The MidEast Web Middle East Dialog Resource
These pages are dedicated to dialog. All of the peoples of the Middle East,
and our friends and relatives abroad should all be talking to each other and learning from each other and about each
other, and we should all be helping to build a better future for the Middle East. You may be surprised how many of us
already are: Arabs and Jews, Moslems and Christians, Palestinians and Israelis, Sunnis and Shiites, Druze and
Bahai and Orthodox Jews and Reconstructionists and freethinkers. Dialog is the beginning of recognition that the other
side is human - and a declaration that you are human and want to help your neighbor. Dialog is a learning experience and
a teaching experience, for your heart and for your mind.
Middle East Truth Video - Simple truths and a personal narrative about Middle East Peace.
What you will find here
The little gains - We have all been raised on a diet of hate
and fear of others, which causes mental indigestion. Dialog helps cure it. Dialog teaches you new things about your
neighbors that you did not know, and help you make new friends. Dialog is also your chance to make yourself known, and
to teach your neighbors things they may not know.
Working together - Some dialog groups just talk and get to
know each other. Others take an active role in changing the Middle East, by supporting peace education projects,
hospitals and medical care projects. A healthy kid or a new schoolhouse built by cooperative efforts should be reward
enough for anyone.
The big gain - The big gain for all of us can be a
fear- free future - cemented by a web of friendships throughout the Middle East and between members of the
Middle East diasporas abroad. Peace cannot be made and secured by political agreements. Dialog and cooperation will
build peace, slowly but surely. It will not happen over night, and it will not be easy, but it is the only way that will
really work in the long run.
Come to dialog to listen and learn and to share your yourself, your time
and your knowledge. Leave behind the propaganda we are all taught and we all hear. You can enrich your new friends by
sharing information and experiences. Share the painful things: what it is like to go through an Israeli check post, what
it is like to survive a terror attack or a hijacking, to lose a loved one in a war, to live in Iraq or to have your
house destroyed. Share knowledge and every day experiences: advice on how to build a house or fix a car, or a good book
you read, or help with navigating the Web. Sharing skills and experiences builds respect and friendship. Talk to people
as individuals and see them as individuals. Do not talk at people - nobody in dialog should be an enemy or an adversary.
In a discussion, be prepared to admit you are wrong. That is how we grow. The truth does not lie with one side or one
person.
A general dialog resource is
located here.
"Talking Peace" is a video
documentary about a Jewish Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group in San Diego, California.
Dialog is not the same as debate, though debate may stimulate dialog. If
you come to dialog with the goal of debating, both you and your dialog partners may be very frustrated. There are many
lists showing the difference between dialog and debate. This is ours. Can you think of other differences?
| Dialog |
Debate |
| Partners |
Opponents |
| Understanding |
Convincing |
| Harmony |
Victory |
| Common ground |
Battle ground |
| Meeting points |
Talking points |
| Listening and explaining |
Telling and defending |
What is NOT dialog?
Politically motivated propaganda that demonizes the other
side, attempts to subvert dialog for other purposes, boycott campaigns and the like are not dialog, they are the
opposite of dialogue. Learn to recognize them and avoid them. See
A program for wrecking Israeli-Palestinian Dialog
There are many face to face dialog groups and e-mail ones as well. Below is
a partial list. The MidEast Web Dialog Directory has more details about these and other
groups. If your organization or group is not posted, let us know and we will add it!
If you don't find what you are looking for in the list, try any of the
following:
In the MidEast -
Givat Haviva is the premiere dialog center
in Israel and will help groups start dialog.
The Abraham
Fund sponsors and funds dialog and coexistence activities for Israeli Jews and Arabs.
MidEast Web - Yes Us!! We will help you start a
dialog. Hagit Ra'anan has organized trips to Gaza and the
West Bank where Israelis and foreigners, young and old, met Palestinians and share meals
and other experiences. These trips were featured on Israeli television and her work has been publicized by the BBC, CNN
and CBC. MidEastWeb is interested in organizing other dialog groups - and helping you organize them. Contact
MidEast Web for more information. Of course, you can also join our online e-dialog group -
for details click here.
CCRR - The Palestine Center for Conflict
Resolution and Rapprochement, educates for nonviolent values and conflict resolution skills in Palestine.
Motivation Circle
- This group promotes integrated life styles in Israel. They intend to found a multi cultural cooperative village in
Israel/Palestine. It will include mainly Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims, religious and secular
people. Property, incomes and expenses will be shared and it is open for everyone to join. The Motivation Circle serves
as a supporting umbrella for those members that intend to actually found the village and live in it.
Interfaith
Encounter Association - Promotes dialog and interfaith meetings in Israel. A
personal account of a peace walk in Jerusalem illustrates the spirit of this group.
Palestine Center for Rapprochement runs a
dialog in Beit Sahour, near Jerusalem and has many contacts. Their sister organization is
Rapprochement Dialogue Center in Israel.
Peace Child Israel is devoted to
educating children and educators to dialog.
Open House in
Ramlah run by Yehezkel and Dalia Landau, is a dialog group for Israeli
Arabs and Jews. They have an educational program for children and a parents' support group.
YAKAR is a Jerusalem based group
devoted to dialog both within Jewish society and between Arabs and Jews.
US
Common Ground - Building Bridges -
Operates dialog projects for Israeli and Palestinian youth as well as for Americans.
Seeds of Peace - Seeds of Peace
operates a dialog camp for Middle East Youth in Maine, and has branches throughout the Middle East.
Click here for an account of an experience at the Seeds of Peace Camp.
www.soccerforpeace.com - The mission of Soccer For Peace is to promote tolerance, understanding and peace in the
Middle East, and ultimately throughout the world, by uniting children of different backgrounds in their shared love of
soccer. It is a New York based non-profit organization with neither political affiliation nor political agenda.
Middle East Peace Forum
is a television show dedicated to fostering dialogue between people who may come from different perspectives but
who share a common desire for peace in the Middle East. The Web site has live Web casts of programs, links and articles,
and promises to have archival recordings of shows as well.
Bay Area - Len and Libby
Traubman in the San Francisco Bay area are co-initiators of the California Living Room dialog. They also have
several Web pages devoted to dialog and are always ready to help you, wherever you are.
If you are a physician, scientist or other professional interested in
Profession cooperation in the Middle East, contact The
Alliance of Middle East Scientists and Physicians
Orange County California - The
Cousins Club of Orange County is a well established group that supports peace
education projects in the Middle East, chiefly the Hope Flowers school in El Khader.
Los Angeles -Middle
East Peace Net (MEPN) was founded to promote peace and democracy in the Middle East. The MEPN focuses on raising
public awareness, networking and fundraising both in the United States and in the Middle East.
Boston - The University of the
Middle East Project is an effort to bring educators together from all over the Middle East and teach them skills
needed to build a better future.
Austin, Texas - The Austin
dialog for peace holds regular meetings between local Palestinian Jewish and other residents to advance the cause
of peace in the Middle East.
Brooklyn, NY - The Dialog Project
brings together groups of Palestinians and Israelis. This group has attracted a great deal of attention in the press.
It now has over 150 people meeting monthly or regularly in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Manhattan,
Riverdale/Westchester/Yonkers, and Queens. Here is a link
from a recent NPR broadcast:
http://thedialogueproject.org/Citywatchdialogue.mp3 They travel to cities and present model dialogues. Contact:Marcia Kanry
marcia@thedialogueproject.org. (718) 768-2175 Fax: (718) 768 - 2094
Florida - Middle East Peace
Association was established to promote dialogue through educational presentations, meetings, and other events,
promote non-violence as a strategy and way of interacting with one another in activities, dialogue, education, and
activism around supporting Middle East Peace, and find common ground between polarized viewpoints.
Switzerland - The
Basle Jewish Palestinian dialog can help you find contacts in Europe.
Canada - The Jewish -
Muslim peace walk in Vancouver aims to build interfaith understanding and provide a common basis for working for
peace in the Middle East.
E-mail dialogs on the Web
MidEastWeb (that's us) provides an open e-dialog list where anyone can
express their opinions, and a newsletter. To subscribe to our open e-dialog, click here.
For more information about the dialog, click here.
The PEACE newsletter gives you a forum to express your opinions and get
news about the Mid East. It is not a list server list - but we do circulate articles and extensive comments of
members. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here. For more information about the
newsletter, click here.
The Encounter group has a list that is just for peace activists (it
is not supposed to be a political discussion group). For more information,
click here. To subscribe,
click here.
Shalom Wa Salaam Dialog (Arabs and Jews Seeking Peace) carries out lively
dialogs by e-mail (mostly about politics) and may also help you find a dialog group near you. To subscribe,
click here.
forum is a Yahoo discussion group that facilitates communications for the
International Forum for the Culture of Peace, founded by Dr. Ada Aharoni to further dialog through culture. To
subscribe, click here. For more information,
click here.
Dialog for Young People
Several groups offer dialog for young people:
Seeds of Peace - Seeds of
Peace is a world famous organization that brings together young people from all over the middle east at their summer
camp in the United States. They have offices and activities in the Middle East as well.
Reut Sadaka -
Jewish Arab youth dialog group that operates Friendship Village and many other projects in Israel.
Peace Generation - A
Peace camp for youths of Jewish and Palestinian background, in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States.
Peace Child Israel - Dialog and
relationship-building through dramatic performances.
A special sort of dialogue
Daniel Pearl was an American journalist who was murdered by Muslim
extremists, because he was Jewish. His family created the Daniel Pearl Foundation
to further interfaith dialogue.
The Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding
is a series of personal yet public conversations between Daniel Pearl’s father, Professor Judea Pearl, President of the
Daniel Pearl Foundation, and Dr. Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University. The dialogue grew out of
Professors Ahmed and Pearl's shared concern about the deterioration of relationships between Muslim and Jewish
communities around the world, and their strong belief that reconciliation between these two Abrahamic faiths can be
achieved through frank and respectful dialogue. In 2006 Professors Ahmed and Pearl were awarded the first annual
Purpose Prizee “in recognition of [their] simple, yet
innovative approach to solving one of society’s most pressing problems.”
Click here for more information.
How to Start a Dialog
If the is no dialog group near you, or you want to do
something different, you can start a dialog group by:
Posting a notice on the Web at different discussion groups.
Contacting local religious and community leaders, who often
have interfaith and interethnic contacts.
Posting a notice in your University or student group.
Contact MidEast Web or any of the other groups above.
You can also start your own Web Site
to publicize your dialog experience - tell us about it and we will link to you.
Dialog Resources - The
Dialog to Action Initiative has a Web site dedicated to dialog resources.
You can join an e-mail list for dialog leaders there, get help with funding and access a host of other resources.
A dialog group can do or discuss anything depending on the composition and
cohesion of its members, and where it takes place. Here are a few ideas:
-
A Page of Dialog Materials - Ideas and
stories that can be used and adapted for dialog groups.
-
Changing Sides - A Palestinian or Arab tells the story of a
Jew living in Israel. A Jew tells the story of a Palestinian. The characters can be modern or historic. They can relate
to every day events or to becoming a refugee or being a terror victim, or going through a checkpoint for example, or to
positive experiences. Tell what happens and how you feel. Here is an example: a Palestinian and a
Zionist discuss the question of Jerusalem from reversed vantage points.
-
A Program for Peace - Your group can build a simple program
for peace. What are the important issues for both sides? Each side will learn a great deal about how and what the other
side thinks, and you will build trust. The PEACE group declaration
is one example of such a program. The Basle dialogue group has another such example.
-
Jerusalem - Jerusalem will be one
issue of any peace program, but it can certainly be the subject of a separate discussion.
-
What my Religion Tells me about War and
Peace - What does your religion tell you is more important: Peace and Reconciliation or Territory?
-
Action on Issues - Your group can take up a cause - for
example, charity drives for peace education projects, or start a campaign to pressure politicians about specific issues
such as: speeding up the peace process or democracy in the PNA.
-
Water and Resources - Members can do
some research on the water issue and come up with solutions and debate them.
-
Personal Experiences - Members can tell what happened to
them. What made them trust/distrust the "other side." There are several Web pages devoted to personal experiences
in the Middle East conflict that may inspire discussion and thought in dialog. For example, an
exchange of letters between a Palestinian and an Israeli,
personal experiences related by different people An Unexpected link
An interfaith walk for peace
Experiences of Others and Testaments to Peace
E-Dialog
This promising
email dialog was started by an aggressive flame letter that was answered with wisdom and patience.
PEACE
The Story of PEACE
tells how the PEACE Mid East Dialog group started from a letter from a Jordanian/Palestinian sent to an Israeli Web
forum.
Dialog on Campus -
JMP The Jewish Muslim Project
Harlan Luxenberg tells how this dialog project got started and
what they did. More
Saida Nusseibeh
My Experiences in Dialog - Saida Nusseibeh,
a pioneer of Middle East Dialog, tells of her experiences in dialog since the 1980s.
SEEDS OF PEACE
A high school teenager gives a vivid, direct and moving
account of her experiences at Seeds of Peace Camp.
A Bridge
This letter from a Palestinian to an Israeli was the start of a long standing friendship by mail.
Bereaved Parents' Group
A very special kind of dialog has been
established between families of those who have fallen in the conflict.
Arab-Jewish Dialogue Of New Mexico
This group held a big public
dialog in New Mexico.
