Q&A with Melissa Zieve: Facilitated Dialogue on Israel and Gaza
In the months after the devastating Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, including the taking of hostages, and the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis that has killed over 40,000 Gazans, ICJS has received multiple requests from Baltimore-area high schools, organizations, government organizations, leadership programs, and our extensive network of fellowship alumni for help in dialoguing about these events. In response, ICJS developed a process to help groups have guided conversations about Israel and Gaza.
In this Q&A, Melissa Zieve, ICJS’ senior director for program, scholarship, and operations, offers her reflections after nearly a year of co-leading (with ICJS’ Christine Gallagher and Heather Miller Rubens) these candid, but difficult dialogue and listening sessions.
Q: Who participates in the ICJS sessions?
In order to create a space for dialogue across difference, ICJS is only working with groups that know one another; we are not convening strangers, or the general public, at this time. We are also limiting the sessions to have 15-18 participants to ensure a genuine conversation is possible. We know that when you are already in relationship with the participants in the dialogue, you’re less likely to be inflammatory than you might be with strangers. You have to show up and work with these people the next day. You are probably trying to express yourself more politely, even if you’re expressing strong views. And people certainly do express strong views.
Q: What happens in a session?
We start by reviewing the ICJS Guidelines for Effective Dialogue, which are on our website. We talk about the ICJS Value of Dialogue:
“Dialogue invites us to bring our commitments to each conversation and calls for patience, humility, curiosity, and courage. The outcome of dialogue does not require agreement, and meaningful relationships can exist even where there are irreconcilable differences. We believe that dialogue around difference deepens understanding and is an essential tool for connecting communities.”
We particularly dig into the middle sentence of that value because the notion that we can remain in a meaningful relationship—even when we differ or disagree—falls outside current social norms. In today’s world, deep disagreements about the Israel and Gaza are fracturing relationships and tearing apart organizations and schools. Practicing dialogue about deep differences is urgent work, and it is not happening in many places because the stakes are so high.
This is the crux of the challenge of dialogue—it takes courage and a capacity for vulnerability.
After introducing ICJS’ approach to dialogue, we talk about the idea of pluralism and living in a multireligious society. Before entering into a dialogue where religion will be discussed, we want to build a shared foundation of understanding about religious differences in society. So we offer a three-part approach using a framework developed by the Harvard Pluralism Project.
First, we emphasize that religions are internally diverse. Let’s not generalize or assume that everyone with the same religious identity has the same beliefs or views. Second, we consider how religions change over time. And it doesn’t have to be a very long time. Here is where people may realize that even if they share a religious identity with their grandparents, their grandparents may have practiced religion differently than they do. Finally, we explore how religion is embedded within culture. Religion is different in different places and in different communities. Our American context matters.
We then move into an exercise focused on personal sharing before we discuss Israel and Gaza. This is a critical transition where we are moving from theory—a mini-lecture about dialogue—to practice, a dialogue about what they know about the conflict. We ask participants to answer: “What is your particular relationship to this war?” Participants have shared: “I have family in Gaza,” or “I have family in Israel,” or “I lost family members,” or “my best friend or my best friend’s family was killed.” So now we’re really stepping into this hard conversation by better knowing who is in the room. Sometimes people are crying right away, just going around the room. I think people are caught off guard by how close the war is to some of their coworkers. But this is a key part of dialogical work—it is vital to know everyone’s personal connection to the war, before they share their thoughts on the ongoing conflict.
Also, this initial personal sharing gets people past their preconceived ideas about their colleagues. Often when people speak in this initial exercise, they shatter stereotypes. For example, we’ve had people who were Jewish and anti-Zionist; and people who were Palestinian and very sympathetic to the Israeli position. Feelings and perspectives are very individual, and it is important to give voice to that difference up front.
Q: How do you structure the next part of the facilitated dialogue?
There is important pre-work that every group we work with completes in advance. A few days in advance of the in-person conversation, we ask participants to fill out a Google form that asks three questions: One thing I know with certainty regarding the conflict; One thing I think I understand (but might be wrong about) regarding the conflict; and one thing I don’t know regarding the conflict.
Thus each group generates their own unique “text” upon which we base our dialogue. By having participants do this introspective work in advance of the in-person meeting we give each person a chance to anonymously share their perspectives with their colleagues. In a way, the first person “to speak” in each of these facilitated dialogues is actually the text that the group has generated.
Q: So how do you use the texts that each group generates? Why did you do it like that?
We distribute the text to the group and then we go around the room and ask each person to read out-loud the anonymous comments of their colleagues. The participants read the paper in the order in which they are sitting, so a person reading an answer may or may not agree with it. And they are most likely not reading the response that they submitted. It asks people to really take a risk, to put themselves inside someone else’s perspective. When you have to read something out loud, it’s very different than just reading it silently and hearing it in your head. Saying the words, you really for a moment take on the perspective of the writer (who they know is a colleague in the room). It’s a very powerful way to experience the fact that there are a lot of ways to look at this. You feel a little sympathy for someone’s words when you’ve read them out loud. But we’ve definitely had people who had a really hard time with some of the statements they had to read.
It does something for the speaker, but it also does something for the listener. The listeners can really hear the words and are less caught up in personality because they know they aren’t the words of the person saying them. And also, the Google form orders the questions from the most to the least amount of words, so there’s a way in which it has this poetic impact as it comes near the end, because the answers are getting shorter and shorter.
Q: Has the conversation ever gotten so contentious that you felt you had to dial back the heat in the room?
People have tended to get more sad than angry. Because we’ve created this space where it’s okay to share your feelings, the stronger emotions tend to be the pain, the anguish, the deep sadness about the loss of life. Rather than anger, we’ve had people express a kind of slightly heated despair about how hard it is to be in the world and hold certain viewpoints. Some people have expressed a fear that if they said what they were thinking, they would lose friends, or that their co-workers might be angry with them.
I think people come to this space to hear what people who are really different from themselves have to say. They want to hear that, even when it hurts.