even under the most difficult conditions. In the last Intifada Israeli tanks assaulted their houses, but they decided they would not run away again, even if that meant dying in their homes. In this sense they still fight the war of 1948. Both Abu Nimer and Um Yasser yearn for peace, but they say peace for them will come only when they return to their land. The stories of the elderly Israelis are different. They tell about building the kibbutz, about the war in which they were forced to surrender and into captivity, about seeing their homes being burnt down. Zeev recalls a member of Um Yasser’s family helping them during their early days in captivity by compiling lists of the captives for those who awaited their return. He is thankful for that help. But his experiences have led him to an inference different from that of the Palestinians: One can build one’s home in a new location. Zeev tries to deliver a message to the Palestinians: Give up that dream about the past and settle down in the future Palestinian state. As a member of the Israeli political Left, he enthusiastically supports such a state. His words meet an angry Palestinian reaction and soon the discussion becomes politically loaded. The confrontation between the stories is harsh. All cards are on the table. Sami and I try to navigate between the stormy responses: Let’s focus on the stories and listen to them carefully before we come up with solutions, we say. This meeting is aimed at listening to each other’s stories, not at solving the problem of the refugees and the Jewish statehood. Uri shows sympathy for the Palestinian pain and dream. In a uni-national session at the end of the first day, he says, “We have to listen, to know the facts, to understand the context, to feel and trust them, but we do not have to agree with all that they say.” We part for the night after a loaded day. Tomorrow, listening to the stories of the second generation may be even more difficult. We meet the next morning at 9:00 A.M., and again there are spontaneous personal encounters before we sit down and a sense of mutual curiosity. Mona asks Adi in English what he will do after school. Adi says he will go to the army. “Do you have to?” she asks. “I want to,” he replies, “but I am not willing to shoot at anybody.” She smiles with satisfaction, though she would prefer to convince him not to go

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at all. So simple, so complicated. Um Yasser is not present; her husband is ill and he will allow no one else to feed and wash him. Amir, Aref and Said represent the male sector of the second generation, they are drawn and committed to the cause of the respective peoples. One can feel the burden of their parents’ generation on their shoulders, just as we found among Holocaust survivors’ families (BarOn, 1995b). Their personal stories form more of a collective narrative. Aref even speaks using the first person plural, “we” instead of “I,” during most of his personal storytelling. They have also been formally conscripted to the cause: Amir served for many years in the Israeli army; Aref, as a 17-year-old stone-thrower in the first Intifada, was jailed for several years. Amir recalls that every February until the 1967 war, the veterans of the kibbutz would take the children to look from afar at the site where the original kibbutz had been established in February 1947. While the land was under Jordan’s rule between the wars, this was a ritual to maintain the personal connection to the old place, just as the Palestinian refugees described their ties to their original homes. At some point during the second generation’s stories, the discussion became semantic: Is there a difference between the Hebrew words hityashvut (generally used to refer to settlement before 1948) and hitnachalut (settlement after 1971)? Uri and Zeev try to explain the legitimacy of the first within the Israeli-Jewish society and the lack of consensus about the second. Said becomes so involved in the conversation that he forgets his role as a more restrained interviewer. “You took the land back in the late 1900s as if no one lived on it. You have done to us what the Nazis did to you.” The confrontation becomes more severe, more open and harsh. During lunch I confront him: If you want us to listen to your stories and respect them, you have to learn to respect our feelings as well. In our one-to-one encounter, his tone softens: He knows that Israel will decide how many refugees can resettle in Israel; he hopes his family will be part of that group. I ask him if he prefers to live as a minority in Israel rather than as part of the majority in a Palestinian state. He smiles back and I feel that the answer is bigger than he can express in words. The women soften the harsh discussion a bit. Though Fatma is also committed to her national cause, she tells vivid stories of moments in the long trail of humiliation and suffering that everyone can

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relate to. Her strength and positive attitude are similar to her mother’s. Tal, who describes herself as between the second and the third generation, since she is younger than Aref, Amir, and Said, represents the Israeli-Jewish tendency to ambivalence. It is part of her attempt to find herself and her own voice in the chorus of the strong and clear male voices around her. She left Revadim ten years before, after her army service, and found her destiny in education, where she can teach about human values, the complexity of the issues, and the diversity between people. We recognize a clear gender difference in the way people tell their stories: More burdened by the unresolved legacy of their parents, the men represent the more militarized recruitment to the cause, while the women, tasked with raising children under these difficult conditions, show more competence at interpersonal communications, transmitting their stories across the national barrier. When we come to the third generation’s stories, the differences grow even deeper: Nimer, the youngest, tells in his own childish way of the life in a refugee camp during the Intifada. One never knows if there is going to be a curfew, when the tanks will come into the camps, when soldiers will hit young children, when one can go out the front door or must sneak out through the back. Mona is very proud of her family and radiates the same strength her mother and grandmother showed, even when she admits, “I feel weak here as I talk to the people who took our land.” From her perspective, nothing has changed over the years, and the occupation she knows is a direct continuation of what happened to her grandmother in 1948. “Death is an integral part of our life,” she says. Tal asks her what her dreams are. Mona smiles, hesitates and responds, “A difficult question. Many dreams, collective and personal.” Tal says, “Your mother and grandmother dream of returning to Bein Jubrin or Tel A-Safi; do you share their dream? I also was brought up with this feeling of roots, as a result of the Holocaust; I was taught not to detach myself but to look for roots and grow from there. But it is less related to a specific location, more related to Israel as a whole.” The young women find a way to communicate which the men do not. The element of personal choice and deliberation of which Tal speaks can also be seen in Adi and Adva’s stories. On the one hand, they express a Jewish need for a homeland and therefore do not accept the refugees’ demand for the right to return

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to their land in Israel. On the other hand these young people, deeply estranged by their government’s current political position toward the Palestinians, express a need to discover their own identity and niche in their state and society. They plan to search by traveling abroad as well as exploring in Israel itself; they show less commitment to Revadim as a location than do their fathers and grandfathers. Someone says: “The land is a binding force for those who were expelled from it, but less so for those who chose to live there.” At some point there is a need for uni-national reflections: Why is the refugee estranged and looked down upon in the Palestinian society? Do Jewish people tend to displace aggression they internalized elsewhere (during the Holocaust, for example) practicing it against the Palestinians? We take a short break; it is late and the translators are tired, and we will soon conclude the meeting with a short summary. But first we go back for another round. Abu Nimer waxes poetic and makes the art of translation even more difficult for the translators, who share with us some of their deliberations. He brings out the keys to the house he left in 1948 and everyone laughs, for the displaced Palestinian brandishing the keys to the ancestral home has become more of a cliché than a poignant or potent symbol. Uri and Zeev are excited and grateful for the opportunity to have met, even if little was resolved or agreed upon. Uri says, “At the beginning I did not want us to sit on opposite sides, but now I am thankful that I could look you into the eye while we were talking, even if the eye was tearful.” Aref laments that our media distorts the personal accounts, and he is happy that he had the opportunity to try to convince Israelis of his cause, but he sticks to his goal: Only a return to the land for his people will satisfy him. There is such a difference between his proclamations in the sessions and his interpersonal warmth to the Israelis during the breaks. Said quotes the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish (“from you we get tear gas, from us you get rain…take your share of our blood—and be gone”) and says, “You feel pity for the child, for us, for how we live and what happens to us over the years. But we also feel pity for you, because your state was established on our demise. If the great USSR vanished in one day it can also happen to you.” Hard words, with so much truth to them, I think to myself. Nathan says that he is willing to allow the Palestinians to have houses in Beit Jubrin—this would not be a problem for him

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as their neighbor—but no one, he cautions, can live off the land today. “Better to try to look at the stars,” he says, referring to Nimer’s hope to become an astronomer: Mona says her first experience in talking to Israeli Jews was a positive experience for her, “but I still believe that you know nothing about how we live and what it means for us.” (I wanted to reply that she also has no clue what it means to be under the pressure of being on the “wrong side” for two days). Adi expresses gratitude, as does Nimer. We all go for dinner and then say good-bye. Sami and I feel relieved. We encourage the filming team to go to Revadim and the camp and film the people at their home locations. In retrospect, what did we gain from such an encounter? The sides could not agree on a solution, so perhaps we only created an illusion of understanding. The answer, I feel, is not simple. On the one hand, the encounter illuminated the depth of the dispute between the parties. It shed light on the kernel of our conflict, for it brought together the refugee families—the most difficult element in the Palestinian society to satisfy, in terms of resolving the Israeli–Arab conflict—and relatively open-minded and caring Israeli Jews, those willing to listen and to contain the Palestinian pain, frustration, and anger. Most of Israeli society is not able to do this yet. The asymmetry was necessary as a starting point for testing out the possibility of dialogue. On the other hand, I became even more convinced that interpersonal justice in any peace agreement (as opposed to formal justice), demands that Israeli Jews listen to the stories of the refugees and their family members. They feel the need to tell, and our share of responsibility for their plight creates the moral imperative to sit and listen and contain the pain of many decades that has gone unacknowledged by anyone. The common tie to a piece of land was a good reason to bring the two sides to the joint encounter, and the presence of the three generations was crucial to the process, introducing restraint and dignity. For a whole family can feel it when you express gratitude, and you may think twice before expressing anger openly, knowing that it might hurt not only an individual but also his relatives. I also liked the intimate framework: More than two families from each side would have meant too many stories to contain. The sense of intimacy and control over what was being said would have been diminished. The combination of men and women was ideal, introducing diverse personal and interpersonal interests that crossed national dividing lines.

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I was very impressed by the pride, openness, and stubbornness of the refugees and their descendents. I even envied them at times. Weak politically, they are sure of their cause, and they have nothing to lose (the worst kind of opponent, in my point of view). I also was impressed by the way the Jewish Israeli participants withstood this moral pressure, neither giving up on their own needs and their claims to collective independent existence in the country, nor becoming aggressive and retreating into a shell, claiming there was “no one to talk to.” Their warm and active presence created the conditions for a dialogue, albeit a difficult one, rather than a monologue. The story of Revadim’s dislocation because of the war created a moral challenge that the refugees were not prepared for. The Israelis showed by personal example how one can rebuild a community in a new location. But their ability to do so could also reflect the cultural gap surrounding attachment to the land; the less deep commitment to specific location among Jewish immigrants, used to wandering from one place to the other. For some Jewish participants, the request that the Palestinians come up with realistic solutions was the only defense, and a legitimate one. Said’s clear statement and the wishes underlying it gave weight to Jewish fears of having to pack up and relocate. We are still far from a comprehensive agreement between the sides—perhaps even farther than I thought before this encounter. However, only many such encounters, in parallel to political arrangements and agreements, will get us there. My nephew has a metaphor for it: the encounters are like “small ants,” but their progress alongside the “elephant” is crucial.

NOTES 1 Prof. Shifra Sagy and Prof. Adwan later developed a questionnaire that combined questions from the original European study and new questions specific to the Israeli-Palestinian context (Adwan & Sagy, in press). 2 Dr. Shasha-Beiton (2002) found that most Israeli Jews seek negative peace (an end to the violence), while the Palestinians look for just peace (acknowledgment of their rights, especially their right of return to the land). Neither side places great value on positive peace (offering gains to both sides). 3 As discussed in the final chapter, Arab society uses the term “normalization” not as I used it in my studies on the Holocaust (Bar-On, 1995b), but

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Tell Your Life Story to mean that contacts with Israelis should not develop as long as Israeli occupation of the territories persists. A Japanese professor initiated the Kids’ Guernica project upon the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima. He asked children from all over the world to paint a painting for future peace the size of Picasso’s original Guernica. After Sami and I received the Alexander Langer Peace Prize in October 2001, our children were invited to Bolzano, Italy, to participate in this project. Their joint Palestinian–Israeli painting was displayed at an exhibition on a nearby mountain sky-lift in November 2001. Sari Nusseibeh, a moderate Palestinian leader and president of Al-Quds University, opened the hotel to create a place for joint Israeli-Palestinian encounters during the second Intifada. We later used this place for our teachers’ encounters (see below). The idiom “disarmament of history” was suggested by Dr. Wolf Schmidt of the Koerber Foundation during the Derry TRT workshop in 2002. This part of the chapter was written together with Sami Adwan (Adwan & Bar-On, in press). I am grateful to Prof. Adwan and Notre Dame Press for allowing publication here. At a UNESCO-sponsored conference in Geneva on Curriculum Change and Social Cohesion in Conflict-Affected Societies (April 3–4, 2003), seven such societies were discussed. The citations are taken from the report of that conference (Tawil, Harley & Porteous, 2003). Writing this, we learned of a group of Israeli Palestinians, headed by Emil Shufani, a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth, who traveled to Poland and visited Auschwitz to learn about Jewish suffering there and its impact on contemporary Jewish–Israeli society (Hava Shechter & Nazir Magali— personal communication). I-M = Israeli male teacher; I-F = Israeli female teacher; P-M = Palestinian male teacher; and P-F = Palestinian female teacher. This notation appears only the first time each person spoke. Sami and Dan are the authors. Later Fatma told a story of combing the hair of one of her daughters on the roof one day. The daughter was crying because of the knots in her hair and one of the soldiers saw it and told Fatma, “Leave her alone, she looks nice like this, too.”

Appendix A: A Sample of the Two Narratives of the Balfour Declaration (in the original there are empty lines between the two narratives for the students to write in their own reactions)

THE ISRAELI NARRATIVE Introduction The birth of the Zionist movement Zionism, the Jewish national movement, was born in the 19th century when the ideology embodied in the Enlightenment spread within the European Jewish community. These new ideas planted the first seeds of Jewish nationalism. The subsequent birth of Zionism was the result of several factors: 1) The rise of modern anti-Semitism—a deeply-rooted and complicated mixture of traditional religious hatred augmented by “scientific” racism which categorized Jews as a depraved and pernicious race. 2) The disappointment of western European Jews with the Emancipation, which pledged that the position of Jews in society would equal that of the Christians. The Jews were discouraged when it became clear that in many instances there was equality in name only. Discrimination continued. 3) New European nationalist movements such as those appearing in Italy and Germany inspired similar aspirations among the Jews.

4) An important element was the longing for Zion, an integral aspect of Jewish religious and national identity throughout history. This longing stemmed from the biblical promise that the land of Israel was given to the people of Israel by the God of Israel, and from memories of those historical eras when the people of Israel lived independently in their land. This concept inspired the national anthem, written at that time: Hatikvah: The Hope As long as in our heart of hearts the Jewish spirit remains strong, And we faithfully look toward the east, Our eyes will turn to Zion. We have not yet lost our hope, The hope of two thousand years, To be a free people in our land – The land of Zion and Jerusalem. The Zionist movement was born in the major centers of Jewish population in Europe, and its purpose was to return the Jewish people to its land and put an end to its abnormal situation among the nations of the world. At first there was a spontaneous emergence of local associations (‘Lovers of Zion’) out of which an

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organized political movement was established, thanks to the activities of the “Father of Zionism,” Theodore Herzl [whose Hebrew name is Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl]. In 1882, there was a small wave of immigration [aliyah/aliyot] to “the land” [i.e. the land of Israel], the first of several. The purpose of these aliyot was not just to fulfill the religious obligations connected to the land, as had been the case in the past, but rather to to create a ‘new’ kind of Jew, a productive laborer who would work on his own land and help establish a Jewish political entity in the land of Israel. There were two basic approaches to Zionism: 1) Practical Zionism focused on increasing immigration, purchasing land, and settling Jews on the land. By 1914, in the first two waves of immigration, nearly a hundred thousand people immigrated (although most of them later left the country). Dozens of agricultural settlements were established and there was a significant increase in the urban Jewish population. 2) Political Zionism focused on diplomatic efforts to get support for Zionism from the great empires in order to obtain a legal and official charter for wide-scale settlement in the land. Chaim Weizmann, who became Zionism’s leader after Herzl’s death, integrated both aspects of the movement. [The original booklet shows here a picture of Moshav Nahalal, a semicooperative agricultural settlement

established in 1921 in the Jezreel Valley.] The Balfour Declaration The first support for Zionism expressed by any country appeared in a letter sent by Lord Balfour, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in Great Britain. It came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. The letter was dated November 2, 1917, shortly before the end of World War I. It expressed the support of the British Government for establishing a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel: Foreign Office November 2nd, 1917 Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet. “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Yours sincerely, Arthur James Balfour

PRIME: Peace-Building Efforts Under Fire THE PALESTINIAN NARRATIVE Historical background In April 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte put forth a plan for a Jewish state in Palestine. During the siege of Acre, he sought to enlist Jewish support, in return for which he promised to build the Temple. The project failed after the defeat of Napoleon in the battles of Acre and Abu Qir. It represents the first post-Renaissance expression of cooperation between a colonialist power and the Jewish people.

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tive interests shared by European colonialists in Africa and Asia, and the Zionist colonialist movement for control of Palestine. British imperialism found in Zionism a perfect tool for attaining its own interests in the Arab East, which was strategically and economically important for the Empire. Likewise, Zionism used British colonialist aspirations to gain international backing and economic resources for its project of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine.

However, it was the events of 1831– 40 that paved the way for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary in 1840–41, proposed establishing a British protectorate in the Ottoman Empire to be settled by Jews as a buffer area—an obstacle to Mohammed Ali of Egypt and to political unity in the Arab regions.

This alliance of British imperialism and Zionism resulted in the birth of what is known in history books as the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917). It is a conspicuous example of the British policy of seizing another nation’s land and resources and effacing its identity. It is a policy based on aggression, expansion and repression of a native people’s aspirations for national liberation.

Britain launched a new policy supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine after Eastern European Jews, particularly those in Czarist Russia, whose living conditions were poor in any case, suffered cruel persecution. Consequently, with the rise of nationalism, Zionism appeared as a drastic international solution to the Jewish problem, transforming the Jewish religion into a nationalist attachment to a special Jewish homeland and a special Jewish state. Other factors influencing the birth and development of the Zionist movement were the increasingly competi-

For the Palestinians, 1917 was the first of many years—1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, 1948, 1967, 1987, 2002—marked by tragedy, war, disaster, killing, destruction, homelessness and catastrophe. Dividing the Arab East Imperialist Britain called for forming a Higher Committee of seven European countries. The report submitted in 1907 to British Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman emphasized that the Arab countries and the Muslim-Arab people living in the Ottoman Empire

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presented a very real threat to European countries, and it recommended the following actions: 1) To promote disintegration, division, and separation in the region. 2) To establish artificial political entities that would be under the authority of the imperialist countries. 3) To fight any kind of unity— whether intellectual, religious, or historical—and to take practical measures to divide the region’s inhabitants. 4) To establish a “buffer state” in Palestine to achieve this, populated by a strong, foreign presence that would be hostile to its neighbors and friendly to European countries and their interests. Doubtless the recommendations of Campbell-Bannerman’s Higher Committee paved the Jews’ way to Palestine. It gave British approval to the Zionist movement’s policy of separating Palestine from the Arab lands in order to establish an imperialist core that would ensure foreign influence in the region. Jewish imperialist projects in Palestine followed in quick succession. World War I, 1914–1918, was a critically important period for Zionist and British imperialist policies in Palestine. Included in an exchange of letters between Sharif Hussein of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon was the Damascus Protocol (July 14, 1915). Sharif Hussein indicated to McMahon the boundaries of the Arab countries in Asia to which Brit-

ain would grant independence—the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq/Mesopotamia, Syria, and southern parts of present-day Turkey. He excluded Aden because it was a British military base. McMahon’s response in a letter dated October 24, 1915, designated areas to be excluded from the independent Arab states—the Syrian coastal areas west of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and the Aleppo provinces and the two regions of Alexandretta and Marsin. The exclusions did not include Palestine. The second letter is known as the HusseinMcMahon Agreement. In May 1916, Britain and France signed a secret document—the SykesPicot Agreement—to divide the Arab East at a time when Britain was exchanging letters with Sharif Hussein about recognizing the independence of the region. In the agreement Britain and France pledged to divide the Ottoman Empire as follows: [In the original a map appears here] 1) The Lebanese and Syrian coasts, given to France. 2) Southern and middle Iraq, given to Britain. 3) An international administration in Palestine excluding the two ports of Haifa and Acre. 4) A French zone of influence, including eastern Syria and the Mosul province. 5) Transjordan and the northern part of Baghdad province, as a British zone of influence.

CHAPTER 4

Story-telling in the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian context 1

The previous chapter discussed some of my work with Palestinian colleagues from the Palestinian National Authority. The following two chapters focus on my interventions and research with Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, living as a (disadvantaged) minority in a state that is predominantly Jewish. As mentioned earlier, these are two very distinct groups of Palestinians, though some Israeli Jews, out of ignorance or willfully, tend to lump them together (as “enemies”). I am among those who see the Israeli Palestinians as an asset, a potential bridge between us and the Arab world. They have lived with Israeli Jews enough years to get to know us and become more like us, but they also are part of the Arab culture, making their role in future, more peaceful times extremely important. I noted in the previous chapter that Israeli Palestinians answering the Youth and History questionnaires placed a high value on “peace at any cost,” in contrast both to Israeli Jews and the PNA Palestinians. Currently, however, many Israeli Jews and Palestinians exclude them, seeing them as “collaborators with the enemy.” It is always fascinating to find out how fragmented my own thinking is, though I’m purportedly an expert in the field of dialogue, reflection, and interdependence of thought. A few years ago, in a meeting at Ben-Gurion University with a group of teachers from Germany, one of the visitors said, “I am sure that you now use the storytelling method [that originated in the TRT group] as a way to create dialogue with your Israeli-Jewish and -Palestinian students. Can you tell us something about it?” I admitted that I had not yet implemented the storytelling method in this context, and I came out of the meeting wondering why. Why had I not come to this idea myself? I worked so

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many years with it in the German–Jewish setting and never thought of trying it with Palestinians and Israeli Jews. When I tried to visualize something like the TRT group in the Palestinian–Israeli context, I knew that changes would be necessary. Interviewing descendants of survivors and perpetrators and bringing them into dialogue did not fit either our context or my role in it. I had participated in different kinds of groups in my professional career, but I wondered which one of them would fit into the current conflict’s arena. Some of these groups, conducted in the traditions of human relations or contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998) aimed to create personal relationships between the participants. The assumption was that getting to know each other (and parts of oneself related to the other) would contribute to changes in stereotypic perceptions, attitudes, and relations between the members of the group. The problem with this approach for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is that it tends to disregard the historical background and the political reality of asymmetric power relations between the parties (Maoz, 2000a). Such a group is likely to have little long-term impact, as the external power relations and the hostile environment erase the positive effect created by the small group process itself. When I initially became interested in Israeli-Jewish and -Palestinian dialogue groups in 1995, I proposed starting a students’ workshop under the auspices of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University. I invited two Israeli facilitators, one Jewish and one Palestinian (Michal Zak and Rabah Halaby) from the School of Peace at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam to facilitate the group. They had already a great deal of experience and had facilitated similar groups at another Israeli university. Together with one of my colleagues, I watched the group process behind a one-way mirror. I followed these encounters (and workshops) for three consecutive years. At the beginning of the second year, I invited one of my doctoral students, Shoshana Steinberg, to join us, record and transcribe the group’s sessions, and conduct her dissertation on the changing discourse categories of these workshops (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). These three years of observation were an important learning process for me. I had to find out how I felt caught in the middle of these two groups, in comparison to my earlier experiences with German–Jewish student dialogue groups2 and the TRT group. One of the

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differences was the acuteness and immediacy of the issues, and my strong conflicting feelings about them. At times I found it very difficult to stay quietly behind the one-way mirror and not to take part in the discussions. I had to learn to cope with the asymmetric power distribution between “us” and “them,” being myself part of the dominant majority. For example, the workshops were held in Hebrew, the language of the Jewish majority, primarily because many of the Jewish participants did not understand or speak Arabic. Moreover, the Jewish participants wanted to dominate the group process as they were used to doing outside the group, by asking the questions, determining the agenda, qualifying the norms of what is right or wrong, emphasizing their moral and cultural superiority, and negating the legitimacy of Palestinian collective identity (Maoz, 2004). It was not pleasant for me to address similar impulses in myself and to learn to struggle with them. Thanks to the facilitators who undertook the task of empowering the Arab minority group, the Jewish participants had to face issues that they had never confronted before. For example, the glorious victory of the Jewish “few against the many” in the 1948 war was a catastrophe from the Palestinian perspective. What Israelis mean by peace—maintaining asymmetric power relations but stopping the violence against us—is in sharp contrast to the Palestinians’ emphasis on peace with justice and change in the status quo. At the same time Palestinians find it hard to comprehend Jewish-Israeli fears in light of the Israelis’ military and economic superiority. Here—unlike in the German–Jewish setting—part of the dispute was defining who was the perpetrator and who the victim. For the first few months, the groups would actually fight over the question of who was more the victim of the other. I could empathize with the Jewish participants when the Palestinian students would question their pain (regarding the Holocaust, for example). Yet I could also empathize with the Palestinian pain of not being respected, of being looked through and ignored, even more than hated. I had to acknowledge the fact that being politically left-wing (“in favor of a Palestinian state”) does not yet mean that one has reached the point of real openness to interacting with Palestinians on an equal basis. I learned that even when a Palestinian state is established, the problems on the agenda of Israeli Palestinians will not be resolved, as this group suf-

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fers intolerance from both the Palestinian and the Israeli-Jewish sides. I found the Neve Shalom approach, with its focus on collective identities and the asymmetric power relations between the parties (Maoz, 2000b), to be very powerful. I could see how this strategy empowered the Palestinian minority group and helped the Jewish dominant group develop insight into their identity ambivalence and power orientation (Sonnenschein et al., 1998; Suleiman, 1997). The price of this learning, however, was the lack of certain opportunities to develop what Steinberg defined as “dialogical moments” between members of both parties: an emotional opening of the “double wall” that enabled more than cognitive understanding. This was for me so integral a part of social and personal learning that I could not see myself facilitating a group without relating to such opportunities and trying to promote them when they arose (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). Yet I would not have been able to try to facilitate such a group process myself without the experience I gained as an observer during the Neve Shalom groups at our university. Using a third model developed recently by Tamar Zehavi-Verete (2000), family stories are produced by members of the two groups and shared in group encounters, using family albums and objects. In her experience, the family stories represent the emotional personal and collective memories of the conflict, as reconstructed by the Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian participants. This is actually the model closest to the original TRT process developed in the JewishGerman context. Unlike in the TRT group, at the university I had to think about facilitation, and it was clear that I would have to co-facilitate with a Palestinian partner. In 1999, after our TRT Bethlehem encounter, I asked Fatma Kassem,3 a participant in the TRT meetings since 1998, if she would be willing to plan and conduct a jointly facilitated workshop at Ben-Gurion University. She had a great deal of experience with workshops of Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the educational system. We called our planned course, “Storytelling in the service of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Israel.” We had to take into account, however, that in “translating” the model to Israeli-Jewish and -Palestinian students, we could not take for granted the reflectiveness, nor the ability to achieve mutual trust and work through issues that characterized the TRT group. Moreover, we also represented status

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differences (Bar-On as a male and a professor and Kassem as a female and a doctoral student). How would that affect the two groups, given the problem of asymmetry between Jews and Palestinians? We did not know what actually awaited us and how difficult the implementation of our design would become, both for us and for the students. As the group process was about to start in the fall of 2000, severe violence, known today as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, broke out between Jews and Palestinians within Israel and in the PNA. The renewed violence was extremely frustrating, especially for people who had been involved in peace-building activities since the Oslo Accords of 1993 and believed that a peaceful solution between Israel and a Palestinian state was imminent—and would also have a positive effect on the relationships between Jews and Palestinians within Israel. Demonstrations by Palestinians inside Israel, in protest of Israeli handling of the uprising lasted a couple of weeks. The Israeli police, equipped with live ammunition, killed thirteen Israeli-Palestinian demonstrators. This was the most serious affair of its kind within Israel’s borders since the Kafar Kassem massacre of 1956 (Ron, 2002) and came under investigation by a special High Court committee appointed by the government. A few days before our teaching started at the end of October, two Israeli soldiers who lost their way and entered the Palestinian town of Ramallah in the PNA were brutally lynched in a mob scene captured on camera and broadcast around the world.

Jewish and Palestinian students encounter each other through family stories The public atmosphere was extremely tense and there was a reasonable fear that these fatal events would be followed by clashes between Jewish and Palestinian students on the campuses once the academic year began. We were afraid that students would not show up for the course, though thirteen Jewish and twelve Palestinian students were already registered. We started the group process with two uni-national meetings; the Palestinian group met with Fatma, speaking in Arabic (which was an exceptional occurrence at Israeli universities in those days), and the Jewish group met with me, separately. We designed this beginning to enable both sides to talk more freely about how the current tension affected them. We reluctantly gave up on

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recording these sessions, lest this form of documentation cause apprehension among the students, especially the Palestinians, who expressed fears of monitoring by the Israeli intelligence agencies. For the descriptions that follow, I have relied upon three parallel sources: my notes and Fatma’s, taken during the meetings; the students’ logs and final papers; and interviews with the students conducted by Tal Litvak-Hirsch at the beginning and the end of the workshops, as part of her dissertation research (Litvak-Hirsch, Bar-On & Chaitin, 2003). In setting the stage, we had to pay attention to every small detail. For example, since we had two adjacent rooms with a one-way mirror between them to use for our uni-national meetings, we placed the Palestinian group in the observer room, so that they would not fear being watched, though we of course closed curtains and turned off microphones to secure the privacy of both groups. I remember our relief when the Palestinian students finally showed up, one by one, a bit late. During the initial two uni-national sessions, we asked members of both groups to share some of their immediate reactions to the current political situation. In the Jewish group, one young woman lamented, “We touched the peace and now we are moving in a time-tunnel backward into the conflict...I feel sad that we are meeting separately today. I would like to meet with them and hear their stories as soon as possible.” Another woman student wondered, “Will they be willing to listen to my family story now, when all this is happening around us?” A Jewish man said, “If we are able to listen to each other, that will be a tiny step to diminish the abyss that separates us again.” A Jewish woman outraged at the lynching of the Israeli soldiers said it would be difficult for her to be open and show her anger in front of the Palestinian students. Another woman speculated that the killing of the thirteen Israeli Palestinians would make it much harder for the Palestinian group to participate fully in the encounter. In the Palestinian uni-national meeting, a few students expressed their objection to the uni-national division that we—the facilitators—had imposed. Other students supported it, and one of them expressed her concern: “Will I be able to feel free to talk openly in a classroom dominated by Jewish-Israeli cultural norms, at an Israeli university, in Hebrew and under the pressure of the current events?” Another man added, “We live in the same state, but mentally we live

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light-years apart.” One woman told about an incident just a few days earlier, when the police came into her family’s house, arrested her brother, and turned the house upside down. “It was a real act of terror,” she exclaimed. “It reminded my parents of the military regime of the fifties.”4 During the second uni-national meeting, one week later, members of both groups started to share family stories. We wanted to get their initial impressions of the stories before sending them to conduct interviews with relatives. In the Jewish group, two students told family stories focusing on their grandfathers, both of whom came to Palestine as Zionist pioneers and worked hard, drying the swamps, building the roads, and fighting the wars. Two others told of forebearers, one a Holocaust survivor and the other a refugee, who came to Palestine because they had no other place to go and could not return to their home countries. The storytelling created an initial bonding within the Jewish group. I wondered which students would feel comfortable telling the same stories later in the bi-national context, who would do so first, and whether these stories would be told in the same Zionist context or with different focal points. Fatma felt that the Arabic language helped facilitate the telling of family stories in the Palestinian group. One student spoke openly about the pull he felt between Israeli identity (wanting to join Israel’s navy when he was young) and the identity of a proud Palestinian whose relatives had lived for generations in the same village in the north of Israel. Another student told the story of his great-grandfather, leaving for Egypt while his great-grandmother, still a dominant figure in the family, took care of the children and the fields and olive trees they owned in the village. In the uni-national settings, a good atmosphere was created in both groups. Yet Jewish and Palestinian students alike requested that the third meeting be a bi-national one. Fatma and I, a bit anxious, deliberated between two possibilities for starting the bi-national process: A task-oriented approach would prepare the students for the interviews in their families, and a more process-oriented one would help them get acquainted with each other while dealing with the conflict between the societies. We chose to take the risk of starting with the latter approach and seeing how the group process evolved to decide when to move into the task-oriented mode. If the process en-

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abled it, we would suggest that a family story from each side be told during the first joint meeting, setting the stage for what we expected would come later. If telling the stories did not create a relaxed atmosphere, we would move into the task-oriented phase. We also planned to move back into the uni-national settings after two joint meetings, so that the students would have a chance to “recuperate.”

Attempting a relaxed storytelling atmosphere in a tense political context When we all sat together in the larger room for the first bi-national meeting, the atmosphere was tense. It reminded me of the setting prior to the first TRT workshop in 1992. After a short round of the participants identifying themselves briefly—usually by name, year of studies, and department or major—we asked them to each tell a story associated with their given or family name. I like this exercise, as it usually breaks through the more formal atmosphere of the initial round. People can choose to disclose more personal details, but they can also choose to tell some simple fact about their name: who chose it; after whom were they named; the associations with a particular place or event. In our group, this exercise dissolved some of the initial tension. A variety of anecdotes soon filled the room. Some names had political connotations; others reflected personal and family traditions that did not necessarily follow the dividing line between Jews and Palestinians. One student related that her mother wanted to name her Palestine, but her father refused and named her after one of the daughters of the Prophet Mohamed. A Jewish woman’s name was derived from the word “peace” in Hebrew, in reference to the peace process that her parents felt had started in 1973. Another Palestinian student was named after the late President Nasser of Egypt, the pan-Arab leader of the sixties. One Palestinian woman was given a boy’s name as she came after six sisters, while another did not have a name for two months for similar reasons. A Jewish male was named after his mother’s first love, who fell in the 1967 war, while a Jewish female student was given a French name, after a famous female lover during the time of the French Revolution. A Jewish and a Palestinian student both related that they were named after flowers that blossom around their

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birthdays. One student was named after his grandfather and another one after her aunt who was murdered during the Shoah. One got a biblical name while another carried a popular name of that era with no special meaning. The atmosphere in the room became more relaxed. The stories about the names were often humorous and at the same time showed sensitivity to what the names meant to the students themselves. At this point, Fatma and I suggested moving on to the first storytelling session. One Jewish female and one Palestinian male volunteered. Both had told their stories in the uni-national setting one week earlier. Naama (J-F)5 started her family story with her great-grandfather who came to Palestine from Russia in the 1910s and settled down in the sand dunes where Tel Aviv was later built. His first son, her grandfather, studied at the first Hebrew gymnasium in Tel Aviv, went on long hikes to learn the lay of the land (for example, to Petra in Jordan), and joined the Haganah (the pre-Israel Jewish defense force), playing an important role in it. He studied engineering in England, married, and had five sons and two daughters. Several family legends related to the Israeli–Arab conflict, stories of war, heroism, and survival. Naama’s father was a pilot in the air force and later became an air force physician and a cardiologist at the Beer Sheva Medical Center. The family lives in Omer, close to a Bedouin tribe and town with whom they have tried to maintain friendly relations in spite of the tension between the two communities, stemming from alleged confiscation of land from the Bedouin tribe by the Jewish municipality. Abed (P-M) also started with his great-grandfather, a very religious man who lived in a northern Arab village. When the greatgrandfather decided to go to Egypt to study religion, taking one daughter with him, his wife took her other four children and, leaving her extended family, moved to the other side of the main road to make a living by cultivating a piece of land they owned. This was at that time a very unusual step for a woman to take on her own. Abed’s grandfather grew up in an atmosphere of extreme poverty. The extended family survived all the violent periods of the thirties and the forties, usually hiding in a cave near their land when there were attacks on the village. The great-grandfather remarried and never returned from Egypt. Abed’s father grew up as a farmer and the family’s economic situation eventually improved. His great-grandmother

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(now past the age of 100) is still alive, paralyzed but with a clear mind. Her legend still dominates the family. These two stories sparked a range of feelings and reactions in the group. On the one hand, the two family legends concerned the same land and shared a theme of struggle and survival. On the other hand, the legends showed the deep gap between the peoples and the mutual exclusion, as if the Other did not exist or was there only in a negative sense, as a source of violence or catalyst for victorious heroism. Some students reacted with envy to the two stories: their own family memories did not go back so far. Said Uzi (J-M), “I cannot even remember my father who died when I was a boy.” Dafna (J-F) identified with Abed’s story as her grandmother was also an influential figure in the family. Zahra (P-F) reacted with contempt to Naama’s story ending in Jewish Beer Sheva: Zahra’s own grandfather’s original house still stands in the middle of old Beer Sheva. It was taken from the family in the 1948 war, while her family was expelled to Jordan, and they were never allowed to repossess it. The group reacted with a deep silence that ended this meeting. Maayan (J-F) said that she had a stomach ache and that Zahra touched upon her deepest fears. She was probably expressing the sensitivities of many students in the room. Zahra’s reaction turned the discussion at once away from the family storytelling to the painful political situation. The students, trying to digest the two initial stories on the more emotional level, were not ready for this shift. For Fatma and me, this illuminated how different from the TRT group context storytelling in this group would be. Current political issues did not weigh upon the German and the Jewish groups. The atmosphere was more reminiscent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict group in Hamburg during the 1998 TRT encounter, where this pressure was palpable. Still, amidst the hostilities of that fall of 2000 and with these young students, we could expect only a few moments of grace to respond to stories on a deeper emotional level before someone’s storytelling or reaction would bring the group back to the harsh political atmosphere that dominated the Jewish-Palestinian relationships. Fatma and I chose to continue with the bi-national framework in the following session. We wanted to enable the students to express some of their reactions to the first joint meeting before moving back to the uni-national setting and to the task-oriented part of the process.

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Naama (J-F) started the second meeting saying that she wanted to add something to her story from the last meeting, and she read a poem taken from a book about the Holocaust. Munthar (P-M) reacted angrily: “I do not believe in co-existence. You manipulate the Holocaust all the time in order to avoid relating to our plight and your role in it.” We suggested resuming the storytelling. Two additional short stories followed. Sivan (J-F) and Nuha (P-F) found out that they both hailed from Ramleh, a mixed Jewish–Arab town not far from Tel Aviv. Nuha’s extended family, like most of the Arab population, was expelled from Ramleh in the 1948 war and only her mother remained behind as a child, due to illness, and her physician aunt who kept her safe in the local church. Sivan’s father was born in Ramleh and he told her stories of the Arab ghetto. Later both students spoke of it to Tal Litvak-Hirsch6: My father just said that it was ideal, the coexistence in the ghetto…The truth is that I tend to identify a bit with the Palestinian side…because I have this feeling that it once belonged to them, and when I think about it, I recall Poland and all of what happened after the Holocaust and those who tried to return to their homes which had been occupied by Polish people, and I believe that they also must have felt that “our house was taken away from us.” So I have very mixed feelings about this situation. Nuha’s family recollections from this ghetto were very different, as the relatives who remained behind were forced to stay there and could not move out of it without special permission. [Sivan’s] story is like the stories I hear every day. I cannot say that it does not make me angry anew, every time I hear such a story, but it also makes me long for all the people who were expelled with whom I did not grow up. You know that there is a real story of a Jewish family in Ramleh who found out who used to own the house, and they decided to move out and donated it for joint Jewish–Arab activities in town. But there is only one such nice story among many other ugly ones…”7

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Dafna (J-F) told about her family immigrating to Israel from Argentina when she was a young girl. Her grandfather was a politically right-wing Zionist leader and dreamt about moving to Israel for many years. She herself was not very keen to leave Argentina, but adjusted quite well to Israeli–Jewish society and norms and had recently served in the Israeli army. This was the discussion that followed: NAWRA (P-F): I am angry at your beautiful Zionist stories of drying the swamps and building the land. When I tell my story, I will spoil some of that beauty. ESTI (J-F): My story is what it is. I cannot change its truth. NAWRA: But why is our pain never represented in your stories? The people who lived in the houses before you came never appear in your stories! ZAHRA (P-F) (adding sarcastically to Nawra’s words): Yes, we know— this is the land that God gave you. Actually, the British gave it to you. UZI (J-M): This will be a painful process, but I prefer that we return to telling our family stories and not continue to fight our political agendas. MUNTHAR (P-M): What you tell is legitimate…Haganah, the Zionist movement. But when I want to speak about the Hizbullah as freedom fighters, you will all jump on me and will not let me speak. MAAYAN (J-F): Everyone is focused on their egocentric pain. That is the way we have been brought up, egocentric monologues, no dialogue, not to listen to the other. NOA (J-F): Your (Palestinian) stories aim to leave me and my reality out. I do not want to be a captive of the past. Is talking about the past a goal or a means? We will also be here in two thousand years, in spite of the struggle. I can feel how complicated our situation is—justice versus justice. Listening to you, I feel how I lose a part of myself—the part of my hope in coexistence in the present or the near future. NAVA (J-F): I can see how this dialogue will be much more difficult than I expected. MORIAH (J-F): We, the Jews, are now talking among ourselves and have left the Palestinians out.

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AMAR (P-M): We are less involved in the discussion because we know you better than you know yourselves and us. Fatma and I, in our weekly summary meeting, agreed that this exchange in the bi-national session was a difficult but valuable one. If Naama, and perhaps other Jewish participants, imagined at the beginning of the meetings that they could use storytelling to dominate the stage and control the discourse, as they are used to doing in everyday life outside the group (Maoz et al., in press), they were taken aback by the Palestinian responses. At this point Munthar, Nawra, Zahra, and Abed represented the Palestinian students’ negative polarity of refusal to hear Jewish stories. Perhaps they were afraid of being trapped (or “manipulated”) by becoming empathic, thereby losing their collective momentum in the group. Still, Nuha and Amar, and to some extent Nawra, were trying to suggest what could help create a constructive dialogue, from their point of view: If the Jewish stories would encompass or at least relate to some of the Palestinian pain— or if they expressed a share of responsibility for the Palestinian plight of the past, or mentioned some newfound knowledge about the Palestinian side, or some acquaintance with it, this could create greater willingness on the Palestinian side to listen and react favorably. This early exchange among the students reveals the first attempt to set criteria for what would later be accepted as a “good enough” story in the group (Winnicott, 1988; Ross, 2000). Here, the students in a sense became fellow researchers of the phenomena we were creating. For most of the Palestinian participants, Naama’s and Dafna’s stories were not “good enough,” as the stories (and especially Naama’s attempt to read the poem) emphasized Zionist heroism without mentioning Arabs, as if “overlooking them” (as one of the Palestinians said in her class diary). Naama’s problem exemplified the problem I mentioned earlier: She perceived herself, until the group process, as a politically left-wing, Arab-friendly person. She and Amar were friends before the group started, and she could not adjust easily to the new norm that the Palestinian group presented, challenging her for what they perceived as a patronizing stand. The discrepancy between Naama’s self-perception and how the Palestinian participants understood her story in fact continued throughout the workshop. During the second semester she made

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an effort to change the power-equilibrium in the group by inviting four Palestinians (and none of her Jewish classmates) to join her for a short students’ exchange to Northern Ireland. But later she asked to be excused from writing the final paper with her Palestinian partner, as her grandfather, to whom she was deeply attached, had died, triggering a personal crisis. Thus she actually dropped out of the course. Perhaps for Naama the contradiction between the heroic Zionist tradition of her family (associated with her self-perception of being open-minded and liberal toward Arabs) and the Palestinian students’ stories and their challenging stance, was too sharp a contradiction to be able to contain and work through at that time.

Determining what is a “good enough” story The following meeting was held in a uni-national format. In the Jewish group the atmosphere was agitated in the wake of the last session. Several voices could be identified: A few students felt threatened by Munthar’s extreme positions (opposing coexistence and refusing to respond to the Jewish stories) and said that if the Palestinians let him take the lead, they, the Jewish participants, would not feel safe enough to tell their own family stories in the bi-national setting. Others tried to put themselves in the position of the Palestinian participants and said that they could understand why Munthar and other students did not believe in coexistence while the humiliation and the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza continued. Some Jewish students suggested openly examining Jewish collective myths about the 1948 war, as a group. Still others said that their stories would change when told in front of the Palestinian group, though they did not specify in what way. Yoni (J-M) wondered how he could be politically the “most leftist” outside the group and the “most right-wing” within the group context. He reflected on the internal Jewish heterogeneity and wondered aloud whether the Palestinians also allowed themselves such internal diversity in their uni-national meetings. Naama tried to understand what went wrong with her family’s story and Hannan (J-M) explained to her that the aspects she emphasized left the Arabs to perceive themselves as excluded or considered inferior. Sivan said she would like to continue her dialogue with Nuha about the ghetto in Ramleh and why their parents expe-

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rienced it so differently. A few students expressed anger toward me for not “protecting” them when they were attacked in the bi-national setting. I suggested that they needed to feel dominant in order to feel safe, and that I could see other ways to feel safe as well, such as creating better contacts with the other side on a more equal basis. Fatma was likewise attacked by students in the Palestinian uni-national group meeting. Some expressed anger at her perceived lack of support and at how the Jewish students were “insulated” and excluded them from their stories (Naama was cited as an example). Others expressed fear of speaking up and telling their stories in the bi-national setting. Walid and Abed (both P-M), however, felt that they had to tell their stories, even if they “paid a price” for it. There were other expressions of the need to put up a strong “front” against the domineering “front” of the Jewish group. Fatma and I, in our weekly summary meeting, reframed these reactions of both groups as positive feedback about the early bi-national sessions. Both groups took the storytelling seriously, but also understood that telling one’s family story “on-stage” is frightening, similar to performing in front of an audience, and not always a sympathetic one. In this setting, every expression used unwittingly in a familiar uni-national context suddenly took on new dimensions. Perspectives shift. How do Palestinians see Zionist heroic stories or stories of suffering from the Holocaust? Do Jewish students feel positively toward a great-grandmother working on her land while her husband left her and went to study religion, or do they look down upon her as a primitive “native”? In comparison to the TRT group, whose mostly middle-aged members went through a long process of working through their pasts, these young students were still struggling to construct their own identities. Furthermore, the ongoing ethno-national conflict in the storytelling was not only a reflective and dialogical process. Storytelling, during intractable conflicts, can also be used to support the moral superiority of each side in the conflict. However, we asked the students to share their family stories in order to reach out to each other. The students realized how important their family stories were for their own collective identity construction. This was expressed mainly in the uni-national settings and the interviews at the end of the workshop. Conversely, they became worried that storytelling in the bi-national

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setting could create conflict either with their own collective identities or that of the Other. We could sense the tension they felt in not yet having a safe haven for telling family stories “on-stage.” This tension could be interpreted as a conflict between the desire to present one’s family story in front of the Other (taking risks and expressing one’s identity, pride and emotional involvement) and caution (due to concern over how the story would be perceived or accepted by the other side and the fear of deconstruction and devaluation). We could also sense a need on the part of some of the Jewish students to deconstruct the “heroic” aspects of the Zionist grandfather and be able to incorporate into their family legend the father who in fact harmed the “Other.” We chose a relatively long process of back and forth between the uni-national and bi-national settings, as we felt that both the students and we as facilitators had to get used to the idea of how storytelling could be implemented in such a hostile and asymmetric environment and discover what could be done to enable a constructive learning process under these circumstances. As a result of our deliberations, Fatma and I suggested another uni-national session in which students would have an opportunity to tell some family stories within their own safer environment. Interestingly, the two groups used that setting differently: In the Jewish group, two participants chose to tell family stories related to the Shoah and to the Israeli wars that they preferred not to tell in the bi-national group after Naama’s experience in the first session. In the Palestinian group, Walid and Nuha tested the ground in their relatively safe environment with the intention of later telling their stories “on-stage.” In the following bi-national session, we could feel the positive accumulative effect of the latest uni-national sessions, together with the benefits of the confrontations in the earlier bi-national sessions. This time a Palestinian student took the initiative and started to tell his family story, the story he told in his uni-national group a week earlier. (Parts of the story he told appear in the discussion of the diverse narratives of Haifa in chapter 5.) Walid told of his father’s experiences of the 1948 war in Haifa as a 9-year-old child; how the family had to run away, leaving everything in their house; how they reached Acre but could not return to Haifa. He described how his father grew up in Acre and the difficulties he faced but also the support he received when he went to study at a Jewish technical school in Haifa. The father became a car mechanic in Acre and built his home there, always

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living among Jews and getting along well with them as neighbors and clients. The following discussion ensued: NAAMA (J-F): How did his story affect you? WALID: I never saw my father as excited as the time when he told me about the evacuation from Haifa, and how his father, when he tried to return to his home, was humiliated by the new inhabitants of that house. It changed my view about the state of Israel and how it was founded. NAAMA: So why do you want to talk with me about it at all? WALID: I want you to hear this story, to learn about it. SIVAN (J-F): I feel that I can identify with your feelings and with those of your father, because you spoke not out of anger, but with sadness. WALID: My father never shared with me this part of his family biography because he wanted me to grow up among Jews and to get along with them, to adjust well and to study. All his life he kept this story deep inside. ZAHRA (P-F): Our parents want to protect us from their painful pasts so that we will not relive the trauma they went through. My parents do the same, covering up what they went through in 1948 and after, trying to give me a sense of security. UZI (J-M): I feel guilty. You told it in such a way that I could see myself in your father’s position. I am moved. There was a silence for some time, perhaps a less tense one than before. Someone mentioned the fear that we all feel about how the past still affects us. I said that this meeting was an achievement for the group and for Walid personally. Fatma spoke about the common need to compare suffering and the challenge of giving up this comparison. I recognized that none of the Jewish participants said openly what I was thinking: that there were elements in Walid’s father’s story reminiscent of stories from the Shoah—the silencing, the wish to normalize life after 1948, the wish to shield the children from pain. After a few minutes, the discussion continued: UZI (J-M): …our pain is associated with the Shoah, and you say you know all about it. [Yet] if I were to tell my story here, you would interpret it as a Zionist manipulation.

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ZAHRA (P-F): We are not trying to win. I am willing to hear your story if you can tell it like Walid did in this meeting. ABED (P-M): What can we do? Your chances of telling me something new are less than the other way around. The problem is that we have heard so much about the Holocaust outside of the personal context that we are burnt out. Fatma and I concluded the discussion with a question for further thought: Why in conflict situations do minorities have more difficulties listening to and feeling empathy with the stories of the majority? Is it only the external power relations that cause this difficulty? In our summary we stated that Walid created a new criterion for a “good enough” story in this group: a story that members from both sides could emotionally identify with. The fact that the Jewish group enabled a Palestinian to lead this session created a different and more open atmosphere, in which even Zahra, Nawra, and Munthar sounded more relaxed and less “conscripted” to their political goals. The question now was whether a Jewish participant could also tell a “good enough” story. This is what happened in the following bi-national session: Sivan (J-F) opened the session by telling her family story. She comes from a mixed Jewish background. Her father’s parents came from Bulgaria, where her grandparents survived World War II in a work camp. The siblings of her paternal grandmother looked Aryan, and that helped them take care of the other family members in different unpleasant situations. They immigrated to Israel in 1948 and settled in Ramleh, where Sivan’s father was born. Her grandfather was killed in a road accident shortly after their arrival. Her father, describing his childhood in Ramleh, would speak of the good relations he had with the Arabs who lived in the ghetto. Her mother’s family came from Bengazi, Libya, from an affluent family of merchants. They maintained that they had very good relations with their Arab neighbors until the riots of the late 1930s, when a mob attempted to burn down their house. An Arab employee physically stopped their attempt. Her maternal grandfather, whom Sivan described as a “tough and difficult man,” decided after that to leave everything in Libya and immigrate to Israel, but he had a hard time adjusting to the Israeli culture. Once a wealthy merchant, he became a cab driv-

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er. He was bitter about the ruling Labor party of that period (“They promised to pay us back for what we left there”) and also angry with the Arabs in Libya and in Israel for their animosity toward Jews. As a religious man, he could not get used to the idea that his daughter, after her marriage, had joined a secular kibbutz. His wife, Sivan’s grandmother, had a more positive approach and she taught the children not to hate. The first reactions to Sivan’s story came from the Jewish side. Shelly and other Jewish participants saw a similarity to Walid’s story: the grandfather’s feeling of betrayal; the grandmother’s more positive role; the pain and overcoming it by learning not to hate. But Sivan asked specifically for reactions from the Palestinian group, even if they felt like criticizing her story. Hawda (P-F) said: “Don’t be afraid—your story does not create negative feelings among us.” Nuha (P-F) noted that the Jews could come and go in the Ramleh ghetto, but the Arabs were confined there, which might account for some of the difference between Sivan’s father’s description of the ghetto and her own parents’ experience. Abed (P-M) pointed out that Sivan’s ambivalence and the complexity helped him accept her story. He agreed that suffering cannot be measured on a scale, but he felt closer to Walid’s story and more able to identify with it, though he could see some of the similarities that Shelly pointed out. Fatma mentioned the crucial role of the grandmothers in most of the stories told up to that point. Then the discussion took a turn back to the political level. Nawra and Zahra (both P-F) could not agree with the other Palestinians. “Where is our pain in your stories?” they asked the Jewish students. Nava (J-F) reacted with anger: “You already said this before Sivan told her story.” Fatma interpreted the negative reactions to the Palestinian women’s difficulty in containing Jewish pain. Abed (P-M) did not agree: “I can feel Sivan’s pain and the difficulties her family had to cope with. But this happened there a long time ago, somewhere else, and our pain is related to what has happened and still happens here, to our people, at the hands of your people.” Now MUNTHAR (P-M) joined in: “Coexistence means that only you exist, not we.”

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SIVAN (angrily): So why did you come to listen to my story in the first place? MUNTHAR: I am willing to try, but I do not trust you when you talk about coexistence. SIVAN: Perhaps in this workshop we will not be able to reach coexistence, but we still can listen to each other’s stories. NAVA (J-F) (to Sivan): In spite of these last reactions, I feel your story came through because you adjusted it to this audience, even if not everyone could come along. It is not a one-sided story. Fatma was angry with the Palestinian group, as she felt what an effort Sivan made to reach out. My conclusion was a bit different: I felt that such effort would not yield immediate results, and the discussion following Sivan’s story was in fact good, as it brought out the differences also within the Palestinian group and involved many participants—such heterogeneity is more difficult to expose in front of the dominant Jewish group. It was to be expected that expressing empathy for Sivan’s story would be threatening for several Palestinian students, as it would require them to give up their role as angry victims of the Israeli Jews. Moreover, the group had not regressed to the initial political discussion, and Sivan’s story remained the focus of the group’s discussion. The negotiations around the terms (coexistence, here and there, then and today, you and us) and the definitions of a “good enough story” were not conclusive, and they continued as further stories were told. We decided to use the next joint session for the tasks we planned, covering how to conduct the interviews with relatives, how to present articles assigned to pairs of students to the larger group, and how to work on the final papers—tasks we had put off for some time while waiting for the group process to gain momentum.

Developing a group framework for reflection on the process A university setting provides opportunities for formal and semi-formal learning. There is, of course, a tension between experiential learning of the kind we encouraged in this workshop and formal learning of theoretical material, but this tension may be translated into a positive interchange between the experiences and the way it has been formulated in writing in other situations.

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As teachers, we took the lead, instructing the students to each interview two people, one from their parents’ generation and one from their grandparents’ (not necessarily their direct relatives, if they had difficulties approaching them). They were to conduct the interviews using the biographical method of Gabriele Rosenthal (1993), encouraging their interviewees to tell their life stories while interfering as little as possible and asking questions only after the main narration. They were asked to transcribe these interviews and bring them to the workshop. We provided detailed instructions on maintaining the accuracy of the transcriptions and the usage of necessary formal notations. After we facilitated a short demonstration in the seminar, the students interviewed each other in triads, rotating the roles of interviewee, interviewer, and observer. Later they reflected on some aspects of these different roles, deciding in which roles they felt more or less comfortable. Students were given two additional assignments, to be conducted in mixed Jewish-Palestinian pairs: 1. To read and summarize one article from the course syllabus and jointly present it in the class during the second semester. 2. To write a final paper about the experience of the workshop, with each pair member analyzing his or her own two interviews and the partner’s, and then drawing upon all four interviews, their personal logs, and the articles that were presented. In the last bi-national session before the semester break, Dr. Shoshana Steinberg gave a guest lecture about her dissertation research (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). Based upon her observations of workshops at Neve Shalom she had developed a typology of discourse categories. She found that many sessions were dominated by ethnocentric discourse: both groups talked predominantly to themselves, not acknowledging the Other at all. She also found some attacks: students acknowledged the existence of the Other, but in an aggressive way. A further category was opening a window in one of the “double walls” that existed between the parties (but not being able to get through to the Other on an emotional level, as the wall of the Other prevented it) (Bar-On, 1995b). In later stages of the workshops, Steinberg found some ability for intellectual exchange, in which the parties discussed and even agreed upon certain aspects of the conflict, mostly on the cognitive level. She further identified a category of containing the other

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and a few dialogical moments, in which members of one group could empathize with feelings expressed by the Other. However, these moments were rare and short-lived, and they usually ended with a return to one of the more ethnocentric categories. Steinberg’s and my interpretation of this return was that re-entry into a hostile environment was difficult for the students, and to negotiate it they had to let go of some of the empathy they gained in their dialogical moments (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). In the discussion that followed, students reflected on similar categories that developed in their own workshop. They identified “good enough stories” as a vehicle to develop more intellectual exchange or dialogical moments. They also identified students whose “task” it was to bring the group back to a more ethnocentric level of discourse, related to the political reality outside the workshop. The discussion that followed the introduction to Steinberg’s typology enabled members of both groups to reflect on the process they had been part of. It was different from the bi-national discussions in which students reacted to stories as if they had been “performed” on a stage. It was also different from the uni-national meetings, which enabled the two groups to relax from the intensity of the bi-national setting. The contemplation of the academic constructs could probably only take place after the group had enough experiences to reflect on them and was able to do so in a joint session, less threatened by what the Other might attribute to their reflections or how they might respond. Similar kinds of reflections transpired during another guest lecture in the second semester, by Prof. Marc Ross of Bryn Mawr College, who discussed his research and observations on rituals of ethnic conflicts in France and Northern Ireland (Ross, 2000). The students’ ability to reflect on the group process also developed when mixed pairs (Palestinian and Jewish) presented articles during the second semester. Some of the presentations included an active role for the listeners. For example, one pair asked students ahead of time to bring pictures from their family albums, an idea based on the article they were presenting (Zehavi-Verete, 2000). This in itself created a nice atmosphere, linking photographs to stories that had already been told and to stories that would be told in the future. After presentation of an article about the TRT group (Bar-On, 1995a), and later, an article about the German–Israeli student group

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(Bar-On, Frumer & Ostrovsky, 1997), the students discussed the similarities and the differences between the German–Jewish and the Israeli–Palestinian group processes. They observed that first, the roles of victim and perpetrator were clearly defined. In their own group, both sides claimed to be victims. The students also observed that in the German–Jewish context there were no pressing issues beyond the burden of the Shoah in the minds and feelings of the two subgroups. It was very different for the Israeli Jews and Palestinians, who felt the pressures of both what had happened in the past and the harsh and violent present reality, dominated by an asymmetry of power. However, Palestinian students also mentioned what they perceived as a similarity between their own workshop and the German–Israeli students’ encounters: In both, a process of strengthening their collective identity occurred. This was more true for the Jewish students in their confrontation with the Germans and for themselves, the Palestinians, in their encounter with the Jewish students. But not all the presentations in the group were easygoing and reflective. When Munthar (P-M) and Maayan (J-F) presented an article by Israeli-Palestinian scholar and politician Azmi Bishara on national identity, and when Hannan (J-M) and Zahra (P-F) presented an article about a Palestinian village with a “divided identity” (half of it within Israel and the other half in Palestinian territory), the discussions that followed were more like the political discussions in the early bi-national meetings—polarized, tense and unreflective. These sessions were followed by a uni-national Jewish session at which both Maayan and Hannan expressed their distress at having had to prepare and present nationalistic Palestinian texts with partners who did not take into account the Jewish students’ feelings of being constantly blamed and put on the defensive. Still, in most of the joint presentations an intellectual exchange took place (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002) that demonstrated the students’ ability to learn from their own experiences, according to their individual abilities to be in a dialogue with the Other and with themselves. The interesting part for us was the fact that this process could take place while the storytelling in the bi-national setting was still going on. In that sense, these learning experiences were different from the final papers the students wrote in pairs after the group process ended. For some who were less verbal in class, working on the ar-

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ticles was their major opportunity for cooperative reflection, and they got a lot out of it. How did what they read affect the rest of the process? We do not really know, as we had nothing to compare it to; and while some members of the TRT group supplemented the experience with outside reading and shared recommendations or excerpts with the group, it was never required. This question, however, bring, us to the last stages of the group process.

A late crisis In the first bi-national meetings after the semester break, the groups listened to three stories. Limor (J-F) told about her grandfather, who died during the break and whom she had loved very much. Limor had succeeded in conducting an interview with him a few weeks earlier, and after his death everyone in the family wanted to read and listen to it. She told parts of his story at the meeting, focusing on how he survived the Holocaust, demonstrating resilience and helping others who were in difficult straits, while he himself was aided by gentiles. The circumstances of the interview followed by the sudden death did not enable the group to have a critical discussion as in earlier stages of the process. Limor’s story was followed by that of Amal (P-F), who described her interview with her grandmother. The grandmother told Amal for the first time of the plight of her family and their whole Bedouin tribe during the 1948 war, as she had experienced it as a child. They were expelled by the Israeli army and sent to the border with Jordan, but the Jordanian army did not let them cross. They were forced to stay at the border for several weeks, in the heat of the summer, almost without water and food, with many children and old people. Only through international intervention was disaster prevented, and they were finally allowed to return to Israel, resettled in another area of the Negev desert away from their original land. This resettlement, however, did not end their trouble with the Israeli police; according to the grandmother, it continues with occasional respite to this very day. In the group discussion that followed, Sivan (J-F) was moved by Amal’s depiction of her relative’s expulsion in 1948 and felt ashamed for the humiliation the family had to endure. Uzi (J-M) and Esti (JF) expressed both fear (“How will this aggression explode on us one

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day?”) and shame and regret (“they experienced humiliation and persecution similar to what our forebears experienced in Europe”). Amal then told of events from her everyday life: The only Arab woman on a bus, she was humiliated by a soldier asking for her I.D. card and treating her in a rough manner. And in a town in the center of the country, after a bomb had just exploded, she was immediately detained and interrogated for hours. The third story came from Nava’s (J-F) interview with her father. Nava had said in an earlier Jewish uni-national session that she was unsure whether she would be able to tell the story of her father in front of the Palestinian group because she did not feel safe presenting her own feelings about him and she was afraid of hostile reactions. But now Nava wanted to tell her story in the bi-national setting. She started by explaining that her father did not talk much about his childhood in Europe during World War II. She asked herself how this had affected her own life; whether it accounted for her feeling sad and lonely at times. Her father was born in Paris in 1933, and the whole family went into hiding when the Nazis took over. Captured as a Communist, Nava’s maternal grandfather was sent to Auschwitz and died there. Nava’s father vividly remembered the fear of getting caught because there were so many of them together in hiding. After the war came the happy years of the story, when he was involved in the Zionist youth movement and preparing himself for aliyah (immigration to Israel). But when he immigrated in the sixties, his family fell apart. His father died shortly after their arrival in Israel. He then joined a kibbutz but did not find his place there, and he returned to France for several years, where he married and where Nava was born. When she was nine, they came back to Israel. In the interview her father spoke of his difficulties feeling at home, both in France and in Israel. Nawra (P-F) reacted with tears to Nava’s story: “This is my home here, but they (the Jews) do not want me here. My mother, as a lawyer, used to represent Arab women, and so the municipality fired her. I can identify with your father’s feeling, though for very different reasons.” This was one of the special dialogical moments in the group, when two women from opposite sides met around the common feeling of homelessness and rootlessness. Nawra (P-F), who was until that

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point negative in her responses to the Jewish stories, opened up and could share her own feelings, without feeling threatened about losing her role in the group. Nava (J-F) could identify with her and did not try to make any gain out of this moment of emotional closeness. This became a point of departure for Nawra from the hostile attitudes that she had expressed earlier in the group. When the seminar ended, she felt the need to continue the group meetings and invited everyone for a day at her home in Jaffa (see below). Perhaps as a “late bloomer” in the group process, she did not want it to end with the official termination of the university course. Perhaps she also wanted to express her gratitude to the group for enabling her to open up and share her feelings in front of the Other. Following the sessions around the joint presentations described in the previous section, a uni-national meeting took place two weeks before the end of the semester. It so happened that Fatma and I did not pay attention to the date: May 15. On this date in 1948, Israel declared its independence as a state. While Independence Day in Israel is celebrated according to the Jewish calendar, in recent years May 15 has become the day that Israeli Palestinians commemorate as Al-Nakbah (the catastrophe). The timing is a political statement: When you celebrate your day of independence, we mourn. The year before the workshop, in May 2000, Israeli Palestinians adopted a Jewish-Israeli ritual for marking its Holocaust remembrance day and its memorial day for fallen soldiers: standing still for a moment of silence. This was also planned for May 15, 2001, at noon, when our class would already be over. The discussion in the Jewish group gravitated naturally to this topic, but other issues from the previous few bi-national meetings were also discussed. Some students were still discussing Munthar’s extreme positions. Maayan (J-F) said that when they prepared their joint presentation he told her he favored a Palestinian state throughout Palestine (including Israel). When Maayan asked him, “And where should I live?” Munthar answered promptly “where there is still open land in the country, not inhabited,” leaving Maayan in shock. Sivan (J-F) told the group that Munthar sent her some written questions after she told her story, but he did not want the group to know about his interest in it, lest others interpret this as showing empathy. Sivan also pointed out how Nawra had changed after listening and reacting to Nava’s story.

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About halfway through the meeting there was a knock on the door. It was Amar (P-M), sent by his group to ask the Jewish students if they would join the Palestinians when they stood still to commemorate Al-Nakbah. They were going to do so while the meeting was still taking place, at 11:00 A.M. rather than at noon. The Jewish group seemed surprised and paralyzed by this request, but their discussion continued, as if they did not notice that they had just been challenged by the Palestinian group. From time to time someone would say, “we have to give them an answer,” but little notice was taken. Yoni (J-M) remarked, “Amar’s invitation is part of their power struggle, so I do not plan to go over to them.” I was deliberating; a way out for the Jewish group was that whoever chose to would join the Palestinian group, and those who did not want to could stay behind. But I wanted the Jewish group to reach this solution by themselves and felt no need to “rescue” them from the drama that would evolve if they did not respond to the Palestinian invitation. Just a couple of minutes before 11 A.M., Sivan and Naama went over and let the Palestinian group know that no one would join them. Fatma told me later that the Palestinian group reacted to Sivan and Naama’s answer with total shock, and a few students even started to cry. Earlier they had deliberated over inviting the Jewish students to their ritual and how to do it in a non-provocative way. Those who were in favor of inviting the Jewish students turned out to be the majority, and the group decided to send Amar, assuming that at least a few of the Jews would respond favorably and share their moment of collective grief, especially after having heard the Palestinian stories during the recent sessions. These students were disappointed and hurt, while the others said, “You see, we told you, you can’t expect anything from them. They will talk nicely but will not do anything for us. This is what you can expect from them.” I saw that this challenge put several of the Jewish students in a very difficult situation. On one hand, they wanted to react positively to the group process and express their empathy with Palestinian students and their ongoing plight, after listening to their stories and feeling close to them. On the other hand, such an act meant a break away from their Jewish-Israeli norm of ignoring Al-Nakbah, as recognition of it would imply recognition of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homes in Israel. Such recognition could further imply the expulsion of many Jews from their own homes and furthermore,

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giving up the Jewish majority in Israel. Therefore the Jewish students felt paralyzed and could not decide what to do, and they in fact did nothing. The following bi-national meeting was stormy. Sivan wept and said that her Palestinian friends in the group ostracized her all week long and did not want to talk to her, as she did not join them in their moment of silence. ABED (P-M): I did not expect you to come, I did not even want you to come in the first place, but after I saw some of the reactions in my group, I must say that you have no feelings for us. Why do I have to stand still for your dead on your Memorial Day, even when I know that some of these dead soldiers were sent to kill my people? When I do stand still, I do it out of respect for the people I work with. Do you have no respect for me, for us? NAWRA (P-F): After what I went through here in this workshop I wanted you to come and be with me. I expected that two or three of you would come. The fact that none of you came was for me a proof that it will be always you and us, that there is no way to break through the wall that separates us. MUNTHAR (P-M): I did not want you to come, but the majority was in favor and I agreed. I did not feel you were relevant for me at that moment. You are still the first generation of what was done to us, not the second or the third generations after these events cease (like the Jews and the Germans). But I could feel the disappointment of my friends. WALID (P-M): I was the most naïve one. I believed that all of you would come. I thought that this process we went through did something. But now I understand that it did something only to the Palestinian group. Maybe at the beginning of the year I would not have expected anything, but now I am very disappointed. SHELLY (I-F): I feel very bad, because I wanted to get up and join the Palestinian group and I did not have the courage to do it all alone, and I think they are right for being angry with me. SIVAN (I-F): I suffered this week. Last week I wanted to come and join you (the Palestinians), but I did not. I cannot even explain why I could not do it without the rest of the Jewish group. I wanted to come, as I identified with Amar and Abed’s pain. But now

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you treat me like a traitor; no one wanted to even talk with me anymore. Like a child who did something bad; it does not mean that the child is bad. I feel we learned a lot and went through a lot, even if it did not meet your expectations. NUHA (P-F): My problem with the “bad child syndrome” is that the child you represent has behaved badly for a long time. So I am fed up, not with you personally, but with you as a people. I am fed up with your explanations and excuses. NAAMA (J-F): Are only we the “bad children”? Think about it, what it means for us that you announced the day we celebrate establishing our state as your day of mourning. I could not identify with that. Don’t you think that you tried to put us in an impossible situation? YONI (J-M): I do not see it as black and white as you present it now. I do not expect you to stand with me on Memorial Day, and this is a change I learned here, through our encounters. We cannot expect ourselves to change overnight. This is a process that we started, but it is not completed yet. NAVA (J-F): We have here an inverse situation, compared to what we are used to. You tell us all the time how dominant we are, and here we are weaker than you, and you have both the justice and the truth on your side. I did not expect Amar to come in the middle of our uni-national session. I feel that you put us to an unfair test and you knew we would fail. I am also angry with Dan who did not take part in this discussion. He could have helped find a way. I do not think I would have joined the Palestinian group, as I do not even feel good about the Jewish ritual of standing silent, and this year, for the first time in my life, I did not do it on Holocaust Day. Had we been initially in the same room, I could see that some of us would get up and stand with you when the time came. These young students carry on their shoulders the burden of their public collectives’ symbolism (Jackson, 2002). The drama of the crisis brought out arguments that were not raised earlier. The Palestinian voice was sound and clear and dominated the session. Their being “fed up” with the Jewish Israelis’ justifications was voiced more clearly than ever before. But Jewish voices also became clearer as a result of the confrontation, as they articulated their feelings of weak-

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ness when they did not act as they wished they had; being set up to fail the test; being unwilling to turn their celebrations into mourning. Furthermore, the diversity within the groups was noticeable. Some of the Jewish students felt bad for not joining the Palestinians on an individual basis. Others had various reasons for not wanting to join— Nava disliked the ritual and Naama did not want to turn an event she celebrated into a time of mourning. There were Palestinians who expected the Jewish students to come and were disappointed, and there were others who did not expect them to come and perhaps did not want the Jews to be with them at their moment of mourning. We all needed some time out. It came in the form of two more sessions of presentations. Then came our final session, one in which the boundaries between the storytelling and the discussions that usually followed were blurred. After we asked each student to write a page summarizing his or her experiences in the class, the session started with a story of Dafna’s (J-F), a student who had not spoken in the joint meetings since the Palestinians’ reactions to her “Zionist” story. She came to Fatma and me privately a couple of weeks before the final session and told us why she kept quiet: She was attacked on her way home during the Passover break, by two Arab men who pushed her so that she fell down, injuring her face. She had to go to the hospital for treatment and took a couple of weeks to heal. However, she felt she could not share her painful experience with the group; she was afraid that this would again be seen as a “Jewish manipulation,” presenting herself as victimized by Arabs. We tried to convince her to speak about it anyway, sure that it would be beneficial for her and for the group, but it was not clear whether she would overcome her hesitation. Now Dafna was telling her story in a restrained voice, explaining why she was silent throughout the past sessions (including the Al-Nakbah crisis) and why she was afraid to talk about what had happened to her in the group. Dafna also said that she learned from the group process, specifically about the Palestinian suffering, more than she ever knew before, and that this was her most important course in her three years of undergraduate studies. Fatma praised Dafna for talking about it in the group and expressed her regret for Dafna’s reticence to do it earlier. There was a long silence before the group reacted:

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HAWDA (P-F): I appreciate how you told what happened to you, and it was important for me to hear it from you. NAWRA (P-F): It was very hard for me to hear what you (Dafna) told us. I could feel the humiliation and pain you must have felt. I remember a friend of mine hit by Israeli police. It’s terrible that these things still happen between us. LIMOR (J-F): I am very moved and feel that you (Dafna) have much more courage to speak here than I have had. This helps me summarize my experiences here, what I learned and what I take with me from this course. Among other things, I want to find out why a Jewish mother does not react the same way when young people from the Palestinian side get hurt. MUNTHAR (P-M) (very agitated): I want to share with you (Dafna) what had happened to me when I was eighteen. I went to work and forgot my hat at home. When I returned home to pick it up, a military police jeep stopped me. They were sure I was a young person they were looking for. They put their rifles against my chest and pushed me down to the floor. I was terrified, I was sure this was my end. Finally one of our neighbors recognized me and called my parents. They clarified that I was their son and the police released me. When I asked them, “Why did you detain me in such a harsh way?” they replied, “Because you were stuttering, this made you a suspect…” Since then I learned not to stutter. NUHA (P-F): How could you (Munthar) keep silent about your difficult experience all these years? I can feel after Dafna’s story the collective responsibility for what my people did to you, and only now understand what you must feel when you listen to Munthar’s story. Members of both groups reacted warmly to Munthar’s openness, showing his vulnerable side, in reaction to Dafna’s story. This was perhaps even truer on the Jewish side, as they had earlier perceived Munthar as the most negative person in the Palestinian group when it came to any form of dialogue or compromise. It seemed that what Nava’s story had done for Nawra a few weeks earlier, Dafna’s story succeeded in doing for Munthar in this last session. This interaction in the group showed that the group had survived the crisis of Al-Na-

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kbah Day and even came out of it strengthened. As Shelly (J-F) said toward the end: “Personal stories such as the ones we heard today break the dividing line between you and us. The emotional aspect is what makes the difference. It may not be able to change the situation, but it clearly changed us.”

Postscript We met again in Jaffa about a month later. Nawra (P-F) invited us to her home and her parents and sister hosted us, after we spent the day at the local theater where her father is an actor. He told us about the plays there and how the actors try to involve the audience in their sessions of Palestinian and Israeli storytelling. It seemed almost like a replica of our group process. We also had a couple of hours for ourselves. An open exchange among the Palestinian members started this session: MUNTHAR (P-M): I always knew that we are weaker than you, the Jewish people. I tried to learn from you: how you gained your strength and what are your weak points. Showing weakness is still very difficult for me, especially in front of the Jewish participants. HAWDA (P-F): I feel stuck in the middle. I do not know if I am more Israeli or more Arab. What does not help is that some Jewish people mistake me for being Jewish, as I seem to look like them, and they talk with me about Arabs in a not-very-nice way…My father never told me before this workshop about what he went through to become a Palestinian psychiatrist. This workshop helped me identify with my Palestinian side. But it is still very complicated. AMAR (P-M): I had almost no chance to study about my own heritage at the Jewish school I went to. There were times when I identified with the Jewish strength, the flag, the army. Only after school was I confronted by the harsh political reality of my people. MAAYAN (J-F): I want to thank the Palestinian group for letting me be here and listen to you today. I felt you were more open than ever before in speaking about yourselves and your dilemmas as Israeli Arabs. I think we are two groups whose identity is very mixed up and complicated and it will take us a long time to figure things

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out. I will need many weeks to digest what I went through together with you. NAVA (J-F): I was hurt when you said at the beginning of the workshop that you know everything about us, and I am happy that you also learned something new about us, and not only about yourselves. I was very troubled with my behavior on Al-Nakbah Day— why did I not come? Why was it so difficult for me? I came today as a special act of gratitude to Nawra, for inviting us. I feel something happened between the two of us during the workshop, which is much more important than standing still with you or not on AlNakbah Day. As a mother to young children in these difficult days, I learned to see things from your perspective. It made a difference, and I cannot feel like my friends outside the workshop who always accuse the Arabs of everything bad that happens here. Thank you for inviting me today. NAWRA (P-F) (crying): Thank you (Nava) for coming. I am torn over what we have accomplished together and the hard reality of everyday life, of what we hear in the media. DAFNA (J-F): Today I would have come to stand with you on Al-Nakbah day. I could do that. AMAR (P-M): I am happy to hear that and I respect that you said it now. We had lunch at a local restaurant and ended the day at Nawra’s home. There were a few additional attempts to meet together at one of the Jewish homes, but none of these attempts materialized. Abed joined Fatma and me at the Derry TRT meeting in August 2002. Nuha asked me to supervise her thesis in which she wanted to continue to interview Arabs in Ramleh who remember the period prior to 1948. Tal continued to conduct her interviews, and in the following months the final papers were submitted. Nuha, Munthar, and Walid came to my next workshop in 2003-04 as part of their graduate studies. They felt that they wanted to experience such a process again and to contribute to it from their previous experiences. The papers, representing the students’ later reactions both to the interviews they analyzed and to the workshop, could form the basis for an entire chapter. I will cite here just a few sentences from the summaries about the workshop. Nawra (P-F) wrote:

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Tell Your Life Story I participated in many such workshops and learned not to expect too much from them, though I see it as my “mission” to present my collective at them. But this workshop was different, as the personal stories managed to take me from the collective level to the personal one. The discussions that followed each story were very important. Even though it was difficult for me to listen to the Jewish stories, as they were often too “beautiful” [nechmad mi dai], some Jewish stories touched me. The Palestinian stories made me more aware of who I am. It is too early for me to summarize all I have learned, but the workshop meant a lot for me. Shelly (J-F) wrote in her summary:

During the last year, in addition to being exposed to the violent reality that all Israeli citizens had to live through, I had every Tuesday’s Jewish-Palestinian workshop. I was confronted by the Palestinians, required to learn their point of view, and to hear the experiences they and their family members went through. It was much more difficult than I anticipated. I did not expect that my feelings as an Israeli would be put to such a test. I found myself, almost every Tuesday, feeling guilty for things that I had not done, even some that happened before my birth, but some took place during the workshop and I did nothing to prevent them…I came to the workshop out of curiosity, but never thought that I could reach such a level of “containing” the Other and the dialogue with them, as part of myself and my identity… There is still so much that has to be done and to be said. The road seems long to me right now, almost endless.

Summary: Storytelling during a violent conflict: Is it possible? The storytelling process described in this chapter differed from that of the TRT group in many respects. The university workshop was conducted with young students, in the middle of renewed warfare, within a severe asymmetric power relationship, and with still no political solution on the horizon, even as these words are being written. There were no earlier stages of preparations for the participants, whereas interviews in the mid-1980s helped prepare the German de-

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scendants of Nazi perpetrators for the coming TRT encounters, as did a self-help group. The group perceived an asymmetry in power relations between the two facilitators. Offered as a university course, the workshop had to start meeting on a certain date (and a very uncomfortable one, as it turned out, since it coincided with the outbreak of the renewed hostilities) and finish by the end of the school year, with grades, papers, and all that coursework implies. The group process would perhaps have continued otherwise, but when some of the students wanted to prolong it, it was beyond their ability to create a structure to make it possible. On the one hand, given the current political polarization, many of the students’ rich and complex experiences and thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) might be lost or overtaken, as the public polarized reality is stronger than such short-term private exposures, even if these succeeded in temporarily creating an atmosphere of caring for the Other. On the other hand, from the macro social perspective there were also advantages. This was less costly than one group over years and could be replicated each year with additional students. In addition, a lot was accomplished. The group developed its criteria for a “good enough story” through a trial-and-error process. While one may analyze what in Walid, Nuha, Nava, or Sivan’s stories made them “better” than those of Dafna, Abed, or Naama, I would like to suggest that there is no single answer to what constitutes a “good enough story,” but rather, it is related to context and timing in the group process and to the events that happen outside the workshop. In this group, stories that were perceived as representing something of the private realm, as being more complex, or as exposing one’s weaker side to the Other were more acceptable, especially to the minority group, than those that they perceived as advocacy for dominant national collective norms (Arendt, 1958). In that sense, it was the minority group which was the first to define what a “good enough story” was, thereby creating a new standard in this group. This is similar to the empowerment of the minority group in the Neve Shalom groups. The dominant group found that the stories about the Shoah or Zionist fathers that they perceived as “good enough” in their uni-national context did not always prove to be so in the bi-national one. Three parallel processes took place in this group: the separate Jewish and Palestinian group processes that evolved over the year; the joint group process that had

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its own pace, based on internal and external events; and the personal dynamics that brought different individuals “on-stage” at different points of the other two processes. Such nuances had been discussed less in the TRT group, which brought me to retrospective reflection upon that process. During the last TRT encounter, in Wuppertal in 2003, I introduced some of these reflections. I suggested that in the TRT group, the Jewish members of the group determined from the outset what a “good enough story” would be: a Jewish story that included parents who survived one of the death camps or a German story of a father who perpetrated the Nazi agenda. Members suffered deeply from either of these family backgrounds. In the discussion that evolved, it became obvious that the Jewish members of TRT who did not have such a ”good enough story” could remain in the group, while the German participants (six or seven of them) who lacked such a story, left or felt driven out over the years. The language problem added to that process considerably (as most of those who left did not feel comfortable with English), but I would suggest it was a secondary factor rather than the primary one. The language issue also looms large in Jewish-Palestinian groups (Sonnenschein et al., 1998; Suleiman, 1997). In this group, as in those of Neve Shalom, at least the Palestinian uni-national meetings were conducted in Arabic. But the bi-national meeting, conducted in Hebrew, imposed a clear disadvantage for the Palestinian participants, especially when having to retell family stories that were told to them in Arabic. It is an example of how asymmetric the setting is for the two groups, even when there is an effort to overcome the outside asymmetry by creating more balanced opportunities within the group process. For a few individuals, those who were mentioned less often in this account, the group setting was probably not the best medium to test their feelings or stereotypes about the Other. But for quite a few others, specifically those whose experiences are portrayed here, it proved to be a good setting to learn about their own prejudices. Even for hardliners such as Nawra and Munthar in the Palestinian group, or more rigid students such as Yoni and Limor in the Jewish group, there were important breakthrough moments during the process, when their approach to the Other softened and they become more open. I

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think that this may be one of the advantages of the storytelling method—one can identify individual differences within each group and not evaluate the process only on the collective group level. What happened to Nawra and Nava, to Sivan and Nuha, to Naama, Dafna, or Munthar, was not less important than what happened to the group as a whole. At many points in the process I felt a strong empathy for the Palestinian students. I could feel their quest for affiliation, their wish to belong, which was rebuffed for generations by a harsh reality and the indifference of Jewish Israelis. I could feel how they were torn between their identification with the Palestinian cause and their desire to become an integral part of a modern Jewish-Israeli society, if the society would accept them. I could feel the pain—how deep was their need for hope and how difficult it was to establish it at the present time in our conflict. But I could also feel the Jewish students’ hardships: How again and again their sense of having a just and moral cause was taken away from them. How deep their fear of being totally overrun by a society that they know very little about and that is alienated by the deeds of their own collective. How much do the Jewish participants have to give up of their own “potential space” and their collective’s symbolism (Winnicott, 1988) before creating an acceptable space for the Palestinians, so that an open dialogue between the two parties is possible? I find the metaphor of a stage useful in analysis of such a group process. It helped identify how the process unfolded, the necessity of developing different settings and following the interactions of the uninational, the bi-national, the academic constructs, and the group process. We saw that it was far easier to tell a story in the safer uni-national setting and how complicated things became when a story was told “on-stage,” in front of the other group.8 We as facilitators were part of this learning process. It was difficult for us to assess to what extent the asymmetry between us played a role in the group process. Did some of the Palestinian students feel less secure because Fatma was not a professor or not a male figure like Dan? This issue should be examined more thoroughly in future similar workshops. From my subjective point of view, I believe that the fact that Fatma and I had the opportunity to work through some of our own difficult issues in the TRT group, and before or after each

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of the group sessions, gave us the necessary advanced ability to cope with this group process. It was, however, not always easy to decide which way to go. For example, when I decided not to intervene in the Jewish group on Al-Nakbah Day, I took a risk; I knew that a crisis would develop if none of the Jewish students joined the Palestinians and that the groups might not be able to overcome the crisis so close to the end of the year. I had already experienced a Jewish-Arab group that had become paralyzed by silence and mistrust on Holocaust Day and did not regain its sense of accomplishment thereafter. The fact that our group did overcome its crisis showed the students’ abilities as individuals and what they had achieved as a group. But had they not succeeded, a negative end to the group process would have been my responsibility. These outcomes are difficult to anticipate, and no one could have made that decision for me. For some time I thought that we put the students in too difficult a situation, especially after the violent outbreak of the Intifada. I felt then that having to move back and forth between their emotionally burdening stories, both personal and familial, and the polarized political situation was almost too much to ask from these young men and women who were still in their formative years of identity construction (Bar-On, 1999b). But after writing up this chapter, I am not so sure. The new violent situation also created new opportunities—a need to be more open and sincere. This became apparent in the aftermath of Al-Nakbah Day, when each one of them felt like the sole representative of his or her collective and required to make up for all the missed opportunities of the last two or three generations. The micro group setting enabled us to learn some important lessons on the macro social level. Most of these lessons appear in the concluding chapter of this book, but I would like to mention one here. The two groups are deeply committed to their collectives, the Jewish-Israeli collective and the Palestinian collective. Once a Palestinian state is established, one of two possibilities can be anticipated: Either the Palestinian minority and the Jewish majority in Israel will try to develop a bridging narrative, thereby creating a clear distinction between these two groups on the one hand and the collective of the Palestinian state on the other; or the Palestinian minority in Israel will continue to see itself as part of the collective of the Palestinian state, and so the gap between it and the Jewish majority will widen.

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NOTES 1 A version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Social Issues (Bar-On & Kassem, 2004). 2 For several years groups at Ben-Gurion University would meet with a group from Germany at the end of the semester (Bar-On, Ostrovsky & Fromer, 1997). See chapter 2. 3 I thank Ms. Fatma Kassem for her help in facilitating the group at BenGurion University and for helping me think through some of the issues discussed in this chapter. 3 After the 1948 war, the Arabs in Israel were put under a military regime and control that limited their movement and occupational choices. It was lifted only in the mid-sixties, and informally certain restrictions continued after that as well. Apprehension about surveillance is expressed in encounters with Israeli Palestinians, especially when they voice any criticism in regard to the state’s treatment of them. 4 J-F—Jewish female. J-M—Jewish male. P-F—Palestinian female. P-M— Palestinian male. 5 Tal Litvak-Hirsch presented Sivan and Nuha (as well as other students) with the following dilemma: The Weitzman family immigrated from Rumania after World War II and settled in a deserted house in Ramleh in 1950. The Hussien family built this house in 1935 and was expelled from Ramleh in 1948. They live today in Ramallah in the PNA. To whom does this house belong? (Litvak-Hirsch, Bar-On & Chaitin, 2003). I thank Dr. Litvak-Hirsch for allowing me to cite the texts. 6 The Open House in Ramleh sponsors affirmative action programs for Israeli-Palestinian children and their families, along with a wide range of coexistence activities. See www.friendsofopenhouse.org/history.cfm for more information. 7 Several other papers used stage-like descriptions or unfolding plots to tell the story of similar group processes (Maoz et al., 2002; Maoz et al., 2004; Adwan & Bar-On, 2004).

CHAPTER 5

The Diverse Voices of Haifa

1

As noted in the introduction, I was born in Haifa, in 1938, to a German-speaking family that immigrated to Palestine in 1933, not because of a Zionist or religious background (which they definitely lacked), but because Hitler’s rise to power alerted my father to the need to find another place to live. Both from assimilated families that had lived in Germany for many generations, my parents had to redefine themselves as Jews because of external reasons—the Nazis—and, unlike many others, they drew the consequences immediately. I mentioned before that there was no clear answer as to why my parents chose Palestine as their destination. But within Palestine, Haifa was my parents’ choice because coming from a European bourgeois background—accustomed to woods to stroll in, beaches to enjoy, and city life for entertainment—it was the most European place they could find at that time. Haifa at that time already had an enclave of German Jews who spoke German openly in the street (to the disdain of the more “Zionist” elements among the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who adhered to “only Hebrew”), and they kept to themselves culturally, very much like the Russian immigrant, of the 1890s. I left my hometown when I went to an agricultural high school at the age of sixteen. Though I visited Haifa occasionally for a number of years, since my parents lived there until their final days, I was no longer a part of what was going on in the city. As a teenager because I wanted to distance myself from my German-speaking background and become a real sabra (a native, New Israeli Jew), I worked hard to adjust myself to this image. Emotionally, Haifa was a distant childhood memory; nothing real to cultivate or feel linked to. I kept up no personal contacts with friends from school years or scouts. When I came to visit my parents, I loved to walk with my children in the

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forests and hills on the Carmel or go to the beach and take a swim. Consciously, I disconnected myself from what was happening in my hometown. But deep inside me was a certain wordless longing, perhaps similar to what my parents felt toward Europe. When I would drive to Haifa through the Carmel with my younger son, Haran, we would reach the view of the bay and he would exclaim, “This is the most beautiful place I know. I want to live here sometime!” I felt something stirring inside me, but no words. On a conscious level Haifa remained, for many years, the town of my childhood and my parents’ home, but nothing more. Perhaps I even felt somehow alienated from childhood memories that were sweet because I tried so hard to become a sabra in the desert. As I described earlier, for twenty-five years I was a member of a desert kibbutz, where I married and had children. Even when I discovered that the childhood memories were not all that sweet and that my kibbutz life did not fit me anymore, and I became a psychologist and an academic, the transition did not bring me back to Haifa in a more emotional or reflective way. Later reflections—for example, in therapy—brought me back to re-examine my relationship with my parents and with my past, but not necessarily my relationship with the place where I lived throughout my childhood. Most of the dreams I could remember took place on the kibbutz, even after I had left it; rarely did they go back to my childhood years in Haifa. At no time in my academic career, studying the aftermath of the Holocaust and bringing Germans and Jews into dialogue, did I reflect on Haifa as part of my own history. It did not even happen early in the summer of 2000 when Sami Adwan and I started planning an oral history database using the life stories of Jewish and Palestinian refugees. As part of that PRIME research project, we became especially interested in life stories of Jews and Arabs who lived in the same neighborhoods prior to the 1948 war (see chapter 3). Yet it still did not occur to me that I was almost unintentionally coming back to Haifa. All this long way, Haifa remained just a place to visit, a retreat into childhood. My mother died in 1992 and with her my last personal bond to Haifa. It was painful for my brother and for me to dismantle and sell her apartment and to know that we had no one to visit there, that we would never sit on that balcony anymore, enjoying the pleasant breeze coming in from the sea. After my brother died in 1996, I

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had no one with whom to even recall our common childhood memories of Haifa, other than a cousin in England who spent part of her childhood there before her parents moved to London in the ’50s. So, quite out of the blue, in the summer of 2000 I took Noa, my twelveyear-old granddaughter, for a “roots tour” through Haifa, showing her where I grew up—places she had never visited, because there was no one to visit there anymore.2 She grew up in Tel Aviv, and for most of her childhood my parents were already gone. I am not sure how much this tour was of interest to my granddaughter, but it was exciting for me to stroll with her through the different streets of my childhood; to show her the houses that were still there: the “copper house”3 with the tree house I would play in until my grandfather called me in for dinner, or the “Mushli” house, owned by a landlord from China, the site of my first childhood memory (saying good-night to my parents on the balcony). In the German Colony4 was the house of my later adolescent years; the British “transferred” us there when they constructed their own security zone in the area of the copper house. To my dismay, the Bahai Society recently tore down this house to enlarge their garden. I can still see in my mind’s eye the large balcony where I married the first time, the garden with the olive tree whose branches cracked and fell during the big snow of 1950, and the water cistern under the house, the source of irrigation for our garden, of which my father was very proud. While I was walking with Noa through the neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas, an Arab5 section of downtown Haifa, very close to where I used to go to secondary school, it suddenly occurred to me that our PRIME oral history project should begin in Haifa. In that moment I was surprised to realize that I had developed my entire career without thinking of Haifa. I felt the need to use the professional expertise I had amassed for more than coming to grips with my recollections of my childhood. I wanted to find out how Jews and Arabs will narrate their stories of how they used to live together before most of the Arab population fled in 1948. I had memories of living in a mixed neighborhood; of an Arab woman in our home who was a kind of nanny to my brother and me. I remembered the war, and that one day she was “gone,” though my father tried to convince her to stay. Perhaps I did not come back to Haifa earlier because I was not ready yet to examine my childhood memories or some of the assump-

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tions with which I grew up, especially those concerning the Arab population of Haifa. I grew up with the Jewish Zionist narrative that maintained that the Arabs refused the UN partition plan in 1947 and were the aggressors in the 1948 war, while the Jewish population only tried to defend itself. We were the few and they were the many. The military units of the Haganah conquered the Arab quarters of Haifa only after they found no other way to eliminate shooting on the Jewish quarters. The Zionist narrative continued: The Arabs fled from Haifa because their leaders convinced them to, promising that they would return with the British-led army of Jordan within weeks. The British, who were themselves to leave the country within days, facilitated the Arab exodus by providing them with boats and ships to cross the bay to Acre and later to Beirut. (In the backyard of our house in the German Colony, the garage was filled with personal belongings that British soldiers left behind, believing that they would be back within a few weeks, after the Jordanian army took over Haifa. Only after the war was over and it was clear that no British soldier would return did my father break the lock of the garage. Thereby we gained our first refrigerator, a gas-powered model taken out of British storage.) In my childhood memory, as in Jewish Zionist collective memory, Haifa is a city where the Jews and Arabs lived together happily before 1948 (Goren, 2000) and where some of that initial coexistence still prevails. In the 1940s, the Jewish and Arab populations were almost equal in size (about sixty thousand each). Haifa is the only city that had two mayors—an Arab one, Hassan Shukri, and a Jewish one, Shabtai Levi—who met during the 1910s, while both were studying at a Turkish university in Istanbul, and who worked closely together between 1927 and 1940. However, this positive Israeli image of the Jewish-Arab relationship does not take into account that most of the Arab population left6 Haifa before or immediately after the Haganah took the city in April 1948. Collective Jewish-Israeli memory does not acknowledge the fact that most of these refugees never returned. Only some three thousand Arabs stayed behind in 1948. Jewish-Israeli memory also overlooks the fact that the remaining Arabs were forced into a special zone in Wadi Nisnas and for many years were allowed to leave only with permits.

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Though Palestinian historians discussed these different details previously (Seikally; 1995; Walidi, 1965; Yazbak, 1998) I was now ready to try to clarify the discrepancies between these facts and the Zionist historical account with which I grew up. It was interesting for me to observe that I interviewed the descendants of Nazi perpetrators in Germany before I could reflect critically on what had happened in my hometown prior to 1948. But apparently by 2000 I was ready, and I believed that some of the open questions could be clarified through the memories of Jews and Arabs who lived in Haifa prior to 1948.

Interviewing in Haifa: Identifying the diverse voices7 In early September 2000, I arrived in Haifa to conduct my first interviews. I found interview partners through telling several contacts of my intentions and interests (people who lived in Haifa, worked at the hospital, and had Arab friends). Some of the interviews took place in neighborhoods that I frequented growing up, but to which I had never returned all these years. Through these new visits, memories of people and places came back to me. For example, when Majed told me about the market of the Hamra Plaza, owned by his family. I recalled walking through that market (which the Israeli army destroyed right after the 1948 war) with my grandfather, looking for fresh crabs. I could recall the smells, the shouting, the horses and wagons. But I also discovered interesting gaps in my recollections. For example, while looking for an interviewee on Abbas Street (where the Arab aristocracy of Haifa used to live before 1948 and where today Jews and Arabs reside side by side), I realized that though I’d walked nearby every day during my childhood, I had never walked on the street itself. It had been considered Arab territory, and I’d probably been told—or felt without being told—that as a Jewish child I should not go there all alone. When the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out at the end of September 2000, the interviews became charged with intensity, especially for the Arab interviewees. Though the more extreme violent protests did not take place in Haifa (which some people attribute to the efforts of the city’s mayor, Amram Mitzna, who came between the police and the protesters), thirteen Israeli Arabs elsewhere were shot and killed by Jewish policemen. Yet I was surprised to find out that most of my in-

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terview partners were even more eager to talk to me after the violent outbreak. I felt an intense link between their recollections of past violence and the news of the violent current events. Sometimes I had a feeling that nothing had changed over the decades; that we were still struggling with the basics of Jewish and Arab inability to coexist. Interviewing extensively for the first time since my interviews in Germany, I became acutely aware of how different and separate are Jewish and Arab narratives of the past as well as of the present. Those German interviews were extremely difficult for me, but subjectively I now felt even more under attack. In Germany I had the “privilege” of belonging to the victims’ side. Here, to the Arab interviewees, I often represented the victimizers. I recall interviewing a Palestinian-Israeli physician one evening shortly after police killed the thirteen protesters. He was very angry and told me, “After this, you can do only one thing: pack your things and leave. You lost your chance to live in the Middle East.” I could sense that he actually wanted to kill me. As it was not possible physically, he tried to kill me morally and psychologically. I interviewed about forty Jews and Arabs (Muslims and Christians) in Haifa. I recorded most of these interviews and transcribed them. In several cases I had the cooperation of younger people who became informal co-researchers and interviewed their relatives in Arabic. I could follow some of their conversations, and not only did I find them extremely interesting, but I also learned that the young people had never before heard the stories that were the legacies of their own families as part of a shared collective history and memory. An example was Nabeeha, a nurse at the local central hospital, who helped me interview her mother, aunt and father-in-law. As she helped in establishing the contacts and in translating and presenting my questions, she realized that her late father never spoke of those times, that her mother had never shown her the place were they used to live, and that she had little contact with her aunts and uncles who were spread out in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. I divided my interviews in Haifa into four different parallel narratives or “voices,” which I present here following a short introduction on the history of Haifa: 1. The Jewish Sephardic voice. The veteran Jewish population in Haifa lived in Chart al-Yahud and Ard al-Yahud8 at the turn of the century. This voice is presented through the interviews with Meir Cohen-Avidov and Izhak Akiva.

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2. A Jewish Ashkenazi voice is heard in different versions of the Zionist canonical narrative. These are presented through the interviews with Gershon Gilad, Amnon Linn, and Amram Mitzna, then the mayor of Haifa. 3. The Communist voice—the only joint Jewish-Arab narrative of that period—is presented through the interviews with Haya Tuma, Walid Karkabi, and Sami Michael. 4. The Arab voices are represented in the interviews with Ibrahim Brahami and Nabeeha Odeh. Though Arab voices could be further divided into Muslim and Christian voices, with different undertones, I have decided to respect the Palestinian-Israeli point of view, which sees this separation as manipulation by the British and later by Israeli Jews, in order to impose “control by separation.” In constructing this division into four “voices,” I do not make any claim regarding the history of Haifa, but rather suggest that they represent different personal constructions of Haifa’s history as recalled by members of these subpopulations. This division is clearly influenced by the current tensions between Palestinians and Jews and between segments of the Jewish society on the national level. But it also suggests that if there was a chance for a constructive dialogue between these voices in the past, on the local level, these opportunities were missed because the local dynamic had no chance to overcome the national polarization. The Muslim interviewees expressed great pain as they discussed their homes and other places they had to give up and when they told of the events that led to the Arab population’s massive flight from Haifa and of their close relatives who still live in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Some told me how they were treated harshly by Jews who, right after the war, pushed them into a kind of ghetto in the Wadi. Some of my interviewees opined that in light of poverty and the lack of reflection on the wounds of the past that have never healed, the Jewish-Israeli attempt to use sculpture, paintings and joint festivals to present a kind of co-existence in the Wadi was a facade. These interviewees then reflected on current events, saying nothing has really changed in terms of Jewish-Arab relationships. In the Christian-Arab stories I could identify other tones and nuances: Good relationships among Jews, Arabs and the British during

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the British Mandate; Jewish neighbors who helped Arabs survive in Haifa during and after the war; good relations with Jews until today. Some interviewees would attribute the difference between their stories and those of the Muslims to the gap in education (the Christians having been better educated for generations). They also claimed they had better occupational opportunities and were veteran residents of Haifa long before the massive influx of Muslim Arabs from various villages during construction of the harbor in the 1930s. For me, a special place among the diverse voices of Haifa prior to 1948 belongs to the Communist party and its Arab and Jewish membership. This was the only Arab party that supported the 1947 UN Partition Plan for dividing Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian one. All other Arab parties rejected it. The Communists asked the Arab population not to leave Haifa in 1948. But they were very few, mostly members of the intellectual Christian elite, which did not have much influence on the predominantly Muslim Arab populace. The Muslim Arabs before 1948 became increasingly religious and nationalistic, influenced by nationalist leaders from the central part of the country, such as Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who preached at the local mosques, and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. (Killed by the British in what the Palestinians called the 1936 revolution, Qassam was considered a martyr and continued to inspire the populace.) The Jewish-Arab cooperation in the Communist party before and after the 1948 war was unique; other political parties or social organizations such as the labor unions were either separate or dominated by Jewish Zionist leadership. Among the Jewish interviewees, tales of the same events took on a strong heroic undertone. There was a war that had to be won, just as the riots of 1936–39 had to be suppressed. Interviewees could recall positive relations with Arabs, but mainly with the Arabs in submissive roles, as laborers or domestic helpers (as was the case in our family). Some stories of Arabs who helped or rescued Jews during the riots were told as well, but no subsequent permanent relationship was ever discussed. There are quite important differences between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi stories which I listened to. The Sephardic Jews spoke fluent Arabic and intermingled with the Arab population, sometimes intermarrying and establishing joint businesses. The Sephardim came from

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the Maghreb, as well as small towns in northern Israel where small Jewish-Sephardic communities survived through the ages. Sephardim, in Hebrew, means Jews who once came from Spain, but has come to refer to Afro-Asian Jewry from Arab countries as well. Ashkenazim, meaning Jews from Germany, has come to refer to those who came from Eastern Europe. The Ashkenazim of Haifa, mainly of Zionist ideology, who immigrated in the 1920s and 1930s, slowly took over the leadership of the Jewish population, with the exception of Shabtai Levi, mayor until 1951, who was a Sephardi Jew. Today there are very few remnants of the earlier proud Sephardic community of Haifa.

1. The Sephardic voice—members of Haifa’s veteran Jewish population Haifa was an unimportant village of some two thousand fishermen during the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman regional capital was Acre, and only when the British conquered Palestine during World War I did the capital move to Haifa. Under the Ottomans Haifa became a walled town, and the first Jewish inhabitants who lived within the walls arrived from the Maghreb (mainly from Morocco) in the mid-nineteenth century. Primarily merchants, they settled down in Chart al-Yahud (the road of the Jews), spoke Arabic, and intermingled with the Arabs. Later, other Sephardic Jews from Shefaram, Safed, and Tiberias9 joined the Maghrebian Jews in Chart al-Yahud for economic reasons. Meir Cohen-Avidov came from one of the original Shfar’am families that settled in Haifa around the turn of the twentieth century. He added Avidov [Dov’s father] to his original last name after the loss of his son Dov, a pilot in the Israeli air force in the early 1970s. As a member of the Knesset—the Israeli parliament— representing the right-wing Likud party, Meir Cohen-Avidov served as its deputy chair during the late ’70s. I interviewed him at his Haifa apartment in the spring of 2000, though by then he was living near his children, not far from Jerusalem. He was videotaped again in 2001 in Haifa when he showed us around the area where his family used to live in Ard al-Yahud. As a veteran citizen of Haifa, Meir Cohen-Avidov has seen the city grow and change over the years: “I was born in 1926 and I remember being told that at my circumcision in March there was a meter of

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snow in Haifa—a very unusual phenomenon.” He can recall the early years in Chart al-Yahud (where he was born) and the more modern Ard al-Yahud where his family moved because of his illnesses. His family returned to Chart al-Yahud during the violent outbreak of 1929, as “the houses there were better fortified. People organized the boiling of oil on the rooftops, so that when the Arab mob would attack them, they would shower them with boiling oil.” Cohen-Avidov recalled the Jews who came during the thirties from Damascus and Aleppo in Syria and from Salonika in order to build the harbor. He told many stories of Sephardic life and customs, mainly by providing examples from his home and neighborhood life. He devoted much of his interview to events that have religious significance—circumcision, bar mitzvah, and weddings—showing the traditional character of life in the Jewish Sephardic community, the mutual support among community members, and the responsibility the rich took for the poor. Cohen-Avidov told of how his parents got acquainted through the French consulate during World War I. The Middle East of his stories was an open arena, and people who had the means could travel freely between Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and France. The family was a central theme throughout his interview. He talked a great deal about the men in his family, much more than about the women, focusing on his father and on his special relationship with his grandfather, who blessed him as his last act before he died. It was evident that he felt loved by his parents and grandparents, as well as by his adoptive parents who “bought” him when he was deathly ill (reflecting a custom among Sephardic Jews when they feared for a sick child’s life).10 Meir Cohen-Avidov spoke at length of relationships between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim in Haifa. The latter, he felt, perceive themselves as an elite group and have made no real attempts to integrate with the Sephardic community. He considered the Sephardi Jews, “here first,” to be the real elite. Nor were his personal memories positive: First there was his near marriage to a woman of Ashkenazi origin who, he said, “disappeared” a while before their intended marriage date because her parents objected to her marrying a Sephardic Jew. A second story concerned a decision by the kibbutzim to no longer buy leather from his father, but rather to purchase it exclusively from “their” mega-consumer organization, Hamashbir. “The kibbutzim trusted my

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father and respected him, but were forced to purchase their goods from their organization only.” Similarly, the Zionists imposed the norm of purchasing only “their fruit” even if “Arab fruit” was cheaper and better. When I proposed that this reflected their understanding of the goals of Zionism, Meir reacted with fury: “How can this be Zionism if it also hurt Jewish businesses like those of my father?!” Meir Cohen-Avidov tended to present the Ashkenazim as those who ruined the relationships with the Arab population. They were less eager to integrate the Arab population into the city’s social institutions. He talked about his relations with many Arab neighbors, mentioning the mutual concern for one another’s safety, visiting one another, learning from one another, and enjoying social activities together. Meir recalled that Arab neighbors were the ones who kept his family from being harmed during the violence of 1929 and later between 1936 and 1939. He recalled how one of their Arab friends saved some fresh fish for his father, a sign of great respect and admiration for the family. Meir’s interview evinced a typical Israeli paradox: On one hand, he could recall examples of how the Arab and Sephardic Jewish populations respected one another and he blamed the Ashkenazim for much of the growing hatred between these two populations. Yet he was a vehement supporter of the Likud party, whose members tend to be more critical of Arabs and who often try to control and repress them. Several explanations have been offered to account for this paradox (Maoz, 1998): 1. From a social-psychological perspective, the actual conflict was between Jews and the Arab world, which created a normative Israeli-Jewish demand for internal unity (Bar-Tal, 2000). 2. The sociological perspective invokes the “demarcation aspect”: Ashkenazi Jews attributed similar negative traits to the Sephardic Jews and to the Arabs (Alcalay, 1993). 3. A contemporary historical perspective would point to the Sephardic Jews’ reconstruction of Jewish history in the Arab countries in light of the current conflict, emphasizing pogroms and persecution of the Jews at the hands of their Arab Muslim neighbors. 4. From a cultural and psychodynamic perspective, the early local Sephardic Jews’ positive experiences with Arab neighbors were later overrun by the Labor Party’s Zionist reconstruction of his-

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tory. The party’s discrimination against the immigrants from the Arab countries (Alcalay, 1993) caused resentment and aggression among the Sephardic Jews, which was displaced onto the Arabs, who were below them in the Israeli pecking order (BarOn, 1999b). 5. A social geographic perspective would focus on the marginalizing effect of placing the Jews from the Arab countries in outlying areas (Yiftachel, 1998). The hegemonic Ashkenazi leadership was afraid to be faced with a strong Oriental opposition of Jews and Arabs and therefore sent the Jewish immigrants from Arab countries mainly to the less developed periphery. This placement reinforced the previously mentioned demarcation and displaced aggression of the immigrants. My interview in 2000 with Izhak Akiva was characterized by strong anti-Arab feelings. As the chair of the Sephardic Jewish community in Haifa, he conducted interviews with elderly members of his family and other veteran families of the Sephardic community whose stories went back to the early nineteenth century. He started off by telling personal stories in which Arabs were deceptive, claiming falsely to be natives when they had only recently emigrated from neighboring Arab countries. Izhak Akiva went on to detail how his parents helped raise an orphaned Arab child, Sabri by name, who became a member of their household after his mother was killed in a train accident near their house. The family raised cattle, in the fields of the Haifa bay outside of the Jewish part of the town. One day in the late 1930s, at the time of widespread unrest, Sabri emerged from a visit to the mosque accompanied by an Arab mob that went to attack the Akiva home with sticks and metal bars and burned down the farm. Izhak, age 12, and his mother and siblings were warned and ran away at the last moment to the Jewish section of Haifa (his father had died prior to this event). “I ran barefoot in my undershirt. I had no time even to get dressed.” His mother died of grief, shortly afterward. “This shows that you could not trust them. You raise him, and one day he turns against you and tries to kill you.” Izhak Akiva says that he met Sabri again in Acre at the end of the 1948 war and almost shot him on the spot, but retreated at the last moment, unable to take revenge. He later heard that Sabri had “died of fear.”

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Even if this story has imagined elements and raises questions (did he kill Sabri after all? Did he fantasize the encounter?), it still shows some of his feelings toward the Arab youth whom his parents raised but who turned on them and caused them real harm. Izhak Akiva had positive memories only of an Armenian teacher, Armeli (a relative of the famous Israeli national soccer player by that name), who used to teach him English in school, where Jews and Arabs studied together. Armeli would tell his Arab pupils: “Remember, in the end a Jewish state will be established.” Even when the Arabs threatened his life, he would not give in. Izhak recalled with sorrow when he found out that this teacher was finally killed “by our military, in Acre, in the 1948 war. He defended his two beautiful girls when they came into the house, and they shot him on the spot, and I cried when I heard about it.” Though this last story introduced some complexity into Izhak’s construction of the Other, the dominant tone of his interview was negative toward the Arabs, in line with the canonic Zionist approach.

2. The Jewish Ashkenazi narrative: The canonical Zionist voice Three interviews that I conducted in the spring of 2001 in Haifa serve to present the Zionist canonical narrative: an interview with Amnon Linn, a previous Labor Party member of the Israeli Knesset, an interview with Gershon Gilad, who was chief intelligence officer of the Northern Brigade during the 1948 war, and a videotaped interview that Sigal Buchman and I conducted with Amram Mitzna, then the mayor of Haifa.11 The interview with Amnon Linn was basically a politicized recounting of historical events. He made almost no reference to personal experiences, despite having taken part in some of these events, nor was there any mention whatsoever of family, childhood experiences, or anything else of a private nature. Amnon Linn grew up in Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, which belonged Hashomer Hazair and Mapam—the left-wing branch of the Labor movement. He fought in the 1948 war to gain Israeli control over Haifa and the Galilee. He listed the names of all the Arab commanders and described at length all the acts of retaliation on both sides (admitting that the Jews also

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conducted cold-blooded murder as retaliation, especially after a massacre of Jewish workers in the Haifa refineries in December 1947). As a fluent Arabic speaker, interested in Arab politics and social life, Amnon Linn was nominated in 1951 as the head of the Arab affairs department of the Histadrut (the Israeli federation of workers) for the northern part of the country. In this role, he appointed Arabs to positions and provided them with work, which gave him a great deal of power. He was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Labor Party in 1967. He viewed himself as an expert on a number of issues: Palestinian and Arab culture and the Arab approach to the conflict and to Jews, Judaism and Israel. In the interview, Linn espoused current right-wing positions: The Arabs will never accept an Israeli state since it goes against Islamic beliefs that the Jews are a religion, not a nation, and thus not entitled to a state of their own in a predominantly Muslim part of the world. The Palestinians are not ready to negotiate because they believe that the Israeli state is a dying power and given time will disappear. The Palestinians are employing a policy of “stages”: After one goal is achieved, they move on to next one, aiming ultimately for the destruction of Israel. For the most part, Amnon Linn justified the actions that the Israeli government and the military regime took to maintain control over the Israeli Arabs from 1948 until 1966. He voiced criticism only when he talked about the government policy of “present absentees”— preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands and homes and then terming them absentees, thereby enabling the government to use the property for the resettlement of new Jewish immigrants. On the whole, Linn appeared to be saying, “We did what we did because we had no choice, but everything that we did was good for the Arabs in Israel.” The military regime was good for the Arabs living in Israel, he claimed, since it kept Israeli-Jewish vengeance to a minimum. He credited his work through the unions and government institutions with greatly improving the quality of life in many Arab villages. At no time did he mention the preferential support given to Jewish-Israeli towns, cities, and settlements, compared to what is given to Arab towns, resulting in an overall lower rate of socio-economic development in the latter. Through his command of Arabic and his many years of work with Palestinian leaders and people, Linn developed considerable exper-

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tise of Arab culture and Arab perspectives, but this did not change his basic pessimistic outlook. He viewed Israeli Jews as morally superior to the Palestinians and other Arabs. Jewish Israelis have nothing to apologize for, he maintained; it is the Palestinians who should apologize to them. Victims of their own people, the Palestinians have no one but themselves to blame for their plight. I saw Linn as the typical Labor Party official who was never really part of the left, though he was educated at one of the most prominent politically left-wing kibbutzim. His encounter with the Israeli-Palestinians comes from a position of unilateral superiority. Never did he try to see the events from their perspective. Though in a position of power over the Arabs, Linn is ridden by fear of their gaining power over Israel. In the film (Buchman & Bar-On, 2001), Linn explained his current goal: to convince a world that has moved away from the Holocaust and the Jewish plight that the Arabs are still trying to destroy Israel, just as in years past. Inasmuch as he is a member of the Israeli Labor Party, Linn’s positions, as expressed here, can be seen to represent a major shift in Israeli public opinion toward the political right, as a result of the renewed violence after October 2000 and disappointment with the Palestinians not being a “partner for peace.” The interview with Gershon Gilad (80 years old when interviewed in 2000) started in a more personal vein. Born in Berlin in 1920, he and his mother were illegal immigrants to Palestine in 1933. His mother joined a kibbutz near Haifa and later became the household manager for the Weizman family (the parents of the air force commander who later became the seventh president of Israel). Gershon Gilad attended school on the same kibbutz where Amnon Linn was educated, but later went to a well-known agricultural school at the Kadoorie Youth Village, where Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin and Amos Ben-Gurion, together with other leaders of the Labor movement and the elite Palmach unit,12 studied during those years. Gershon remembered being impressed by Rabin’s performance, even though he was in a younger class; he made an impact on people right from the beginning. Gershon himself “was the only Yekke (Jew of German origin) at the time,” and he felt an outsider among “all those Sabres.” But he excelled in his studies and loved the work in agriculture. I could identify with all these details—I attended the same school fifteen years later, also one of the few pupils coming from Germanspeaking background, and I too compensated for being an outcast by

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excelling in school and in agricultural work. Like Gershon Gilad, I admired our principal, Jacob Fiat, an American Jew who introduced liberal educational ideas to the very traditional local school system. Fiat introduced some of the most advanced methods to encourage responsibility and independence in pupils. For example, pupils would decide on rotating workplaces every month, using a very egalitarian system developed in the school. And an honor system meant that exams were given without supervision. Gershon’s school years coincided with the violent events of 193639, and, recruited with his friends to self-defense activities, he finally joined the Haganah in Haifa. There he was gradually promoted and during the 1948 war he was nominated the intelligence officer of the Northern Brigade, under the command of the General Moshe Carmel. He described at length his mission to steal maps from the British Municipal Measurement Department, to provide the Haganah with maps needed for the conquest of Haifa. In a second anecdote, he told of one of his reconnaissance flights over Nazareth in a small airplane. When he leaned out to take aerial photographs of the police station, his eyeglasses fell off his nose. His children, telling the story in later years, joked that he was still looking for his glasses when he later participated in conquering that police station. At the end of the 1948 war, he was in charge of drawing the maps of the cease-fire agreements with Syria and Lebanon. During those years he married and had three children, the oldest of them now already a grandmother herself. As an expert on Arabs, he worked after the war for the governmental authority responsible for the “deserted” Arab houses and land taken over by the government. Gilad later studied law and became the legal advisor for the Oil Refineries in the Haifa Bay, a position he held for twenty years, until he retired at the age of 65. Much of Gershon Gilad’s interview was a long report of all the areas and streets of Haifa where Jews and Arabs lived and where he had to be in charge of conducting military activities to defend the Jewish population. He specifically recalled being in charge of a unit of Mistaravim, Jews disguised as Arabs, in an operation to kill a sniper whose position controlled Herzl Street, one of the town’s main thoroughfares. The Ashkenazi Israeli military command recruited original Sephardic inhabitants of Haifa for these operations because of

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their familiarity with Arab customs and the language. The unit approached the house where the sniper was stationed, but he identified and shot at them. Their commander was injured and the others could not move. Gilad approached and took the injured commander away on his back, as well as helping the other move back to safety. When he got home, soaked with the commander’s blood, his wife almost fainted. Asked about relationships with the Arabs, Gershon Gilad answers with precision: “They were not my friends, but there were friendly relationships between Jews and Arabs in town.” He gives relatively short shrift to the question of why the Arab population left Haifa, claiming first that he as part of the military had nothing to do with that; it was “only the politicians and the British.” He believed that the Arab population, living in the lower quarters of the town, knew that it was in an inferior strategic position in Haifa, and that militant groups and their leaders outside of Haifa exhorted people to leave, “since they would be able to return with King Abdullah of Jordan within a few weeks.” The British facilitated this move by providing transportation. Gilad admitted that there were incidents of Arabs being murdered in the northern villages in order to make the rest flee. He saw such acts as legitimate in war, as the hostile villages were in the rear of the military advance and “had to be cleaned up.” The videotaped interview with Amram Mitzna, then mayor of Haifa (subsequently he became the head of the Labor Party and the opposition forces in the Knesset), was relatively short due to his heavy schedule. He claimed that “generally speaking, there are good relations between Jews and Arabs in Haifa.” The examples he gave were the reconstruction of Wadi Nisnas, a Muslim-Jewish-Christian festival, and the growing prosperity of the Arab population. Asked about more specific issues, he maintained that Arab claims for their original houses in Haifa would not solve anything. He supported the state’s legal decision after 1948 to take over the possessions and houses of those who fled and never to return them on the basis of personal claims, though some were returned on legal grounds. He also claimed that a demand to change back the names of Haifa streets that once had Arabic names came from a very small and radical group of Arab citizens who want to define Zionism as racism. Furthermore, said Mitzna, though Arabs who think that Zionism is racism seek to re-

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name Zionism Avenue, “We will not let them wreak havoc on the good relations between the populations.” He explained that the municipality had decided upon the name “Zionism Avenue” instead of “United Nations Avenue” after the United Nations equated Zionist with racism in 1975 (General Assembly Resolution 3379). In summary, the canonical Zionist voices presented here addressed issues of survival, heroism, and dominance over the Arab population in terms that were largely negative and sometimes even portrayed Arabs as inferior. The violent events at the time of the interviews probably colored this position. The contemporary perspective determined how the past was evaluated and reconstructed in the interviewees’ stories. Other than in Gershon Gilad’s interview, we heard mostly generalized political statements rather than personal stories. It is likely that the narratives people in leadership roles and of a canonical group belong more to the public domain than to the private one (Arendt, 1958).

3. The Communist narrative—A unique joint Jewish–Arab voice The Communist narrative, as the only joint Jewish–Arab voice of its period, characterized Haifa for me more than any other town in Palestine-Israel. And it was a joint Jewish–Palestinian narrative in a deeper sense, as Jews and Arabs were truly committed to the Communist ideas and party, and these brought them to stronger ties with each other. Unlike other joint Jewish–Arab endeavors (for example, the Arab Department of the Histadrut, led by Amnon Linn) that were dominated by Jews and patronized the Arabs, the Communists developed a genuine partnership in which Arabs played leading roles and in some cases displayed intellectual superiority, with deep historical roots in the city. Moreover, the Communist party was unique as the only official Arab movement that welcomed the UN’s partition plan of November 29, 1947. Finally, this group opposed the flight of Arabs from Haifa in April 1948 and distributed flyers among the Arab population trying to prevent their departure. Had they succeeded, the region would be very different today. In my view, there were two major obstacles to their having a significant impact on the Arab population of Haifa in 1948:

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1. Members of the party were a highly intellectual elite, with relatively little impact on the Arab populace. National-religious Muslim preachers such as Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the Mufti of Jerusalem were far more influential. Part of this estrangement also had to do with the fact that the leading figures in the party were Christians Arabs and intellectuals. 2. The dominating doctrine of the Soviet Union did not allow the local Communist party to go its own way. It is clear from Emil Tuma’s writing, for example, that at times the local Communists had internal disputes and points of view that differed from those of the Soviet leadership. But during the years of Stalin’s reign, no such differences of views were allowed, and this determined the fate of the local parties and their leadership. Prominent Arab intellectuals and authors—people such as Emil Tuma and Emil Habibi—led the Haifa Communist party. They were joined after the 1948 war by Jewish figures such as Sami Michael, who emigrated from Baghdad where he was already an active member of the Communist party. They all used to meet around the publication of Al-Itichad: the Communist party’s Arabic-language newspaper. I interviewed Haya Tuma, the Jewish wife of Emil Tuma who died of cancer in 1985. Their marriage personified for me a level of Jewish-Arab unity that seems from today’s perspective not only idealistic but unreal. I wanted to know how Haya and Emil could manage their partnership within a context of Israeli-Palestinian hostility. I met Haya Tuma at her home, decorated with her ceramic art work, in one of the quiet upper-middle-class streets on Mount Carmel—a few blocks away from where my parents lived in the last three decades of their lives. She served Arabic coffee and her Arab carpet was one “that Emil’s mother took from her house when they left and later brought back from Lebanon.” Her home held a mixture of Jewish- and Arab-style furniture. Haya Tuma is a storyteller and Emil was definitely the story of her life. There were moments when I felt that Emil had died just a short time ago, for she spoke of him in the present tense with vivacity and deep longing. She was born in 1931 and met Emil when she was 18. They married two years later. As Haya asked me not to disclose the details of her early life and courtship, I will focus here on the times after their marriage.

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Haya learned to see the conflict from a different perspective through Emil’s eyes. She developed an openness toward the Palestinians’ suffering that was at odds with how events were reported in the Israeli media. The couple’s friends were from within the party, which for them was like an island in a rocking sea. The Tumas did not have an easy time raising their children. They had to take them to an Arab kindergarten, for the Jewish children attacked them “because they had an Arab father.” Today, Haya said, when young mixed couples come to her for advice, she tells them: “You have to decide now how you will raise your children. They cannot grow up in a vacuum, they have to be either Jewish or Arab. A young child cannot decide—especially in such a hostile society—what his or her identity will be.” Haya adds, “And this may be the reason why my children do not live here today. My son Michael lives in Germany as an artist and defines himself as cosmopolitan and there he is accepted as he is. When he had an exhibition in Haifa a few years ago, it started right away: “He is Jewish,” “He is Arab…’” She paused and added that she never had a moment of regret: “There was never a dull moment in my life with Emil, never a dull moment.” Some of Haya’s stories were about Emil during and after the 1948 war. Born to one of the wealthiest Christian Arab families in Haifa, he studied law in Cambridge, England. He hoped to become a historian but his father wanted him back in the family’s retail business. He returned and became the secretary of the Communist party in Haifa. Falling ill with typhoid prevented him from carrying out a plan to continue his education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When the fighting broke out in Haifa in late 1947, Emil had good contacts with David Hacohen, one of the Jewish leaders of the Labor Party in Haifa. Hacohen urged Emil not to leave Haifa, promising that he personally would take care of the Tuma family. But Emil’s father, who owned a summer house in Lebanon, decided to take the family there for a while because their home in Haifa was in the line of fire between the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, and “the bullets started to fire through their house in both directions.” In Lebanon, Emil was put under detention “because he was a Communist and because he opposed the UN partition plan. He was in favor of a bi-national state.” Emil’s sister Olga, engaged to a man who had not left Haifa, returned to Israel. (Her fiancé, Tufik Tubi, lat-

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er became a member of the first Knesset, representing the Communist party). Emil’s uncle, Michael, was informed through connections in the Lebanese parliament that members of the Lebanese government planned to assassinate Emil because of his communist background. Advised to leave at once, Emil walked overnight in heavy rain, with the help of a guide who rode a donkey. When he crossed the border into Israel in the morning, he was arrested at an Israeli army outpost and brought to the commander. He identified himself as Emil Tuma and the commander replied, “We know, we were already waiting for you.” The commander had orders to send him back to Lebanon, but Emil protested, “Kill me here—it doesn’t matter if it is a Lebanese or Israeli bullet.” They negotiated for some time, while the other soldiers listened, and when Emil was sent to the border he was smuggled back into Israel, where he was picked up and hidden in a nearby Arab village where he had friends. An eight-year-old child who later became the village physician used to bring food to his hiding place. Finally, Tufik Tubi succeeded in getting Emil a permit to settle back in Haifa. But because of his dissenting views, the party did not restore his leadership role and he focused on editing its newspaper. Haya added that during the early 1980s, Emil once went to a barber shop in Wadi Nisnas for a haircut. There a man approached him and asked him if he was Emil Tuma. When Emil confirmed it, the man told him that he was one of the soldiers at that army post in 1948 and that he and his friend were so impressed by Emil’s arguments that they decided to guard his way back to the border until they saw someone pick him up to bring him to safety. Emil was so stunned that he forgot to ask for the man’s name or phone number… Haya was distraught over recent events and hearing television reports of mobs calling “Death to the Arabs” at soccer games or after a suicide bombing. She was also disillusioned with Emil’s Arab followers and frustrated by the Jewish–Israeli authorities. For example, the Haifa Municipality wanted to destroy the Tuma house, which had stood empty for decades, in order to build a new highway. (Later, during the 2003 mayoral elections, Yona Yahav, who ended up winning the post, promised to preserve the house and turn it into a Jewish-Arabic center for the city of Haifa.) The place where Haya Tuma was embraced by officials of the government and by the people in the streets was Jordan. When she

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traveled there in later years with an Israeli women’s delegation and people found out that she was Emil Tuma’s wife, they told her repeatedly that Emil Tuma was their ideologue; that growing up they were sustained by his writings. On his tomb in Haifa was inscribed, “He devoted his life to the Jewish–Arab issue.” Haya ended the interview with a sigh. “The small stories of coexistence show that another way is possible.” I was overwhelmed by the sense of missed opportunities when I left the interview with Haya. How many opportunities did Jews and Arabs miss in the history of Haifa and probably in many other places during those days? And why do we continue to miss them now? Are people so committed to the mistakes of the past that they cannot mourn what has been lost and turn over a new page? Difficult questions with no good answers. The Communist narrative: A second-generation reflection I met Walid Karkabi at his home on Abbas Street, in a beautiful location overlooking the harbor. A couple of months earlier I had spent an evening at his parents’ home with a few of their friends—what remains of the circle of the Christian communist intelligentsia in Haifa today—listening to their views of the past and the present. Walid Karkabi is an architect and works for the municipality restoring important houses in Haifa. His well-preserved home, with its thick walls of local stone, reminds me of my parents’ former house not far away, in the German Colony. The walls are hung with impressive paintings by his Russian-born wife. They met while he studied in Leningrad during the seventies. He began on a positive note. I was born at the beginning of 1957, and among us [time was measured as] “before ’48” and “after ’48.” They would always say, “You were born nine years after ’48.” I was born into a very warm family, very close, and like everyone they really experienced this sharp transition in ’48. In spite of the personal tragedy that hit them—the family separated and property was lost—I always remember my parents as full of optimism and hope for a…better future, and I always remember that my parents got over this personal trauma, and they really believed, with all their hearts, in the possibility of co-existence in this country.

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Their political activities naturally allowed contact with very many friends, including Jewish friends. For as long as I remember myself at home, my parents’ home was always open for many people, and all kinds of friends would visit us from Tel Aviv and even sleep over when there was some kind of event here. So I will say that I don’t know how standard my upbringing was relative to the Arab sector in general. Both of Walid’s parents were from the same Haifa family, eighth generation members of the Tubi family, which was related on his mother’s side to another clan with deep roots in Haifa, the Tumas. He noted that his house had belonged to Emil Tuma until his death in 1985 and remained in the family’s possession after the establishment of the state. After Emil’s parents and most of his family left for Lebanon, Emil and his sister Olga lost almost everything else. Walid added that his father’s family, the Karkabis, were very well-known in Shefaram and came to live in Haifa from the end of the 1940s, immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel. Ah, the stories of what happened always accompanied us—always. We have a lot of relatives, uncles and aunts, in all kinds of places, be it Jordan or be it Lebanon, and in Europe, in London, and in Greece; in every possible place—in the United States, of course.… Keeping the family cohesive was at the center of everything. And there was my grandmother, who always told us all the stories and how it happened and how they left… the uncertainty and the fear of what was to come definitely influenced the people to leave. Ah, of course today when you look back, they say, “If only we hadn’t left, then perhaps all of the history would have changed…it’s possible, but who knew then what we [know now], what we are waiting for, and what they could really expect.” Karkabi’s maternal grandfather’s house was right on the border between the Arab and Jewish areas, one of the most dangerous spots in Haifa. The family had no choice but to leave their home, a few days before Haifa fell to the Jewish forces. “There was shooting and bombs fell; it was one of the places in Haifa, I think, that really was under fire.” At that point the family left for Lebanon. His parents went there

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independently of each other, and returned the same way, though they were together there. His father, active in the Palestinian Communist party even before the establishment of the state, returned because of his belief that he needed to be back in Haifa. I asked how it was that so long ago the Communist party already had a different approach to the conflict and ways to solve it. For Karkabi, the answer was simple: the fact that it was the only party that was Jewish and Arab “very much influenced the way it looked at things.” He also thought there was an ideological closeness to Israel among the Communists of the time, because the issues of internationalism and socialism were central to the early architects of Israel. And, he added, “I think that the Communist Arabs were the only Arabs who really [accepted] the 1947 UN partition decision.” They paid a price for this stance. “They were deviants in the landscape then, and very wide circles among the Arabs looked at them as if they were traitors: ‘What does that mean that you accept this UN partition plan?’” The Arab leadership rejected the plan as unfair but Walid pointed out the prescience of the Communist party: Look, the fact is that the Communists declared that it was forbidden to leave the country, and that even after establishment of the Jewish state, the State of Israel, it would remain our country, and that it was preferable to stay here instead of being some place else that does not belong to us. This means that they pretty much envisioned what was going to happen. They also thought that there was some kind of plot here against the Palestinian Arab people, yes, to try to thin them out from here, as much as possible. The Communist party, however, did not succeed well in convincing the population to stay put, despite their considerable effort. “Ah, they were a small minority,” said Walid, “that spoke in very different tones… general public opinion was different.” I asked if members of his family had threatened. He denied it, but admitted that there were “definitely all kinds of clashes in different workers’ forums or… in different social forums. But something really violent, no, I don’t think so.” I think that Jewish-Arab cooperation in Haifa produced a kind of cosmopolitan atmosphere that was quite different from every-

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where else in the country. I am talking about the years at the end of the ‘20s and of the ‘30s, actually, the years of great financial growth in Haifa. I think that this contributed to bringing together the way in which my parents, these people, looked at what was going to happen. They understood their solidarity with the Jews who came from Europe after, as a result of the Holocaust; I think that definitely was a factor, a very important [one] in the polishing of their world views. As Communists they knew what had happened in Europe, and they understood very well that some kind of different reality was emerging that was impossible to ignore, and they simply had to accept this reality, as it was. Karkabi did not remember family discussion about the cooperation between Hassan Shukri and Shabtai Levy, the Arab and Jewish mayors of Haifa, but said that opinions were likely to have been divided. On the one hand, “all in all, Hassan Shukri did his job and it was impossible to ask him to act differently” and not cooperate with the British and the Jews. Some, though, saw him as a collaborator. Karkabi noted that opinions are still very much divided, but he viewed Hassan Shukri as an exceptional personality who managed to do a great deal for Haifa over the many years that he was mayor. Walid Karkabi recalled specific events in his life that were key in the history of the conflict, but he also spoke of ways in which life carried on despite the tensions: In the year 1964, my father requested clearance to go visit his eldest [brother] who was living in Amman in Jordan. And because of his Communist activities, the Israeli government rejected his request. However, they allowed my mother and the children, us, to go to visit him. I was seven years old and I remember that trip quite well. When we left Haifa it was still very early in the morning hours, and we traveled via the Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem (the UN checkpoint between Israel and Jordan) and came to Amman, and that was something very special... Now, my grandmother and grandfather from my father’s side, they did remain here, as opposed to my mother’s parents, who had left. They lived in Shefaram; my grandfather’s house in Shefaram still exists, one of the old and very impressive houses [there]. It still belongs to the fam-

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ily. And…we would go to visit them, for us it was really a special event to visit Grandpa and Grandma. Look—what happened in ’48 accompanied us. But, I think that we didn’t blow it out of proportion. That is, it didn’t fill our entire lives. We definitely had a lot of activities that belonged to a new life here… Walid Karkabi was educated at a private Protestant elementary school in Wadi Nisnas (still standing), and a Greek Orthodox high school in the Kiriyat Eliezer quarter of Haifa, which he says is today considered the best Arab school in the country. A year after finishing school, the Communist Party gave him a scholarship to study in Leningrad, where his eldest brother was studying medicine. “He was five years older than me and when I came he was already pretty much well into his studies. I must say that without this opportunity it is very doubtful if my parents could have allowed themselves to have us go to school here.” With the education of the first child covered, they could afford local education for the others. Walid noted that his younger brother became a doctor and his parents were able to finance his advanced studies at Hadassah in Jerusalem. I asked what it was like for him to study in Leningrad during that period. “Look,” he answered, “You have to understand that I left here as a boy of 18, completely open, and I ended up in a place, ah, so different from here; the cultural possibilities were amazing.” The influence of those years was profound. It was still the period of Brezhnev, the Cold War, a time when nothing had changed…as a foreign student who came to attend school, I had my own way of understanding this situation. When I would come home and be critical of the Communist regime at that time, my father did not like my open criticism. That came only later, during perestroika. Before that, there was this need to show loyalty to the regime. There were about thirty foreign students from Palestine and Arab-Israelis, but I was alone in architecture. This was actually a good thing, I wasn’t so interested in connecting to the Israelis, I always looked for the connection to the Russians, and to the Russian culture and, and it was very interesting, really. I must say that I am not talking about theatre and cinema and this amazing coun-

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try in which it was possible to see the architecture that was so very different from the Western architecture, by the way, very different. Walid Karkabi talks fluently and eloquently. The only signals of stress appeared with his repetitions of words and “ah’s.” These surfaced when he talked about the more delicate issues: the fact that his family had been dispersed all over the world since 1948, the Israeli authorities not allowing his father to see his brother in Jordan, the Communist party’s lack of influence on the Arab general public, the polemical Arab opinions about Hassan Shukri. His pride in his family, in their struggle to remain united under the most difficult circumstances, was evident. The family’s talent, status and affluence helped them cope with the hardships of exile during those difficult times. After our conversation Walid took me on a tour to see some of the old Arab houses he had recently reconstructed in Haifa. I was impressed by his knowledge of the different styles of construction of the thirties. A special Haifa architecture seen in some buildings combined imported Central European (Jewish) knowledge with local materials and ways of constructing houses. I was quite moved, as he led me through some of my childhood neighborhoods, absorbing a new map of my town that I was hardly aware of. We share the love of this town, though we come from such different backgrounds: he, expressing it through his love for the architecture; I, expressing it through my relationships with people, memories and landscapes.

4. The non-Communist Arab voices of Haifa Ibrahim Berumi: There is no place that can accept me as a whole person…there is no perfect situation in the world.

Wassim Berumi interviewed his father Ibrahim during our 2000-01 workshop at Ben-Gurion University (see chapter 4). Since Ibrahim happened to be born in Haifa, I asked Wassim about interviewing him for my project at their home in Acre, a mixed Jewish-Arab coastal town north of Haifa where the British sent many of the Arab refugees from Haifa and where a few of them settled.13 However, I present here the interview that Wassim conducted with his father, as I believe their dialogue to be more authentic in terms of the internal

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Muslim Arab affairs of Haifa and their transmission of narrative from one generation to the next, than Ibrahim’s interview with me. IB: Good evening. My name is Ibrahim Berumi I was born in Haifa in 1937. After the State [of Israel] was established, we lived here in Acre; we settled down somehow, living a normal life. Let’s go straight to the subject matter. I have three children, two boys and a girl. I put a lot into their education, I wanted them to study. It did not go so well in Israel. Two studied abroad, and thank God— this was luck from heaven—the third was accepted for studies here. Every coin has two sides; I believe in that. I myself finished the technical high school near the Technion [Bosmat] in Haifa in 1956 and became an independent electrician working in electromechanics. I did not have the chance to study further and therefore decided to invest in the children, and thank God it worked out well. There were times that I felt a bit…I don’t know whether to call it discrimination, or what to call it…when things did not work out and I found out and it was painful. I wanted to rent a lot in the industrial park of the town and to build there. There were discussions in the municipality, but finally I got the lot and I was promised a cheap loan and sold my car and started the construction…I was suddenly told by the ministry that I did not deserve it because I am an Arab, only people who finished the army [were wanted]. They said it straightforwardly, just as you hear it now. It was painful, but I decided not make a fuss over it… I am a quiet man and gave in. So the building is half done. But I earn my living well in the rented place, and I could not move over because they did not give me the loan. WB: Did you try to approach them? IB: I tried, but they told me that the loans are only for military veterans. I gave in. WB: Why? IB: Why? Because I do not have the energy to fight these strong institutions. WB: You were born that way or were brought up that way? IB: I think I was brought up that way. In my family the message was that you should distance yourself from problems and I believe this is such a problem…I did not want it…But it does not matter, be-

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cause, thank God, now I have my own reputation after being a mechanic for more than forty years; I have my clients. At the beginning they were afraid to work with an Arab, but I slowly proved myself, and now my clients are 50 percent Arabs and 50 percent Jews, and I cannot complain. I invested everything in the children, in their being good students, with high grades and high psychometric scores. They were not accepted here, there were even remarks that they should go abroad, I don’t know why. WB: Can you give me an example? IB: I do not want to go into this… WB: Why? IB: Because, I don’t like disputes… I preferred to work hard, take expensive loans so the children, except for you, Wassim, can study abroad. You were accepted at the last moment at Ben-Gurion University, thank God. But I want to start from the beginning when we lived in Haifa. I was born in Haifa, and so was my father and his father. I remember that when I was eight or nine (in 1936), the unrest started in Haifa. I did not understand a lot of what it was about. I just know that they shot at us, downtown, from the Jewish parts uphill. People would go up the stairs to the marketplace and would be shot at by Jewish snipers from the top. I was a child and I was afraid. Once they told of a bag being thrown down the stairs and when it was opened it was an Arab cut into pieces. He wanted to be clever and to go up the hill to the Jewish quarter to get back some money that they owed him, so they cut him into pieces; this is what I remember being told as a child….I studied in a school on Iraq Street, and one day the shooting broke some windows and the teacher told us to lie down on the floor. Later we were told to go straight home and not to come back to school. I was in fourth grade… and there was shooting all the time and we got used to it. Then one day, we went to sleep, and suddenly someone knocked on the door. It was my uncle: “What are you still doing here? Everyone ran away.” So we ran out without taking anything with us and ran straight to the monastery. WB: Why there? IB: We were told it was safer there, where people could gather. I was a child, but I remember people saying that Arabs were being taken in groups of fifty to the harbor. That the British, people in uni-

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forms, would help us go to Lebanon, to run away…We were lucky to get stuck in Acre. WB: Why did you get stuck in Acre? IB: We wanted to continue to Lebanon, people were just like a herd of sheep. But someone arrested the older children from 18 to 19. So my father said, “I will stay here till my son is released. So we stayed as well, and then they closed the border and we got stuck here. I think it is my luck that we got stuck. WB: But why here? IB: Because, as much as I understand… here I feel better… Here I have… I don’t know, I think here it is better. WB: But earlier you said that you are restricted here and now you say that you feel better –why? IB: Even if I am restricted here, I think that here it is better anyway… in spite of everything. I hear that there are also restrictions in other places. I don’t know what restrictions they have—maybe more, maybe less… there is no place that can accept me as a whole person, as a full citizen, as a person with all rights. Here at least there is a democracy that I believe in and I manage somehow; I earn my living, and I am happy with my portion. I am an optimist by nature and therefore I say, “Good that I stayed here.” I hear that Palestinians are not granted citizenship in other Arab states, so here at least I have an I.D. card and citizenship and I managed…had I all the rights it would have been even better, but there is no perfect situation in the world. I would have liked very much to get a few more rights here that I am entitled to. WB: When you arrived in Acre, where did you live? IB: First with another family and then we took a room—in the deserted Arab houses, because people fled, and others took over another room; there was a court and rooms around so we made partitions so no one could see us from the courtyard…and a few families lived there, with communal toilets and no kitchen, no showers…we used to heat water on a stove—that is how we lived—Dad, Mom, and four children. WB: What did your father work at during that time? IB: As an older person he had no chance of finding a job, but during the British Mandate he owned a private school, he was a teacher and had this school, until they closed it and he went to work for Abba Hushi14 as a tax collector, when Hushi was still in the unions,

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before he became mayor. Hushi had a jeep during the Mandate time, and he and my father would travel among the kibbutzim and moshavim15 in the area and collect taxes for the unions. After the war, when Hushi became mayor, someone came and suggested to my father that he return to Haifa, to live there and get a job at the municipality, but my father declined the offer. He still thought that Arabs could be hurt in Haifa, and from Acre it is closer to Lebanon. In Acre he worked for a while in the unions, but then he opened a store, with a partner, and he worked there; he could not do more as an older person. Ibrahim wanted to continue to talk about his son who studied to become a dentist abroad and had trouble getting a permit to practice in Israel after he came back, and about his daughter who got her doctorate abroad, and about his third child (Wassim) who studies in Israel, thank God. But Wassim had his own agenda: WB: When you lived in Acre, you did not think of returning to Haifa, to your house? IB: I was a child, but what I heard was that Haifa was more dangerous than Acre. Perhaps it was propaganda, but that is what I overheard as a child. In Acre there were only Arabs then and we felt more secure here. On the other hand, there was the constant fear that we might have to move on to Lebanon. WB: And did you work at while living in that room? IB: We lived there a few years until I started to work, and I bought an apartment in the new [Jewish] part of Acre and moved my family there. WB: All of you [siblings] worked? IB: No, I worked and my brother studied; my father did not work anymore. WB: How did you start to work? IB: I looked for a job in the industrial area of Haifa, for six pounds a day, which was not much but it enabled me to learn a profession... I had a good background from the vocational school, and I was strong in theory. Even my boss did not know some of the things I knew theoretically. There were younger [Jewish] helpers there and they got twelve [British] pounds a day; they would laugh at my salary, and I was their foreman…When I asked for a raise, my boss

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refused: “If you want, you can work; if not, go…” Three and a half years with this salary, but I did additional work and I saved, and then I rented this workshop. I slowly developed my clientele. At some point a Jewish person wanted to compete with me and told people to come to his place, but my clients told him: “We have here an Arab who is doing a reliable job—good price, good service—why should we leave him?” WB: And you had Jewish neighbors near the apartment you bought? IB: Yes, Jewish and later other Arab neighbors, and we all got along very well. WB: You chose to live in the Jewish part of Acre? IB: Not specifically. I had a friend who wanted to sell his apartment. I did not mind. WB: Did you ever return to your house in Haifa, to see it at least? IB: After many years…I did not, but someone who went back told us that the house was empty. I am not sure, I think it was my uncle who went back and found my mother’s sewing machine and brought it with him to Acre; that is the only thing they brought from there. WB: Does the house still exist? Do you have any rights? IB: No, it was destroyed in the meantime and I am not looking for rights, I don’t even know if we owned it or rented it. WB: In which house do we live now? IB: This house is an old Arab house.16 When we got here it was populated by three Jewish families who divided it among them, the two stories of the house… WB: When you came here first and saw an Arab house, populated by Jewish families, did you not feel anything inside? IB: What was I supposed to feel? We were already used to it. We also lived this way, a few families in the same house. WB: I meant that there are Jews living in an Arab house. IB: I live among Jews; why should it disturb me? It does not… WB: It never did? IB: Practically not. I know that there are some very good Jews and there are some very good Arabs, and there are others on both sides. I know that I relate to every person in the same courteous way and get back accordingly… An exceptional person can be a Jew or an Arab and a bad person can be either…No, I do not think it disturbed me. Remember that I studied in a Jewish vocational school

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in Haifa, lived among them, visited them, they visited me, and I was in daily contact with them WB: And that is how you acquired such good [Hebrew] language? IB: Yes, I also loved that language and wanted to learn it in the right way. WB: That is why you prefer to conduct the interview in Hebrew? IB: I think it is easier for me to express this in Hebrew, my feeling this way… WB: Do you think that this is something you transmitted to your sons, to your daughter, through the education: your relationship to the Jews? IB: I did and I still do… a man is a man and [you should] distance yourself from politics, which has no God, only dirty games. Also my father was like that, till the very end. Politics is dirty and I do not walk in the mud. And I am also not willing to sell my conscience. You remain clean and white like snow; this is what I look for, this what I got from my parents, and thank God, my children did not get involved in politics. WB: You said that your father worked as a tax collector; did that not affect his relations with Arabs or with Jews? IB: Tax collection is work, not politics, and I also cannot tell you much about that because I was a child and he did not talk much, he did not tell me anything. All I know is that he worked and had very good relations with Jews and Arabs. Also, when we still lived in Haifa we had Jewish neighbors and we used to light the candles for them on the Sabbath, but when the unrest (of 1936–39) started, they ran away; I do not know how, but I know that they left the house. WB: Can you give me an example of the good relationships? IB: I do not have examples because I was a child…I only remember that an uncle of mine used to live near the seashore not far from Haifa, I think in Tantura, and he once saw a person drowning in the water, and he ran and rescued him, and it turned out that this was a very famous physician, and [the physician] always said that an Arab rescued him and he gave free medical services to the whole family. Interesting that I only now recalled this event. There were good relations and therefore it is so painful to see how things have deteriorated recently. I remember that once in a Bible lesson

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When Wassim presented his father’s narrative in the classroom, he expressed his shock at his father’s willingness to glide over the painful past. He was especially troubled by the issue of the family house in Haifa: How could it be that his father never visited that house and did not express any feeling at all for it? Ibrahim, discussing his own father, describes the instability and insecurity of the early years: Should they stay? Should they go to Lebanon? In his own life, Ibrahim professes acceptance of their fate as displaced and disadvantaged (“There is no perfect situation in the world”), while his anger and frustration turn up between the lines (“I have this dark spot inside that pierces me”). He tries to overcome that dark spot with an emphasis on his vocational accomplishments and the education he succeeded in providing for his children. Not only did he enable their formal education, but he also tried to give them his moral message: “There are good Jews and good Arabs and there are also others…” In the encounter between the father and son, there was a manifest difference between the “bent generation,” as Rabinowitz and Abu Bakr (2002) defined Ibrahim’s generation, and the “Stand Tall” generation to which Wassim belongs. The younger generations, sensing

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the contradictions within their parents’ narrative, open up old wounds that the parents wanted to forget in order to have a “happy and quiet life.” When Wassim asked how his father felt when he moved to their present house, Ibrahim was largely oblivious to the gist of his son’s questions; his sensitivity to the fact that Jews had occupied an Arab house. A interesting, related point is that Ibrahim chose to conduct the interview with his son in Hebrew, though they usually converse in Arabic. At the same time, the encounter between Wassim and Ibrahim was characterized by identification and warmth, a sharing of the pain of displacement and of the not-reconciled past. Reconstructing a family’s silent voices Nabeeha Odeh was born after the 1948 war. One of my graduate students, who worked with her as a nurse, introduced us. Nabeeha agreed to help me interview her family—her mother and two aunts (one died later of cancer), her uncle, her father-in-law, and later her daughter. Nabeeha helped me out with translations when necessary and introduced me to all these people, most of them living still in a small Arab enclave, Kababir. Once an Arab village on Mount Carmel, Kababir was later “swallowed” by the expanding Jewish neighborhoods of Haifa (Gilad’s family lived in one of them). Still, the enclave maintained an active mosque and had about thirty extended Arab families living in their original homes. The interviews with the older generation were characterized by stories of suffering before, during, and after the 1948 war. There were some efforts to resist, but the weapon supply was poor and some of the old rifles they had could not shoot. These interviewees portrayed the British as helping the Jews (almost the opposite stories could be heard on the Jewish side), and finally evacuating most of the Arabs from Haifa’s harbor to Acre. Later, after the Haganah conquered Haifa on April 21, 1948, a few weeks before the State of Israel was declared, the British used their navy rafts to evacuate the Arabs to Lebanon. There were stories of the young being driven hastily by their parents out of their homes, reaching the harbor and traveling on the rafts, not knowing where they were going to land. There were other stories of evacuation by truck to the Jenin area, then under the control of the Arab Legion in Jordan. Later stories told of efforts to

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sneak back to Haifa, at night, through the villages and forests. My interview partners, who succeeded in these efforts, were among the few lucky ones, resettling in Haifa and its surroundings shortly after the war. However, they were usually not allowed to return to their original homes. There were painful separations between children and parents who lost track of each other and could not reunite for many years, if ever. Through her assistance with the interviewing process, listening to these stories being told and retold, Nabeeha Odeh started to ask herself questions. (“I am like a bear who slept for a long time and woke up,” she commented.) Why did her father, who had died eight years earlier of cancer, talk very little about 1948? He experienced the war in Wadi Nisnas at the age of fourteen. She knew only that during the fighting he had seen bodies being dumped off a truck in the Wadi. And why did her father always keep such large supplies of food at home? Why did he tell her not to be sad; to be happy? He would get frantic when being approached by the police and would preach to his children to keep away from Israeli administration. Why did her mother never show her where they used to live before the war? Why did all her other relatives flee and where did they live today? Some of these questions had actually cropped up in Nabeeha’s mind when she visited her uncles in Jordan a few years earlier. But she later forgot about them until after I came and asked her to help me with the interviews. When Sigal Buchman and I made a documentary film based on my interviews, Nabeeha, for the first time, took her mother and daughter to the Haifa neighborhood where her mother had lived before the war. Though they reside within a couple of miles of the place, they had never gone to see it before. When Nabeeha asked her mother, Badriya, why, the answer was, “I don’t know, it is still too painful.” We traveled together to Acre, to interview Nabeeha’s aunt, who was ill. On the way back home, Nabeeha asked Badriya why they had not all stayed in Haifa in spite of the fighting. Badriya answered, “There were dead in the streets, we were afraid, everybody left, we wanted to rescue our children…” But after a few minutes of silence, Badriya continued, “Today, were it to happen again, we would let the children die, we would not leave at any price. Where should we go— to Syria? Lebanon? Look how our relatives live there, still in refugee

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camps after fifty-three years!” During this period, a new outbreak of violence was surging across the Palestinian territories and Israel, and I could not resist thinking that now in 2001 the Palestinians were fighting the war they had wanted to fight (and did fight, relatively poorly) in 1948. On another occasion, Badriya showed a different aspect of her feelings: “When a Palestinian or an Israeli-Jewish child dies in the conflict, I cry. Who cries? Those who cry are mothers of children who died, and I am a mother too.” While being videotaped in the area where her parents used to live, Badriya entered a carpentry shop, which was once the house of Umna, a relative who lived there before 1948. Eyal, the Jewish owner, was surprised by their story, as he had thought it an old Turkish house and had never seen Nabeeha or Badriya before. Nabeeha then asked him how he would react if her relatives wanted to come back and resettle in Haifa. After some hesitation, Eyal answered, “This is a problem, a problem.” Nabeeha asked, “How would you vote if the Right of Return [for Palestinian refugees] was brought to a referendum?” Eyal replied, “I would vote for financial compensation.” Nabeeha reacted: “At least you recognize that this was taken away and should be compensated for.” Eyal responded, “This is the minimum you can do, one cannot deny that they were expelled.” Nabeeha replied, “Of course, there are still many [Jews] who are not willing to recognize even that.” Listening to this exchange, I thought to myself, here are two individuals, with all the burden of their respective nation’s narratives on their shoulders, trying to find a way to communicate with each other as human beings, but almost crushed under that burden. In her interview, Nabeeha also reflected on the fact that she grew up in a relatively small family, with very few cousins, aunts, and uncles. Now she knows she could have had a big family around her, but many of her relatives were dispersed all over—in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan. She would actually be happy if they could come back. Again, I could not resist seeing the analogy, one that Nabeeha was even not aware of, to stories of the children of Holocaust survivors: the father’s silence, the compulsive storing of food, the avoidance of the sites that are painful to remember, and moreover, the growing up in a small family, knowing that all the relatives are far away (but alive, unlike the relatives of Holocaust survivors).

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Nabeeha made reference to the violent events after October 2000. On several occasions she had to leave the worker’s lounge at the hospital because she could not bear how people would talk about Arabs. She spoke of a nurse who was a good friend for many years, but who would say such things as, “There was nothing here before the Jews settled,” or “If you were in Saudi Arabia, you would not be able to have a profession the way you do here, thanks to us.” Nabeeha felt humiliated: “This is racist talk. Finally, I reached the point when I could say this word aloud. As long as I keep quiet, I am an okay ArabIsraeli, but once I say something, empathizing with my own people who now suffer again, from that moment on I am a troublemaker for them.”

Haifa: Missed Opportunities; New Opportunities Before ending my interviews, I met with the writer Sami Michael. The fresh outbreak of violence pained him greatly. “The Zionist leadership that came from Europe had no idea how to live with the Arabs,” he told me. “Instead of learning, instead of trying, they only estranged themselves more and more... I accuse the leadership of both sides, of poisoning the minds of their people with so much hate for such a long time and to such an extent that only a terrible new wave of bloodshed will bring both sides to realize that they have to find a way to live peacefully with each other. Haifa, with all its imperfections, can be a model of coexistence. Here there are all the contradictions of Israeli society—Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, religious and secular, Christians and Muslims. But the atmosphere is such that these people can talk to each other, and this could serve as a model to the whole region.” Like Michael, I hope, though there is something naïve about such optimism. When, occasionally, I come back to Haifa, I am excited not only because of my childhood memories, but also because of the people I got to know during my interviews. Their narratives help me recreate my own, despite my lack of words. Haifa, with its wonderful landscapes, could be a beautiful city of peace. To reach this goal, it must reconcile the diverse voices we have heard, and bring them into dialogue.

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1 The interviewees in this chapter agreed to the use of their real names, as their narratives usually present what Arendt (1958) calls the public rather than the private discourse. 2 I was reminded, with all the difference in contexts, that when I conducted my interviews in Germany I once asked my mother to join me and go together to her hometown, Hamburg. We spent a weekend there and she showed me around. She was very emotional and talked a lot about who lived where and what they used to do, but I also could feel how painful the visit was for her, as she had no one to visit there anymore. 3 There are still two houses in Haifa made of prefabricated copper plates, imported from Europe in the thirties. We lived in one of them throughout most of my childhood years. I still remember how on winter days a pail was placed in the hallway to catch the water dripping from the roof through the screws that connected the plates. When I came back to this house years later it suddenly seemed tiny, though in my childish memory it was a huge house. 4 The German Colony was settled by German Christian Templars in the nineteenth century. As German citizens, the Templars were detained as enemies during World War II and their houses were taken over by British Mandate officials. 5 In this chapter I usually use the term “Arab” instead of “Palestinian,” as did my Jewish interviewees. The exceptions are when “Palestinian” was the term used in the original interview. 6 Even to write that the Arabs “left” is controversial—part of the current dispute between so-called “old” and “new” Jewish-Israeli historians (Morris, 1999)—for it suggests a voluntary departure. Usually at PRIME we try to overcome this difficulty by writing “fled/were driven out,” thereby acknowledging both Jewish and Arab narratives. In the case of Haifa, however, “being driven out” does not precisely reflect even the canonic Arab narratives. Instead these narratives emphasize British facilitation of the Arabs’ departure, the “advice” of Jewish commanders to leave after the Israeli-Jewish forces won the battle for the city, and the rationale that staying at that point meant surrender to Jewish occupation. The Arabs do not claim that there was a massacre in Haifa that forced people out from which people fled, as happened in Deir Yassin, a few weeks earlier. 7 I thank Dr. Julia Chaitin for her help in the global analysis and translation of some of the interviews presented here. 8 Chart al-Yahud—the road of the Jews—and Ard al-Yahud—the neighborhood of the Jews—are two quarters of Haifa where Jews used to live among Arabs in the earlier part of the twentieth century. They can hardly be recognized today. The first was totally destroyed right after the 1948 war, together with the Arab neighborhood of downtown Haifa. The second is in ruins and sparsely inhabited.

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9 Some differences are attributed to the fact that the Sephardic Jews lived under Muslim influence, while the Ashkenazi Jews had lived under Christian influence (Alcalay, 1993). For a literary description, see A. B. Yehoshua’s book, The Journey to the End of the Millenium (1997). 10 Akin to the custom of changing a child’s name to trick the Angel of Death. 11 Sigal Buchman and I edited a film based on my interviews in Haifa, called “The Silenced Voices of Haifa, 1948–2001.” 12 The Palmach was an elite unit of the Jewish self-defense militia, composed mostly of kibbutz members, that fought in the 1948 war. It was later dismantled by Ben-Gurion when the Israeli Defense Forces were established. 13 The interview was conducted in December 2000, tape-recorded and transcribed by Wassim, and appeared in his final paper for my course (see chapter 4). I thank Wassim and Ibrahim for their permission to present parts of the transcript here. The interpretations are my own. 14 Abba Hushi was the head of the Histadrut in Haifa at that time, and after Shabtai Levi died in 1952, he became the mayor of Haifa. 15 Moshavim were family-based cooperative agricultural settlements, while kibbutzim were collective agricultural enterprises. 16 In his interview with me, Ibrahim mentioned that the house was previously owned by the Kanafanis—the family of Ghassan Kanafani, the wellknown Palestinian writer whose stories included the famous “Return to Haifa.” He was killed in Beirut during the Lebanon war. It is alleged but not clear that the Israeli army assassinated him.

IN CONCLUSION

Life’s Rivers, Whirlwinds and Whirlpools

1. Coping with criticism We have come to the final chapter, though my travels through the whirlwinds carry on. I have taken you through my personal journey into the world of academe and several of my projects that used storytelling to facilitate dialogue between parties in conflict: Germans and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, and Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians. My study in Germany and my involvement with the TRT group process over more than a decade were formative experiences, out of which the other ideas and studies grew: the two projects at PRIME, the students’ group at Ben-Gurion University, and my interviews in Haifa. I consider the focus on my work in our region with Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinians to be the special contribution of this book. In the previous chapters I described research and intervention processes that aimed to reduce hostility and create a more constructive context in conflict situations. The main vehicle for my research was conducting interviews and analyzing them. Listening to their stories enabled some of my interview partners to create a voice of their own, and for me this in itself was a gratifying process, not to mention how much I learned from listening. The logical next step for me was to try and bring the emerging voices from the different sides of the abyss into dialogue. This took many years to achieve in the German– Jewish context in relation to the Shoah and it is still very difficult to achieve in ongoing conflicts. The art of facilitating dialogue between bitter opponents is an aspect of my work that is precious to me, as is uncovering ever deeper layers of meaning during an interview, especially an interview describing simple daily events. These aspects of

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my work continue to challenge me, no matter how many times I have experienced them before. The pain of my interview partners has sometimes become unbearable for me to carry all alone. It is easier when I know that the story got better with time, as with Anat or Bella and some of my German interviewees. It is much more difficult to listen to stories that still have no “happy ending”; to have the kind of awareness of missed opportunities that I felt while listening to Haya, Ibrahim and Nabeeha in Haifa. I understand why some people cannot listen to these stories: because no one has publicly acknowledged the level of pain that the storytellers experienced, the listeners find no consolation. This could be a clue to the question of what has constituted a “good enough story” in the dialogue groups. A “good enough story” presented the Shoah in the German–Jewish context, or Al-Nakbah in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in a way that both groups could contain, emotionally and cognitively, despite the continuing struggle between them. This was the basis for a common understanding and feeling, the beginning of a collective memory for a group whose members had previously clung to mutually exclusive memories or conflicting “tribal egos.” In the first chapter of my earlier book, The Indescribable and the Undiscussible (1999), I described different methods of seeking. I characterized Amir as the intuitive path-finder who feels the landscape as if a compass were located in his body; Oded as the analytical pathfinder who uses maps, a compass, and azimuths; and Chagai as the one who tries to integrate these two through dialogue between them. When I reflect now on the milestones of my research, I see that I started off by relying more heavily on my intuition, like Amir. There was no rational, analytical way to account either for my initiative in starting my study in Germany in 1985, or for how it slowly evolved, almost by itself, into the long TRT group process. My projects with the Palestinians started more as a result of rational and ethical decision. Only at later stages did I find ways to “dialogue” between my intuitions and my analytical thinking to create the projects I have described. My projects with the Palestinians were admittedly only a first step on a long road. Despite all my efforts and my dialogues with Palestinian colleagues, as an Israeli Jew I still belong to the West more than

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to the East. My intuition works better in Germany than in the Palestinian National Authority and I speak German more fluently than I speak Arabic. I know more about what happens in New York, London and Berlin than in Cairo, Damascus and Amman. Instead of avoiding this reflection (using various rationalizations that are part of our local Israeli discourse, such as blaming the ongoing conflict), I try to be aware that this is part of our problem as western Jews. We are still estranged from the Middle East and we have to find ways to work through this estrangement. Perhaps we need not do it by giving up the cultural heritage we brought with us from the West, or our values and intellectual capacities, but the task of reaching out is still ahead of us. Integrating our Western selves with the life and cultural heritage of the Middle East is an extremely difficult task in this conflict-ridden and chaotic region, especially today when we see this region as extremely hostile to us and the Arab world perceives us as colonizers. This integration will be the task of the next generations, but we can be a bridge for them, perhaps a narrow and fragile one, but a bridge nonetheless, just as my parents were the bridge that brought my brother and me emotionally intact from Hamburg to Haifa. In retrospect, the projects I have described here helped me to widen my bridge during politically difficult times when my people have tended to move in the opposite direction. As they estranged themselves more and more from the Palestinians, and from the Arabs in general, constructing walls on the ground as well as in their minds and souls, they paradoxically became even more alienated and perhaps even less safe. I can understand this need to build walls in the current whirlwinds of hostility, when suicide bombers threaten one’s life almost on a daily basis, but it is at such times that we deserve better leadership, to help us understand that no physical walls, and especially no inner walls, can provide us with safety. They will only make our situation more complicated in the long run, as long as the occupation of the Palestinians by Israel does not end. One could claim that this is a political stand, not a professional one. Some will argue that in my studies I have pursued the political aim of trying to establish symmetry between Jews and Germans and between Palestinians and Israeli Jews and that this biased my findings, rendering them unreliable. I agree that I do have a political be-

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lief in developing mutuality and symmetry with our neighbors, which has affected my perceptions of how we should behave in this context, but I do not think that this necessarily makes my findings untrustworthy. It is clearly much more difficult to generate valuable data in a field in which one is involved personally and politically. Perhaps this is the reason why many academics refrain from studying these topics (Bar-On, 2001b). But I still think that research is possible when one is aware of the possible contradictions and pitfalls. For example, I was able and willing to listen to interviewees in Germany whose approach to the past and the Jews I did not like, because I was genuinely curious to learn how the past still affects their lives and thoughts. I was also willing to facilitate a group of Jews and Palestinians, though some of the attitudes and emotions expressed were very far from my own, because I was eager to learn what obstacles would arise in this form of dialogue. Could I conduct good research in an area in which my political stand was less sharply defined, or in a situation about which I felt apprehensive? For example, would I be capable of interviewing Jewish settlers from the West Bank or religious-nationalist Jews, in order to promote a dialogue between different sections of Israeli Jewish society? My guess is that it would be more difficult for me, and I can see how I could reach my limits in such a case, but I still believe that had I become curious about certain questions of identity construction and change related to these populations, I could have conducted this kind of research. Currently, however, I see the mission to first reconcile internal Jewish Israeli disputes before turning our attention outward as another way to avoid facing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I find the idea that peace among Jews must precede peace with the Arabs to be illusory. Some of those who promote this used to believe in the opposite approach, claiming that only achieving peace with the Arabs will give us time and energy to deal with our internal conflicts. But life and rivers do not stream in a straight line (Jackson, 2002). Internal and external conflicts are similarly chaotic, intermingling and creating whirlwinds and whirlpools. Another criticism of the projects described in this book, from a radical side of the political map, is that interviewing subjugated people, developing dialogue in small groups, and facilitating joint school

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textbooks all create an illusion of “normalization.” Accusers find the semblance of normal relations between the parties inappropriate when one side is in fact exercising disproportionate power over the other. The illusion of normalcy may weaken the oppressed side in the political struggle. I tend to agree that we should always be aware of this danger, and not use the practice of our profession to become bystanders when the unacceptable is happening around us. Researchers should set “red lines” and not continue if they are crossed. I set as my red line the frightening scenario of the government of Israel starting to transfer Palestinians out of Israel or the Palestinian National Authority (as some politicians proposed during the last years of violent conflict). Continuing to do research or engage in dialogue under such circumstances seems to me unethical. There have been times recently when I have been so furious at the behavior of settlers toward the Palestinians, under the protection of the Israeli army, that I felt the need to stop “playing around” with my studies and take violent action. My family helped me restrain myself and to understand that this is exactly what the extremists of both sides are aiming at: to turn us all into animals. A degree of advocacy seems to me legitimate, for successful dialogue requires that those involved take principled stands. Trust grows when partners are forthright about their views, outside the group as well as within. The gaps between the sides that remain provide ample grist for the mill of dialogue. When the gaps are wide and emotions run high, the limits to communication may threaten to overwhelm the group. I experienced our limits in conducting interviews and dialoguing at the 2002 TRT workshop in Derry, for example. The situation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians was so frustrating, and the whirlpool in our well of stories was so immense that it was difficult to bring these two groups into a meaningful dialogue. In 2003, at the farewell meeting in Wuppertal of the German–Jewish group, it became clear that clarifying these issues within the Jewish group was extremely complicated. The group was divided between the “pro-Palestinian” faction and those who were “pro-Jewish.” At critical times, such as during this current stage of the violent conflict, polarization becomes so severe that every sentence, every feeling expressed can be translated and turned as part of the political struggle. But one can still learn from this. For example,

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we saw how difficult it was for the Jews in the group to see themselves as causing evil to the Palestinians, especially in the context of the Jews being on the “moral side” of the Holocaust. Our micro TRT setting displayed, full-blown, certain aspects of the larger internal social crisis within Western Judaism.

2. Social change in Israeli society: Allowing for “weakness” I would like now to look critically at our understanding of social change when working on the grassroots level. In particular, I would like to deconstruct the illusion that our interventions can affect rapid changes in ourselves or in others (Jackson, 2002). The research projects described here have shown what limited space we had to move in, between the personal, professional and political; space that was in many cases constricted further by the limits of our own perceptions. The social change achieved was very limited and occurred only over a very long period of time, even when I succeeded in developing new concepts (such as the “double wall”); even when I got to know aspects of other societies that could be relevant (as attempted in the TRT group); even when I sought to have a political impact through educational activities (such as PRIME’s teachers project). We have to confront and struggle with our naïve perceptions of the social change, in ourselves and in others, that activities such as those discussed in this book can bring. These activities can enhance our understanding, but they also show us how difficult it is for the society around us to adopt psychosocial perspectives without parallel, top-down political change into which our activities and understanding can fit. The question of social change molded me during my early work, even as I tested its limits. Let me recall the introduction and my interview with Peretz in his village in the desert during the late seventies. In the short run, from his perspective, Peretz was successful: he grew high-yield tomatoes for export in hothouses and helped others to do so as well. He succeeded by initiating a top-down process, with the help of Raanan Weitz and the Jewish Agency. But Peretz did not see the personal and social price that people paid for participating in his Zionist voyage, probably because he could not understand or did not value the psychosocial processes that took place before his eyes. Though we at the clinic became aware of the price some

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of “his” people paid, we could not do much about it when the political sensibilities in the village supported Peretz’s idealistic “Zionist” stand and not our psychosocial understanding. I probably had some intuitive early insight into what was happening there, and it became more evident through the interviews in that village, but I could not translate it into practice then. Social change took place only after a much longer period of time, more or less in the direction I had anticipated. But I was not there anymore, as I was not patient enough to follow through; to look for opportunities to pursue my perspective, based on my earlier findings. I had to learn to live with the frustration of my intuitions and analysis and the slow pace of social change. I had to learn to what extent my professional work could or could not be synchronized with processes of social change that took place top-down. Clearly our work can have a more positive impact when it is “in synch” with top-down social and political processes. But if the expected social change will ensue anyway when the political process gets underway, why does one need grassroots, bottom-up projects at all? The case of Peretz’s village in fact shows how changed political or economic processes bring about psychosocial change. The criticism implied in this question is not so easy to rebuff. We have to clarify when our work is valuable for more than fulfilling our own needs to hold out hope for social change. This leads me to what I promised to relate back in chapter 2: how the unresolved silencing of the stories of the Holocaust survivors reached some resolution in Nathan’s kibbutz. Nathan became a member of the TRT group in 1992, and each year at our annual encounter I would ask him if there was any development. Each year I would hear from him that the time was not yet ripe. I began to think that the problem was Nathan lacking the courage to raise the issue in his community. On the other hand, I thought, I left my kibbutz because I had no patience to wait for social change, while Nathan continued to live on his, so he must have a better understanding of social processes in his context. Eventually, Nathan became the secretary of his kibbutz and he even hosted the German–Jewish TRT group prior to the Bethlehem encounter, in 1999. We held an open session at his kibbutz, where Martin Bormann spoke in public in Israel for the first time. This was unthinkable when we deliberated whether to hold

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our 1993 encounter at that kibbutz. The climate of that society had changed, but perhaps not in relation to its own silenced members. I realized that the issue of acknowledging the silent voices of the Holocaust survivors at Nathan’s kibbutz might have no remedy. While on sabbatical in U.S. in 2002–03, I got an e-mail message from Nathan, eager to share his excitement with me. When he had learned that one of the Holocaust survivors on his kibbutz was terminally ill with cancer, he felt that he had to do something before the person died. He tried to organize a meeting of the kibbutz oldtimers to discuss his study; unfortunately, the ill survivor died before that meeting could take place. At the cemetery, during the funeral, Nathan walked by a huge new memorial stone commemorating the establishment of the kibbutz, including the phase when its members were in Jordanian captivity. Nathan observed for the first time that only the names of the Israeli-born veterans and not those of the Holocaust survivors were inscribed on the stone. This was too much for him to endure. When he went jogging with his 14-year-old daughter that week, he showed her the memorial and told her the story of his study. She was shocked and told him he was to blame since he was aware of the unfinished past. “You’ve got to do something to change this inscription,” she insisted. Sometimes what your young child tells you is more effective than what your university professor asks. Nathan decided that on the thirtieth day after the funeral, when everyone was to reassemble at the cemetery for a memorial service, the missing line should be in the inscription. He approached the veteran who had initiated the memorial, and the reaction he got was very typical: “You are right, it just slipped my mind. I didn’t even pay attention to the omission and neither did anyone else.” Together, he and the veteran initiated a meeting of the Holocaust survivors and other veteran members, and after a long discussion they decided to add a line acknowledging the survivors who helped establish the kibbutz and went with the veteran members to captivity. This happened in the spring of 2003—acknowledgment of events that took place in 1948 and which Nathan uncovered in 1992. Fiftyfive years passed by before the pain caused by omitting the survivors from the collective memory of this kibbutz was recognized officially. Will they now feel that they are “good enough”? Will they be able to

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tell their stories in public? Perhaps, but it may be too late to repair that secondary injury which compounded the pain and loss they suffered during the Holocaust. Nathan became very emotional when he told this story during the 2003 TRT meeting in Wuppertal. It became clear how this unresolved episode had burdened his soul and mind all those years, until he finally found a way to address it in his community on a more public level. I mentioned before that Nathan’s story may be a very extreme example of continued social labeling, at least in regard to Holocaust survivors in Israel. But the story also tells us something about the pace of social change when it comes to the 1948 generation. This generation still plays a dominant role in the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionist sector of Jewish Israeli society. In telling Nathan’s story, I moved away from describing a process from the bottom up, as in previous chapters, and how it was transformed into a political, top-down change. We must recognize that the rules of the public domain are different, and it is much more complicated to achieve and impose social change from the top down, in comparison to intervening in small groups or conducting individual interviews. With so many internal and external forces involved, top-down processes of change are chaotic. It is very difficult to predict when change will take place. In my previous book, The “Other” Within Us (1999), I described the common belief that there was no battle shock in the 1948 war. Whenever we interviewed a soldier of the 1948 war who could tell us about his battle shock, we would hear that not only had there been no one he could consult at the time, but that he still suffered from nightmares fifty years later. Yet officially, to this day, battle shock in the 1948 war is a taboo topic (Bar-On, 1999a). Only after the 1973 war did the Israeli army institute any change in diagnosing and treating battle shock. For veterans of the earlier Israeli wars, the silencing continued (Witztum & Levy, 1989). And battle shock again “vanished” from the official psychiatric discourse during the first and second Intifadas (Bar-On, 1999b). If the generation of 1948 cannot deal openly and officially with what it perceives as “weakness” among its own members who suffered battle shock or endured the Holocaust, even in retrospect, how are they to acknowledge what they have done to the “other side,” to

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their Palestinian enemies? Could it be that their standard of silencing whatever represents weakness to them has impeded their capacity for empathy, in a way that still haunts our formal politics today? Had Nathan not been on that kibbutz, perhaps no one there would have paid attention and all of the Holocaust survivors would have died before anyone acknowledged their stories, their double layer of pain. There are probably many such painful stories that no one in our society has acknowledged publicly, stories that have thus been lost to the collective memory. The problem is that the loss of the stories of the past encourages the suppression of new painful stories. One purpose of our projects that work from the bottom up is to generate this data and search for opportunities to introduce them at the political level, thereby also supporting change in the public domain. My work with my students offers additional examples of stories that are not yet part of the public discourse in Israel. Even if they had been made public, there probably would be no one to “contain” them emotionally and respond to them officially. It is my hypothesis that despite all the changes that have taken place in Israeli-Jewish society, the silencing of past “weakness” reinforces the silencing of current “weakness,” especially when male heroic figures are involved. Michael came to my office at the beginning of the 1998–99 academic year. He wanted to do an independent study with me. Undergraduate students in psychology often use independent study as an opportunity to get acquainted with a professor before they start their graduate studies in the field. Michael, however, had a different motive. He knew of my work in Germany and wanted to do a study on the after-effects of the first Intifada (1987–93) on Israeli soldiers. He was a captain in the reserves in the paratroopers, and during the Intifada he had served as an officer in the occupied territories. Discussing his experiences a bit further, he told me that he had killed a Palestinian child during his military service in the West Bank town of Nablus. “Do you know the name of the child?” I asked him. He shook his head no. “Would you like to find out?” was my next question. He hesitated, surprised. “Yes,” he whispered. Michael revealed the place and date of that fatal event. We were speaking back in the “Oslo days,” when it seemed that we were coming to the end of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I asked Sami Adwan, my Palestinian colleague from PRIME, for help in finding out the details, and after a week I had all

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of them. The child, an 11-year-old Jordanian boy, happened to be near the stone-throwing. He was not armed. Injured, he died on the way to the hospital. Giving Michael the details, I asked him if he would like to try and see the family, if they were willing to meet with him. “No,” was his answer, “not for the time being. But I would like to do my independent study on people like me who killed children during the Intifada and how it still affects them.”1 I was hesitating now: “How would you find them? Are they going to be willing to talk with you?” After one week Michael came back with a list of ten officers. He had had no trouble finding them. He interviewed all of them, asking them questions that I asked him, and finally wrote a very interesting paper. I encouraged him to publish it, using pseudonyms, of course, but Michael felt the time for such an article was not yet ripe. We did not know then that a year and a half later Israeli soldiers would be embroiled in a much more violent Intifada. Today there are probably scores of additional Israeli soldiers who killed children during the last few years and may need help in the coming decades—they and their descendants. Shimon joined a workshop for Jewish and Palestinian students that was facilitated by Neve Shalom experts in 1996; one of several that I watched behind a one-way mirror, together with my colleague Shoshana Steinberg. In an early session Shimon related that in the army he was in a special unit of Mistaravim2 and that he came to the group to repair his image of Palestinians, whom he saw during his military service “only through the sights of a rifle.” When he spoke about it, none of the other group members responded. He brought to one of the following meetings a videocassette showing six of his fellow soldiers in the unit answering questions about the ongoing impact of their military service. The interviews were chilling. The interviewees could not be recognized, but they spoke about things they had done, their hatred of the enemy, and how what they had learned (“the art of the revolver”) would also serve them in their future, civilian life. Following the silence that filled the room when the video ended, one Palestinian woman responded, “You are very courageous to show this here, in this group.” Several Jewish women reacted with fury: “This cannot be true. Our boyfriends told us that things are much more humane than what you portray.” They just could not take it. Though I was only an observer of the group, I was stunned, and after the session I invited Shimon to my office to talk a bit more

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about his military experiences. One of those that he told me about was the terror-resistance course that had been part of his training. The soldiers were taught to react instantly and aggressively when they sensed that they were being attacked from behind. They could only be approached from the “right” side coming from the rear, and they all knew which side that was. Once, when his mother woke him up from the “wrong” side, he instantly attacked her before realizing who she was, breaking her finger. He was crying now. I suggested that he seek therapy. A colleague of mine agreed to see Shimon confidentially, without payment. Shimon went for his graduate studies at another university, but we still keep in contact from time to time. He agreed to be interviewed by Michael. There is no official channel in the army taking care of the psychological wellbeing of people like Shimon and his friends. For again, as in the 1948 war, the official military point of view has it that the Intifada “left no scars upon the souls of the Israeli soldiers.” To identify such scars and to help heal them would entail making a political statement, and at least some psychologists are not willing to complicate their professional careers by doing so (Bar-On, 2001a). Karen was another student who wanted to conduct an independent study research project. She came to me not long after I met Shimon. I asked her if her boyfriend served in the army during the Intifada and what she knew about his service. It became quite clear that she knew very little, although she herself was in the army at the same time. I asked her, “What will you tell your grandchildren in thirty years when they come and ask you where you were during this dark period?” Karen had no answer. I did not want to impose my ideas on her. I suggested that she interview women in her situation, asking them the same questions. If this kind of study was not to her liking, she should choose another professor for her independent study. Karen decided to come back, and over the following year she interviewed about ten women her age. When she went for her graduate studies at another university, she asked me to be an additional advisor, and she interviewed twenty couples—soldiers who had played an active role during the Intifada and their wives, to whom they were already then engaged. In general, Karen found out that the women knew very little about their husbands’ activities—and perhaps did not

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want to know too much. Recently we met in New York City where she is now doing her doctoral dissertation in clinical psychology. She wanted to return and interview the same couples again, now that the men were probably involved in the second Intifada. However, her tutor advised her to use only quantitative measures, calling interviews “too subjective and methodologically unreliable.” Here, again, the professional and the political converge, providing another demonstration of how methodological arguments can be used to avoid confronting politically disturbing outcomes. I infer from the studies of Michael, Shimon and Karen, as well as from the studies presented earlier, that Israeli-Jewish society (and to some extent, Jewish society in other countries) suffers today from difficulty in acknowledging and working through its internal inconsistencies, especially those related to what it perceives as its moral and psychological “weaknesses.” This is what has happened to other insecure and heroic societies in intractable conflict situations—for example, Serbia in the Balkans (Ron, 2002) and the Protestants in Northern Ireland (Ross, 2000). It also reminds me of the elegant differentiation David Herbst has made between strong and hard and between weak and soft. Israeli Jewish society has to accept that showing softness does not necessarily mean showing weakness. Israel would in fact gain a great deal of strength by accepting the parts of its past that are less heroic or less morally superior. This would also open it up to accepting those different sides in the Other.

3. Developing a path through political whirlwinds I started this book with the description of a whirlwind in the desert: Strong winds from different directions collide… When caught in a whirlwind you do not know where you are; it blurs your sense of direction…This is my image of where we are today, pulled and pushed by different dynamics that whirl us and whirl around us, so that we can not make sense anymore of what going forward or moving backward mean … I associate this description of chaos with our inability to understand who we are anymore. We don’t know where we came from and where

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are we heading in a world that is rapidly changing. From today’s perspective, following these changes and understanding what they mean for us was easier during earlier periods (though other, more existential challenges of finding meaning were always difficult). Despite all the terrible existential trauma of loss and victimization during World War II and the Cold War, having an enemy in common helped people define themselves in relation to the Other. The world was clearly divided between “good” and “evil.” Monolithic representations had their advantages: one needed no energy to define oneself, and this created an illusion of stability and of continuity in the world order (Bar-On, 1999b). The expectation for a new era after the Cold War ended in 1989 stemmed from the assumption that the Western world would finally be able to relax and focus on problems that had long been neglected—hunger, health, environment, education. The prosperity of the Western world and the process of globalization would surely have a positive effect on major areas of the world that had become less and less privileged until then. But psychologists, knowledgeable about repressed social processes, should have known that this expectation had no solid basis. The negative emotions of so many individuals were repressed, silenced, and not worked through during World War II and the Cold War era. So many social agendas of the past had likewise been quashed. Thus a chaotic outburst after the end of the deterministic and seemingly stable polarization between two big world powers might have been anticipated. While we as psychologists should have known, as part of our society we still wanted to believe in the illusion of a new era. I think this is one of the dilemmas we face in such chaotic situations: We were willing to give up knowledge to conform to the society we live in. Perhaps we were also afraid that proclaiming our disharmonic knowledge publicly would marginalize us and thereby undermine our effectiveness as agents of social change. But if so, then in these situations we social scientists have almost no advantage over the laypersons whom we analyze and whose actions and reactions we try to identify and predict. Part of the crisis is therefore our own: We cannot fulfill the role that we have been assigned or have taken upon ourselves: foreseeing social developments and trying to facilitate them. At best, when we keep our eyes open, we are caught in between the dynamics of acknowl-

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edging and understanding these complexities and wishing at the same time to diminish their impact. Trying to find a path between two dynamics that pull in opposite directions is extremely difficult. Such was the dilemma developed in our region after the Oslo Accords in 1993. Israeli Jews expected a peaceful solution with the Palestinians that would enable them to develop a civic society unlike the militarized one that preceded it (Kimmerling, 1993); one that would manage the internal tensions that had not been dealt with properly before—between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians, religious and secular, rich and poor, men and women. Psychologists working with mixed Jewish-Palestinian encounter groups such as those described in earlier studies (Maoz, 2000a, 2000b, Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002; Maoz et al., 2002) could have predicted that the post-Oslo Accords expectations were naïve. A chaotic outburst of aggression and turmoil could have been anticipated—both because so many negative emotions were suppressed for so long under the monolithic demand for unity against an external enemy and because so much distrust prevailed between the parties in the conflict. But such predictions seemed to us untimely and perhaps even counter-productive. We preferred the illusion and did not like our own predictions. And therefore we kept silent. In The “Other” Within Us, I described the deconstruction of the earlier monolithic phase in our collective identity and evaluated the process as a move forward (albeit very painful at times) rather then a move backward (per the perspective of those who idealized the phase and feared or opposed the closer analysis). I assumed that the dynamic of deconstruction would enable voices to emerge, voices which the specter and the real pressure of having external enemies had long suppressed. Even if the process was at times a bit chaotic, the emergence of these voices was, in my view, necessary before a positive dialogue could start. I tried to demonstrate this viewpoint here in this book through describing my interviews in Haifa (in chapter 5) and the storytelling approach of the Jewish–Palestinian students’ group (in chapter 4). But although I was aware of and wrote earlier about the predictable chaotic expressions of our society’s repressed tensions, I did not expect that the outburst of these tensions would be as chaotic and uncontrollable as what we have experienced during the last few years. Though I knew what to anticipate, I preferred the illusion

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that it would soon be over and that our common dream of a more reasonable and peaceful society would soon materialize. I only realized how chaotic and harsh the expression of our internal crisis could become when the crisis was out there, almost full-blown. A deconstruction process, as mentioned earlier, requires external stability so that those engaged in it can look inside themselves and identify and accept the inconsistencies within. For Israelis it means, among others things, understanding how we were victims of previous hostilities in Europe and in the Middle East, but also victimizers of the Palestinians; that we were composed of many different social, cultural, and religious entities that did not fit together, and that this was probably true of our Israeli society from the very beginning. Acknowledging such internal inconsistencies could help us acknowledge them in others also, and could create new opportunities for a dialogue between the parties in conflict. In Israel an “emergency dynamic” diametrically opposite from this took over after the outbreak of violence in October 2000, defining us again as a monolithic entity. Our collective perception of self was once again equated being the “good guys” with victimhood; with struggling for survival against an evil Other who attacks us and seeks to destroy us. Though this dynamic was supported and manipulated from the top down, it could not stop the previous deconstruction process. Torn between the two opposing dynamics, with no single way to account for what was happening within themselves and others, people were caught in a whirlwind. Unfortunately, if we expected to receive help in escaping this unpleasant whirlwind from a more stable West, our hopes collapsed and disintegrated with the events of September 11, 2001, and the “war on terror” that followed. The vicious acts of terror were followed by a new rallying of the Western world “against its enemies” under the Bush administration in the U.S. The combination of American President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had the devastating effect of moving us further away from any more self-critical form of thinking into a totally “black-and-white,” new-old worldview: “We are the good and vulnerable ones who strive for a better democratic world, and they, the enemies, are trying to destroy it and us.”

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For those of us involved in peace-building activities, working for a more positive agenda between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, both inside Israel and in the occupied territories, this renewed atmosphere of emergency has been devastating. Within Jewish-Israeli society, we reverted from being a legitimate partner in the effort to cope with the changing social context, back to the sidelines. Feeling itself under siege, the society began celebrating its old tribal heroes. We were faced with a choice: to give up and join the majority or to stick to our course and become marginalized. There seemed no other option left. Prof. Benny Morris is an interesting case study of this dilemma. On one hand, as one of Israel’s leading historians, he, perhaps more than any of his colleagues, provided sound research data about the government’s role in initiating ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the 1948 war. Thereby he actually initiated a social healing process, by acknowledging our role as perpetrators toward the Palestinians and our share in the responsibility for the fate of the Palestinian refugees in 1948. The task he undertook caused him serious trouble, and for a long time he could not get a tenured position at an Israeli university. On the other hand, his latest views, as presented in the Guardian (2002) and in Haaretz (2004), evince disillusionment: “A pity that Ben-Gurion did not finish the job of ethnic cleansing in 1948; we would have a more peaceful situation today.” Morris, perhaps unintentionally, here echoes the horrendous argument of some anti-Semites: “It is a pity that Hitler did not finish the job during World War II. It would have saved the Arabs some of their current fate with Israel.” It was, no doubt, the Palestinians’ renewed violence in October 2000 that disappointed Morris. They did not fulfill his expectation and perhaps illusion of a linear and steady movement toward a solution based on mutual recognition. Such a development would have helped Morris move out of his solitude and perhaps would have made him a cultural hero of a future, more open Israeli-Jewish civic society. As the Palestinians did not deliver what he expected, Morris’ frustration became their fault. As I see it, Morris was both unable to understand the chaotic nature of such a peace process and unable to face his renewed marginalization in the backlash, and therefore he tried (perhaps unwittingly) to become part of the Israeli majority.

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My own renewed marginalization within Israeli society has led me to look back at some of my earlier experiences of feeling marginal during my political activities in the seventies. Then it was worse, as I did not have the professional stature and the theoretical concepts I can now employ to try and understand the dynamics behind the whirlwind. These new concepts, gained on my long and tedious journey, helped me in my struggle with my own narcissistic voice that sees being marginal as my fate and destiny. My analysis of the underlying tensions of our society and their chaotic outbursts help me resist that tendency. I was neither able nor willing to choose the route of ending my marginalization by putting the blame on the Other. I do not feel that it is the fault of the Palestinians that we are stuck in this daily violent battle, though I despise the way their extremists conduct their struggle against us with suicide bombers. I do not think it is all the fault of the Palestinians, but I also do not accept the contrary argument of some of my leftist colleagues that that it is all born of Israeli-Jewish oppression. So my own struggle is to continue to see and try to understand the complex and chaotic dynamics of the current situation, even if that means that I am at times caught in the whirlwind. A critical aspect of this chaos, which may have accelerated it, was the emergence of political leadership that at best was unable to understand the nature of the opposing social processes. Even worse, the leaders may have started to manipulate the processes in order to achieve their own goals of maintaining the sense of emergency, thereby avoiding self-reflection and coping with complexity. It seemed that whenever there was potential for progress (notably, after President Sadat’s move toward peace in 1977, and after the Oslo Accords in 1993), the political leadership, supported by the fear of the general public, exploited the situation anew to move back into the “neo-monolithic” victim mentality. A society haunted by fears of the past (pogroms, the Holocaust, the lack of international support during critical times) and the fears of the present (hostility, extremism, stagnation within the Arab world) is easy prey for such opportunistic political leaders. In the following paragraphs I will try to explain why we have to find ways to work together with the political leadership to move out of the more destructive phases of the conflict.

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4. Synchronization of top-down and bottom-up processes I return now to the issue of top-down and bottom-up aspects of social change. This book has portrayed research and intervention from the bottom up, asking how, at such difficult times, we can continue to generate data and design psychosocial dialogical processes that will help in moving out of the violent phase of the conflict, into less destructive, post-conflict modes. But I already pointed out earlier that we have to learn our limitations: We cannot reasonably expect to change the directions of the social dynamics within which we operate. We may be more successful when we can move along with processes that are already taking place, so that our micro social process reinforces a macro social process and vice-versa. I mentioned earlier that this was the case with the TRT group in the German–Jewish context. The kind of dialogue activity that characterized the TRT group was slowly accepted as the two societies moved in the same direction, though it started before they were ready to accommodate it. After the end of the Cold War in 1989, some renewed dialogue and a limited form of conciliation (though this term is problematic, as I will explain shortly) took place between Germans and Jews in general. No such welcoming environment evolved to embrace the peacebuilding activities within the Palestinian–Israeli context. After October 2000, and to some extent even before then, it became obvious that the conflict had not reached the point at which our activities could have a positive macro social impact. And so our frustration grew. We worked very hard and may even have been successful in increasing understanding on the micro level, but the overall situation was getting worse and worse. There was almost an inverse relationship between what we did and where our societies were heading politically. Generally speaking, one may conclude that peace-builders will not be able to have an impact on their societies if they only work on the grassroots level and there is neither a spontaneous synchronization with social processes of change nor any coordination to create change initiated at the political level. I suggest here that an important component of a successful peace process is positive mutual acknowledgement and synchronization of top-down political agreements and bottom-up peace-building activities.

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The relationship between top-down activities within a peace process and those that work from the bottom up merits more discussion. Usually, politicians, lawyers and economists, striving for the political agreements that make a peace process possible, represent the topdown level. Educators, NGO activists and academics are usually the peace-builders on the ground who try to help the wider population accept the need for a change of mind and heart. How to accept the enemy of yesterday as the partner of tomorrow? How to work through the hatred and pain of yesterday’s violence, so that there will be less of a pull to repeat it in the future? The problem with many peace processes all over the world, including our Israeli-Palestinian one, is that the two levels of action are poorly coordinated. In many cases the political players ignore the grassroots ones, while the peace-builders are often contemptuous and frustrated with the political level and feel that the politicians look down upon their activities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa serves as an example of successful coordination between the political leadership and the grassroots level from both sides of the conflict. They found a way to understand each other and develop a political compromise that gave 22,000 victims of apartheid an opportunity to testify and thereby to be heard and acknowledged by the society at large. The tension between the top-down and bottom-up advocates must also be understood in terms of their separate and almost exclusive languages. The politicians, accountable to their voters at relatively short intervals, usually focus on more immediate, quantifiable outcomes. The peace-builders are usually focused on long-term social processes that are difficult to measure and evaluate. I witnessed some encounters between these two groups over the last few years (see Siemens, 2004) and found that a major reason for mutual frustration was their inability to understand each other’s concerns and means of expression. Moreover, the peace-builders sometimes internalize some of the aggression they experience while working with people on the grassroots level, while politicians may succeed in keeping a distance from unpleasant experiences on the ground. The tension is also related to another dichotomy that I mentioned earlier: the micro and the macro levels of activity. Grassroots activities usually take place in smaller group settings. Political processes are aimed at the macro level. While the micro process can usually generate data that is also important for the macro level, there is often

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no ready-made social setting to enable such transmission of information. For example, after the Oslo Accords there were many signs in small group activities of tensions and of frustrations with the peace agreement, but there were no established channels for discussing these signs with those on the political level. Practitioners who work in micro settings can also afford to take risks; in many cases we do not know ahead of time if a certain activity will be successful or not. Politicians have to be much more cautious, as excessive risk may imperil their political careers—if not their lives, as happened to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a result of their peace initiatives. One of the questions often posed to the TRT group was how that positive experience between Germans and Jews could be transferred to the macro level. I do not believe that there is a simple answer to this question, other than the coincidental temporal synchronization mentioned earlier. Sometimes, however, micro processes can tell us about the depth of mistrust or other negative emotions that still exist on the grassroots level, even when we believe that a political agreement is close (Maoz et al., 2002; Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). In other cases, a top-down process will address the grassroots level and create a symbolic middle process, as did the TRC in South Africa (Villa-Vicencio & Savage, 2001). We should always be aware and try to address the tensions between the micro and the macro, between the top-down and the bottom-up processes. This entails developing a common “language” between politicians and peace-builders—orchestrating their activities into a complementary process that is pragmatic and acceptable on the political level but also addresses deeper psychosocial roots of the conflict. One cannot demand change only at the political level; it is partially our responsibility to develop such a common language.

5. A few last comments on reconciliation The concept of reconciliation is quite prevalent today. The term is used extensively when conflict settlement or management are discussed (Kriesberg, 1998; Lederach, 1998; Bar-Tal, 2000). The discourse usually assumes that after a top-down political settlement is reached, another process should take place to handle unresolved issues of the conflict on the grassroots level. We have seen that without such a complementary process, there is a real danger that the settle-

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ment will not last and a new outbreak of violence will follow. Among the issues that the reconciliatory process must address simultaneously is the lack of resolution between the perpetrators and victims of the conflict. It is a matter of debate whether the perpetrators should be brought to trial and punished (as in the Nuremberg trials or the current tribunal in The Hague) or should confess and receive amnesty (as encouraged by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and several similar ventures in South America and elsewhere in Africa). How the victims should be compensated is another question, as is determining who will address the ongoing plight of those traumatized by the conflict or by the times that set the stage for it. These aspects have most often been handled as legal issues of formal justice during the aftermath of the conflict. But reconciliation has a psychosocial component as well as a legal one, that of interpersonal justice. The concept of reconciliation suggests that the enemies of yesterday will let go of their hatred, animosity, or desires for revenge, as well as the identities that they constructed around the conflict. A new identity construction is meant to develop together with a new relationship between former enemies that addresses the roots of the conflict and not only its unfortunate outcomes. But how can we create such a deep change in people who were committed to the conflict, in some places for generations, in others for a substantial part of their lives? Are these expectations realistic in intractable conflicts or only wishful thinking? Basically a religious, emotive concept, reconciliation has been introduced into post-conflict discourse in order to address key issues that earlier cognitive conceptualizations such as formal conflict resolution did not resolve. I would like to bring this religious, somewhat idealized discourse down to earth by discussing some of its limitations and by suggesting some empirical criteria to test its feasibility. In this analysis I rely on my experiences with the TRT group process, as described in chapter 2. Reconciliation, as described above, is basically a Christian concept, integral to the religious discourse of that faith from very early on (Rittner & Roth, 2000). Judaism and Islam have a very different religious approach to reconciliation. According to Judaism, only perpetrators themselves can approach their victims, taking full responsibility for their hurtful deeds and asking forgiveness. After the victim has accepted this plea, reconciliation can take place. No one can do

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it for the perpetrator. Rabbi Elliot Dorff (1992), a leader of the Conservative movement in the United States, has discussed the possibility of reconciliation through intermediaries. But the more Orthodox understanding of Judaism does not yet embrace such flexibility. The Islamic tradition and practices (such as sulha or musalaha) are closer to the Jewish tradition than they are to the Christian tradition (Irani & Funk, 2000). It is no coincidence that the relatively successful South African TRC process took place between two parties that belonged to the same church. The African concept of Umbutu does not divert in essence from the Christian notion (Villa Vicencio & Savage, 2001). It was a powerful symbol when Archbishop Desmond Tutu was appointed the chairman of the commission, and some of its sessions were held in churches (Boraine & Levy, 1995). Returning to the micro context, the TRT group did not accept the concept of reconciliation as characterizing its work. Group member Martin Bormann, a former Catholic priest, proclaimed as much in the BBC film made about the group (Time Watch, 1993). The Jewish members of the group argued that they had no right to forgive in the name of their relatives who had been murdered during the Holocaust (Dorff, 1992). The terms to reflect and trust (TRT) were chosen as alternative concepts upon which both the Jewish and Christian members of the group could agree. I wish to emphasize, therefore, that the term reconciliation needs new empirical verification and precision. When talking about conciliation (reconciliation can only happen if the parties were once living in peace), we should move from the somewhat idealized and quasireligious discourse into the more pragmatic and testable discourse of social sciences. I believe that the data presented in this book tells us quite a lot about the process necessary for reaching conciliation between parties: Voices that have been silenced by the conflict can be reconstructed. Storytelling can facilitate this process. Members of opposing parties can engage in dialogue. The stages they must work through in order to reach a level of mutual trust can be identified. Many questions about the process remain open: Sometimes the parties should meet separately as uni-national groups; when are they ready to encounter the Other? What is a “good enough” story in this process? When is it advisable to teach children the two narratives of

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the parties in the conflict rather than strive for an imagined narrative that bridges the versions? Using the concept of dialogue as a necessary part of the process of conciliation, Steinberg identified six categories of discourse at workshops where Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians discussed the conflict (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). As mentioned earlier, these categories represent the gradual changes that take place in small group encounters, from ethnocentric (non-dialogical) discourse, through attacks, “opening a window,”3 and intellectual exchange, to addressing the differences, and dialogical moments. Steinberg showed how the discourse changed over weekly encounters, in a quite chaotic and non-linear way. Re-entry into the separate societies, whose power relations were still asymmetrical and which were still engaged in the conflict, would move the students away from the dialogical moments they reached, and they would revert to old patterns of discourse as a kind of emotional preparation for what awaited them outside the workshop room. This data from the micro setting could be applied to the non-linear and even chaotic patterns that we observed earlier on the macro social level, in asking such questions as: When are parties in the ethnocentric stage? When are they ready to move to further stages of discourse, and when do they move backward, as a result of backlash in the political or social arenas? I want to suggest a similar empirical conceptualization in regard to conciliation. We saw that when the TRT tried to open itself to current conflicts, a major problem was the huge variety of historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychosocial conditions that play a major role in these conflicts. In a sense, each of these conflicts has developed its own biography, so that implementing processes such as the TRC from South Africa in other current conflicts becomes almost impossible. Basic assumptions that are relevant to one context have to be re-examined for their relevance in another. For example, as we saw, the differences between religious conceptions of conciliation have to be addressed when one moves from a uni-religious setting such as South Africa to an inter-religious one, such as the Middle East or Bosnia. Often knowing which assumptions are relevant or what modification is needed means first trying to implement a process on a micro scale. After the outbreak of the violence, it can even be difficult to implement a method of conciliation that was previously relevant in a society (for example, the implementation of the Gacaca

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courts in Rwanda, extending a traditional local method of problemsolving to provide a limited amnesty to the perpetrators of genocide there). Based on the experiences cited in this book, I would like to suggest seven parameters, in addition to the top-down/bottom-up issue already discussed, for empirically testing the idea of conciliation within a specific conflict. The parameters are: trust, reflection, identity construction, timing, subjective language, women and children as specific target populations, and the possibility for maintaining hope without delving into illusions. These criteria are not arranged in a systematic order, but I believe that in combination they provide a kind of a profile for diagnosing conditions and prescribing the directions that will enable progress forward. 1. Trust. We saw to what extent violent conflicts destroyed the trust in the social contract that a society had achieved earlier on, and we saw how this took its toll in both interpersonal and inter-community formal relationships. This was definitely the case between Jews and Germans. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, one could claim that trust was never established on a wide scale, and as we saw in chapter 5, even in such enclaves as Haifa, trust was limited. In Bosnia, the interethnic marriage rate was 46 percent prior to the outbreak of violence, so that even among relatives, family bonds were destroyed due to the conflict. The process of reconciliation, then, has to address and try to rebuild trust and confidence where it was severely damaged. Trust that was broken in an instant may need years to be reestablished. I believe that it is no coincidence that the TRT group, which met more than fifty years after the Holocaust, chose trust as the first parameter in its self-description. The role of storytelling that the group initiated helped to reestablish some level of interpersonal trust that could later be translated to the inter-community level (Albeck, Adwan & Bar-On, 2002). Trust cannot be established through storytelling or words only; deeds must accompany it—acknowledging and taking responsibility for past crimes and evil conduct, attending to the needs of the victims, punishing perpetrators, establishing formal agreements between the parties, and supporting economic and educational initiatives. Yet without some level of renewed confidence and trust, such deeds remain on a superficial level (Bar-On, 1998). 2. Reflection: As we saw, violent conflicts establish zones or areas of silencing in a society: silencing of the perpetrators’ crimes, along

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with their responsibility for what they did; silencing of the victims’ suffering; even silencing of the heroic acts of the rescuers; and most of all, silencing of the role of the bystanders (Bar-On, 2002a). We also saw that silencing can easily be transmitted to the following generations. Post-conflict, psychosocial conciliatory processes can work only if some level of reflectiveness is established that can penetrate these realms of collective silencing around the shadows of the past. It is, again, no coincidence that the TRT group chose reflection as the second major parameter to describe its work; penetrating through the vale of silences that their parents, together with the rest of the society, German or Jewish, had imposed upon them (Bar-On et al., 2000). Some of this reflection may first happen separately, within each of the segments of the society that were split apart as a result of the conflict, but later this could lead to new understanding between the parties in conflict, as well. For example, we saw that in both the German–Jewish encounters and in the encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, some reflection occurred first during the uni-national meetings. This helped establish new understanding and mutual reflectiveness in the bi-national encounters that followed (Maoz, et al., 2002). 3. Identity construction. Intractable conflicts lead parties to construct monolithic identities in opposition to the hostile Other (BarOn, 1999b). We saw how powerful such monolithic constructions were; every threat or violent act by the Other instigates it anew, even if some aspects of the monolithic constructions are not relevant anymore, in the case of either party. We saw how neo-monolithic construction among Israeli Jews was strengthened after October 2000. I mentioned earlier that in order to enable the deconstruction and reconstruction of collective identities in a less chaotic form than what we experience these days, internal processes of dialogue have to take place on each side, and these will also reinforce the external dialogue between the parties in conflict. If people can address the bits and pieces within themselves that do not fit anymore, they may be also able to address those within others. That is exactly what happened in the earlier phases of the TRT process, and to some extent in the Jewish-Arab group described in chapter 4 as well. In some might-extolling societies, such as Serbia and Israel (Ron, 2002), one of the major obstacles to reconciliation is the absence of that internal dialogue. It would seem that these societies grew accus-

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tomed to externalizing all evil as the “Other,” and they silenced or broke down all internal channels of communication in order to avoid inner disharmony. When people fear that there may be nothing to hold them together as a collective afterward, it can be very difficult to let such a monolithic construction go. Thus, some East European countries leaving Communism moved directly to some form of neonationalism or to religious collective constructions, lest the fall of the monolithic communist construction otherwise lead to total loss of identity or collective disintegration. Though the previous construction was no longer relevant—and in countless ways had not been relevant for years, since it could not account for the changes in social and economic reality—its disintegration was nonetheless frightening and painful for many. Psychosocial reconciliatory processes such as the TRT serve to provide a safe place and the social support that is needed to go through a gradual process of internal change. Within such a safe environment, an identity that is “softer” and more complex may slowly replace the “hard” identity construction that developed to support the conflict. This may then lead the way to a new and richer dialogue with the Other. 4. The long-range time dimension. The processes described in this book suggest that acts of conciliation, whether internal or external, require long-term commitment. Yet top-down peace making processes may occur in a relatively short span of time. If a peace agreement is not accompanied by a deeper, long-term, bottom-up process that can support and amplify it, disillusionment when the pace of change fails to meet people’s expectation, can pose a major threat to the peaceful resolution of the conflict. This gap may be one of the reasons for the failure of the Oslo Accords between the Israeli, and the Palestinians. The Oslo process created a hectic timetable for the implementation of top-down agreements, without recognizing the need for the longterm conciliatory processes between the people on the grassroots level. Had these been in place, trust and reflection could have contributed to solving the more difficult issues that the timetable left for a later phase. 5. Subjective narratives, asymmetry and the status quo. Subjective language, as expressed in the narration of my interviewees in Germany, in Haifa, or in the Jewish-Palestinian student group, needed time to be digested by a wider audience. I had to show my video about cer-

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tain interviewees several times before some viewers were able to really understand and accept what they heard in the verbatim accounts. This was especially true when the narratives highlighted asymmetric relationships and thereby implied the need for change in the status quo as part of a communal acknowledgement process. The Israeli Jewish, more powerful party tried to use the duress of the post-conflict situation to maintain the superiority of its narrative, even as it came to the conclusion that there was no military way to resolve the conflict (Maoz et al., 2002). Therefore, I would advise that when parties talk about peace and conciliation, all concerned should question whether the words they use carry the same meanings. One party wants to maintain the status quo while the other party wants to change it. Habermas (1971) has suggested that a change in asymmetric relationships happens only when it is identified in the subjective language of the weaker side. For example, in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations after the Oslo Accords, Israel stressed the issue of its security, while the Palestinians wanted change on the ground: removal of Jewish settlements, the release of prisoners, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. When young Israeli Jews and Palestinians in one study were asked about peace, the former meant a negative peace (no violence; security) while the latter meant a just peace (changing their status quo) (Shasha-Beiton, 2002). Though from the Israeli perspective some peace, in the form of greater security, was achieved after the Accords, the lack of change perceived by the Palestinians was a harbinger of the disruption of the peace process in October 2000. Another consideration is that weaker elements of both populations fear that the benefits of the peace process may pass them by (BarOn, 1998). The fear is realistic when a peace agreement is achieved by the stronger groups among both parties, those who may directly benefit from it, and who might then care even less for their own longneglected backyards. Without addressing these aspects of subjective language, asymmetry and the status quo, conciliation in the deeper sense may not be possible. 6. Target populations. Usually, a conflict reinforces male domination of societies, as the men are the ones using the weapons, carrying out the violent struggle, and becoming the celebrated heroes of the conflict.4 Post-conflict situations may bring to the foreground the impor-

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tance of women in the psychosocial reconciliatory processes. As relatively oppressed members of their societies, they have developed more complex representations of themselves in relation to the dominant male hegemony, which can aid them in changing their understandings of themselves and others. They may be better equipped, in terms of “emotional intelligence,” to express their feelings in words and to recognize the feelings of the Other (Bar-On, 1999b). The question is whether their voices can be heard within the post-conflict social network. They may be underprivileged in ways that hamper their relative advantages—less educated, less prominent or altogether absent from the working force, and repressed by religious rigid structures (an extreme example is found in the Taliban as practiced in Afghanistan). Likewise, children are often among those most victimized by conflict. They may be used as part of the military force or they may be exploited or mistreated to carry out guerilla atrocities. In other cases, their education is hampered and they are drawn into the workforce prematurely. In some of the more violent conflicts, parents cannot provide the necessary physical and psychological safety for their children to grow up properly. It is extremely important that some of the changes that must take place target specific populations within societies, such as women and children. Additional populations that must be addressed in the post-conflict society are bereaved families as well as the soldiers of the conflict, both victims and victimizers, who may be left isolated in the new reality, without proper attention and care for their post-traumatic reactions. Reconciliation means taking care of these target populations and bringing them into the healing process within each society. In Northern Ireland, for example, Catholic and Protestant ex-combatants who were in prison together formed a combined organization after their discharge to support their own special needs. They became a joint vehicle for a change of perspectives in both societies. 7. Maintaining hope, not illusions. Hope is a tricky process in intractable conflicts. One can easily create illusions of change and improvement, but when these are not solid, it may lead to renewed desperation and pessimism. Yet it is difficult to maintain hope when only cold analytical observations are made. Hope is therefore a construction that must be tested continuously—while moving through whirlwinds inside and out; while taking into account the different chaotic turns.

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This is extremely difficult. I can testify that amidst our current whirlwinds I have become disillusioned many times, but each time I found ways to go on. Despite all the hardships I have encountered over the last few years, I have also received a great deal of support for continuing in my path, from interviewees and group participants, as well as from colleagues and from my wife and other family members and friends. Even if I see only a slight chance that the fruit of my work will materialize in my lifetime, I feel blessed by the opportunity I have had to develop my own way. My parents were likewise unable to see the fruits of the path they found, and perhaps the same will be true of our children and grandchildren. I hope they will not have to yearn for what Remarque referred to as “the desires that belong to a world that is gone from us,” or at least not in the painful way that my parents and many others knew. Today, I look at this quotation in a different way. Today, hope may mean giving up the romantic, monolithic desires of the idealized past in favor of a less perfect but more complex understanding of the world and ourselves, an understanding that can create new possibilities for dialogue within our selves, among ourselves within a collective, and with the Other.

NOTES 1 Michael did, however, go to a joint meeting of bereaved parents for peace. Telling his story there, he was first sharply attacked by some of the Palestinian parents, but later on they expressed appreciation for his openness, and he told me that they parted in tears. 2 In this unit, also mentioned in the previous chapter (Gilad’s report), soldiers dress as Arabs to catch and sometimes kill saboteurs who instigate violence among the Palestinians. 3 Opening a window is based on the author’s image of the “double wall” between survivors or perpetrators and their children or other social relations. Each side constructs its own wall and when one side tries to open a window in its wall, it usually meets the wall that the other side has erected (Bar-On, 1995a). 4 A few opposite examples exist. In the first Intifada, Palestinian women played a major role, for the men were more restricted in their movements. However, as soon as the Intifada ended, women were pushed back into their traditional roles.

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Index

Abed (student), 129, 130, 133, 135, 138, 139, 148, 153, 155 Acre, 9, 119, 120, 136, 164, 169, 172, 173, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196 “Adi”, 107, 110, 112, 114 Adna (village), 91, 92 “Adva”, 108, 109, 112 Adwan, Sami, vii, xi, 20, 26, 31, 64, 76, 79, 80–82, 84–86, 88, 90, 92, 100, 101, 103, 104–107, 114–116, 159, 162, 210, 225 Akiva, Izhak, 166, 172, 173 Al-Aqsa Intifada. See Intifada Al-Aza (refugee camp), 108 al-Husseini, Haj Amin, 77, 168, 179 Al-Nakbah, 88, 146, 147, 150, 202; Al-Nakbah Day, 153, 158. See also May 15, 1948 al-Qassam, Izz al-Din, 168, 179 Al-Quds University, 116 Amal (student), 144, 145 Amar (student), 133, 147–149, 152, 153 “Amir”, 107, 111, 112, 202 Anat (survivor), 42–45, 202 Antje (TRT member), 54, 59 Antonia (TRT member), 53, 59, 68 Ard al-Yahud, 166, 169, 170, 199 “Aref ”, 108, 111–113 army, British, 4, 5, 11, 164; Israeli, 31, 91, 92, 106, 111, 132,

144, 165, 181, 200, 205, 209; Jordanian, 40, 105, 107, 164 Ashkenazi Jews, 167, 171, 200, 215 Asymmetry of power between groups, 25, 26, 53, 62, 63, 81, 82, 90, 92, 114, 122–125, 143, 154–157, 227, 227 Awwad, Elia, 77–79, 80 Balfour Declaration, 80, 89, 93–95, 117, 118, 119 Bar-On, Dan, family background, 1–5, professional path, 10–18 Bar-On, Haran, 84, 162 battle shock, 14, 15, 21, 209. See also post-traumatic stress disorder Beer-Sheva, 28, 129, 130 Beit Jubrin, 20, 108 Bella (survivor), 41, 42, 202 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, viii, xi, 7, 12, 81, 82, 104, 121, 122, 124, 159, 187, 189, 201 Bernd (TRT member), 53, 56, 61, 71, 75 Bethlehem University, 79, 81, 82, 90, 104, 108 bi-national settings,25, 134–136, 142, 143, 145 biographical interviewing, 15, 16, 29, 32, 38, 141. See also interviews and narratives Bormann, Martin, see Bernd, 48, 75, 202, 223

242

Index

“bottom-up” processes of social change, 69, 206, 207, 219–221, 227. See also grassroots change Brahami, Ibrahim, 167 bridging narratives, 26, 86, 89, 99, 101, 104, 158 British Mandate, 2, 109, 168, 190, 199, Chaitin, Julia, xii, 17, 31, 36, 44, 84, 86, 105, 107, 126, 159, 199 Chanan (TRT member), 54 Chart al-Yahud, 166, 169, 170, 199 Chava (TRT member), 54 children of perpetrators. See descendants children of survivors. See descendants Cohen-Avidov, Meir, 166169, 170, 170 cold war, 13, 186, 214, 219 collective identity, 7, 88, 106, 123, 135, 143, 215 collective memory, 58, 164, 202, 208, 210, Communist party, 168, 178–181, 184, 186, 187 conciliation, within specific conflicts, 225. See also reconciliation Dafna (student), 130, 132, 133, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157 Danya (TRT member), 54, 61 Deheisheh (camp), 104, 107, 108 descendants, of Holocaust victims,19, 27, 38, 53, 67, 70, 122, 197; of Nazi perpetrators, 4, 12, 15, 19, 23, 25, 27, 30, 36–38, 46, 49, 50, 52, 70, 104, 155, 165 dialogical moments, 104, 124, 142, 145, 224 dialogue, between narratives, 98, 99; German–Jewish, 19. See also dialogue groups and TRT dialogue groups, 25, 27, 31, 33, 54, 122, 202. See also TRT

Diaspora, 73, 106 “disarmament of history”, 86, 104, 116 double walls, 15, 24, 51, 77, 124, 141, 206, 230 double-bind messages, 8 Esti (student), 132, 144 family stories, 52, 71, 124–130, 132– 136, 138, 156. See also narratives “Fatma”, 82, 108, 111, 116 Fischhoff, Baruch, 12 gender issues, 67 generations, differences between and transmission of stories between, 15, 30, 33, 37, 39, 56, 58, 68, 73, 106, 107, 127, 148, 157, 158, 161, 168. See also intergenerational transmission of trauma Germany, pre war, 1–5, 11; Nazi, 49, 161; post war, 12, 15, 19, 23, 29, 30, 34, 38, 46–50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 81, 84, 101, 107, 121, 159, 166, 169, 180, 199, 201–204, 210, 227 Gilad, Gershon, 167, 175–178, 195, 230 “good enough” stories, 25, 35, 40, 56, 133, 134, 138, 140, 142, 155, 156, 202, 208 grassroots change, 69, 206, 207, 219, 220, 221, 227. See also “bottom-up” processes grounded theory, 18 Haganah, 5, 129, 132, 164, 176, 195 Haifa, vii, viii, 2–5, 21, 25, 28, 29, 31, 44, 45, 86, 120, 136, 137; Jews and Arabs in, 162–169, 171– 187, 191, 193, 195, 198, 199; narratives of; 136, 166, 198, 199; Ashkenazi,173, 176 198, 200, 209, 215; Christian and Muslim Arab, 166, 167, 8, 171, 174, 177,

Index 198; Communist, 167, 178–187, Sephardi, 169–173 Halaby, Rabah (Facilitator from Neveh Shalom), xi, 122 Hannan (student), 134, 143 Hawda (student), 139, 151, 152 Helga (TRT member), 53, 62 Herbst, David, xi, 13, 14, 16, 213 Hiltrud (TRT member), 48, 53, 56, 59, 62, 68 Holocaust in family stories, vii, 3, 4, 14, 15, 16, 19, 25–27, 30, 33, 37, 38–41, 44, 46, 49, 50, 51, 53–56, 57, 58, 61, 65, 68, 69, 71–73, 75, 78, 79, 88, , 95–97, 112, 113, 115, 123, 129, 131, 135–138, 143, 144, 146, 149, 155, 158, 162, 175, 185, 201, 202, 206, 209, 218. See also family stories Holocaust survivors, 3, 10, 15–17, 19, 21, 24–27, 30, 33, 37–42, 44– 46, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59–63, 67, 68, 70, 76, 105, 111, 122, 127, 197, 207, 208–210, 230 hope, role of, 228, 229 identity construction, 6, 135, 158, 204, 222, 225–227 Igmar (TRT member), 53, 54 Independence Day, Israeli. See May 15, 1948 Indescribable and the Undiscussable, The, 12, 16, 50, 202 intergenerational transmission of trauma, 37, 69. See also generations interviews, vii, viii, xii, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27–36, 38–40, 42, 46–48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 77, 78, 80, 84–86, 92, 105, 107, 108, 11, 122, 126, 127, 135, 140, 141, 144, 145, 153, 154, 165–179, 182, 187, 188, 193, 195, 196–202, 207, 209, 211–213, 215. See also biographical interviewing

243

Intifada, Al-Aqsa, viii, 21, 77, 84, 87, 91, 99, 101, 109, 110, 112, 116, 125, 158, 165, 209, 211, 212, 213; first, 59, 93, 111, 209, 210, 230 Jackson, Michael, 13, 24, 26, 27 Jean (TRT member), 54, 56, 57, 60, 63 Jonathan (TRT member), 54 justice, 64, 114, 123, 132, 149, 222. See also reconciliation Karkabi, Walid, 167, 182–187 Kassem, Fatma, vii, xi, 35, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 135–140, 146, 147, 150, 153, 157, 159 kibbutz life, vii, 5–8, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 39, 40, 44, 45, 54, 59, 90, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 139, 145, 162, 170, 173, 175, 191, 200, 207, 208, 210 Kibbutz Revadim, 107, 108 Kibbutz Revivim, vii Kurt (TRT member), 53, 59, 62, 68 Labor Party, 7, 139, 171, 173–176, 177, 180 Lachish region, 86, 105, 107 Legacy of Silence, 1, 23, 36, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 75 Linn, Amnon, 167, 173–175, 178 Limor (student), 144, 151, 156 Litvak-Hirsch, Tal, xii, 17, 31, 34, 126, 131, 159 location, attachment to/as basis for Palestinian–Israeli encounter, 104–116 Maayan (student), 130, 132, 143, 146, 152 May 15, 1948, 88, 146, 147, 150, 153, 158, 202. See also Al-Nakbah Day

244

Index

Maya (TRT member), 53, 56 “Nimer, Abu”, 108, 109, 110, 112, methodology, 16, 18, 23, 28 113, 114 methodological stages, 28 1948 war, 5, 15, 40, 71, 71, 88, 89, Michael, Sami, 167, 179, 198 93, 105, 106, 108, 130, 131, 134, Milgram, Stanley, 13, 22 136, 144, 159, 162, 164, 165, 168, mistaravim, 176, 211 172, 173, 176, 179, 180, 195, 199, Mitzna, Amram, 165, 167, 173, 177 200, 209, 212, 217 “Mona”, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114 1967 war, 6, 88, 95, 100, 107, 111, Monika (TRT member), 47, 48, 53, 128 59, 61, 62 1973 war, 5, 6, 209 Moriah (student), 132 Noa (student), 132, 163 Morris, Benny, 199, 217 normalization, 85, 91, 115, 205 Munthar (student), 131–134, 139, Northern Ireland, 18, 69, 70, 71, 73, 140, 143, 146, 148, 151, 152, 156, 74, 76, 134, 142, 213, 229. See 157 also post-conflict situations Mussallam, Adnan, 90 Nuha (student), 131, 133, 134, 136, 139, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, Naama (student), 129, 130, 131, 159 133–137, 147, 149, 150, 155, 157 narratives, 19–26, 28, 32, 33, 37, 38, Obeidi, Fida, 84 52, 69, 71, 80, 86, 87, 88–90, 93– Odeh, Nabeeha, 167, 195, 196 103, 124, 125–130, 132–136, 138, Oslo Accords, 20, 70, 74, 77, 78, 88, 156, 166, 178, 197–199, 223, 227, 105, 125, 215, 218, 221, 227, 228 228; silencing of, see under silencOther Within Us, The, 209, 215 ing; see also bridging narratives; family stories; Haifa, narratives Palestinian National Authority of; paradigmatic narratives; story(PNA), vii, ix, 78–80, 88, 106, telling 121, 125, 159, 203, 205 Nathan (TRT member, kibbutz Palestinian refugees, 20, 26, 86, 88, member), 39, 40, 45, 54, 59, 75, 89, 104, 105, 108, 111, 147, 162, 105, 107, 108, 113, 207–210 197, 217. See also refugees Nava (student), 132, 139, 140, 145, paradigmatic narratives, 25 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157 paradoxical morality, 15, 50 Naveh, Eyal, 89, 90, 92, 93, 101 Parafianovo, 49 Nazi perpetrators, 4, 12, 15, 19, 23, peace-building under fire, 77–120 25, 27, 30, 36–38, 46, 49–52, 56, “Peretz”, 9, 10, 206, 207 63, 67, 68, 70, 73, 76, 122, 155, perpetrators vs. victims, 122, 123, 165, 230 143, 222, 230. See also Nazi perNawra (student), 132, 133, 138, 139, petrators 145, 146, 148, 151–153, 156, 157 post-conflict situations, 19, 22, 26, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, xi, 87, 89, 93, 219, 222, 226, 228, 59, 60–62, 66, 122, 124, 141, 155, 229. See also Northern Ireland 156, 211 and South Africa NGOs [non-governmental organizapost-traumatic stress disorder, 14, tions], 82, 84, 85, 220 15. See also battle-shock

Index PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), vii, xi, 20, 77, 79, 80, 82, 85, 102, 103, 106, 162, 163, 199, 201, 206, 210

245

South Africa, 18, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 85, 89, 220–224. See also postconflict situations Steinberg, Shoshana, xii, 17, 31, 34, 97, 122, 124, 141–143, 211, 215, 221, 224 storytelling, 4, 19, 20, 22–26, 32, 35, 38, 50, 53, 55, 66, 69, 70, 93, 103, 107, 111, 121, 124, 127–131, 133, 135, 136, 143, 150, 152, 154, 157, 201, 215, 223, 225. See also narratives student workshops, viii, 20, 122, 123, 126, 133, 140, 141, 142, 146, 148, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157 subjective language, 29, 225, 227, 228 subtexts, 23

Ramleh, 131, 134, 138, 139, 153, 159 reconciliation, 63, 76, 87, 89, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 229. See also justice reflection, 63, 71, 113, 121, 140, 142, 144, 156, 162, 167, 182, 203, 225–227 refugee camps, 96, 105, 108, 109, 112, 166, 167 refugees, 20, 25, 26, 86, 88, 89, 96, 104–106, 108, 109–115, 127, 147, 164, 166, 167, 187, 196, 197, 217 Renate (TRT member), 53, 61, 62– 65 “Tal”, 107, 112 Rosenthal, Gabriele, biographical Talitha Kumi, 80–85, 104, 106, 108 method of, xi, 15, 29, 30, 32, 36, Tamar (TRT member), 54, 68, 124 38, 141 Tannenbaum, Robert, 7 Tel A-Safi, 108, 112 sabres [native Israelis], 175 textbooks, textbook project, 20, 26, Sagy, Shifra, 80, 115 84, 86–89, 205; pupils’ responses “Said”, 107, 108, 111–113, 115, 130 to, 95–101, 173 sampling, 30 “top-down” processes of social Sarah (TRT member), 52, 54, 57, change, 13, 20, 206, 207, 209, 58, 63 216, 219–221, 225, 227 Schön, Don, xi, 13, 14, 16 TRT (To Reflect and Trust) group, Sephardic Jews, 168, 169, 170, 171, 16, 19, 20, 28, 31, 34, 35, 48, 50, 172, 200 52, 57, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69–76, 82, Shelly (student), 139, 148, 152, 154 86, 94, 103, 104, 108, 116, 121, Shoah. See Holocaust 122, 124, 128, 130, 135, 142, 144, silencing of narratives, 15, 16, 19, 154, 155–157, 202, 205–207, 209, 24, 25, 34, 37, 38, 40–42, 51, 64, 219, 221–227; adapting method 65, 70, 137, 200, 207, 209, 210, to Israeli-Palestinian context, 122, 223, 225, 226 124; TRT group process, 16, 52, Sivan (student), 131, 134, 137–139, 63, 69, 201, 202, 222 140, 144, 146–148, 155, 157, tribal ego, 63, 65, 66, 202 159 Truth and Reconciliation CommisSix-Day War. See 1967 war sion (TRC) (South Africa), 69, social change, 47, 51, 206, 207, 209, 70, 76, 89, 220, 221–223 214, 219 Tuma, Emil, 179, 181–183

246

Index

Tuma, Haya, 167, 179, 180, 181 UCLA, 7, 12, 17 uni-national settings, 127, 128, 130, 135, 136, 157 “Uri”, 107–111, 113 Uzi (student), 132, 137, 144 victimhood, 46, 51, 99, 123, 143, 216, 222, 225, 226 von Borries, Bodo, 79, 101 Wadi Nisnas, 163, 164, 167, 177, 181, 86, 196 Walid (student), 135–139, 148, 153, 155, 167 wars, fought by Israel. See 1948 war, 1967 war, 1973 war weakness, perceptions of in Israeli society, 206, 209, 210, 213 Weiner, Bernard, 12, 14, 22 whirlwind metaphor, vii, viii, 4, 6, 10, 57, 67, 104, 201, 203, 204, 213, 216, 218, 229, 230

“who suffered more?”, 62 Wistrom, Oyvind, 107 working-through process, 15, 19, 48, 50, 67 World War I, 2, 3, 118, 120, 169, 170 World War II, 38, 42, 70, 72, 84, 138, 145, 159, 199, 214, 217 “Yasser, Um”, 108–111 Yom Kippur War. See 1973 war Yoni (student), 134, 147, 149, 156 Youth and History (study), Greek and Turkish teams, 79, 82, 83, 121 Zahra (student), 130, 132, 137, 138, 139, 143 Zak, Michal (Facilitator from Neveh Shalom), xi, 122 “Zeev”, 107, 109–111, 113 Zionism, 9, 10, 21, 117, 118, 119, 171, 177, 178