Cairo Dialogue

Dialogue

‘Dialogue’ refers to a set of practices employed by facilitators to stimulate conversation that flows in non-linear ways and stands apart from more formal ways of engaging groups in conversation, such as debates or discussions. The word is much abused, especially at large conferences where various Big speakers come and take the platform for ‘High Level’ dialogues where no genuine form of listening or exchange appears to occur between them, let alone the vast majority of those in the room (the audience) excluded from the talk. In Egypt, during, the GCM programme we, encouraged by all of our grounding as facilitators in Freiran methodologies, encouraged participants to think and act dialogically. We also allocated a morning session to organise subject specific dialogues. To this end we employed a simple technique called the ‘Fishbowl’ whereby two circles of participants are formed, facing inward, with the outer remaining silent and observing the behaviour of those inside and the flow of the dialogue, to feed back on the process later. At periodic intervals the opportunity is given to change circles so that everyone who has something to say can do so and that as many people as possible can watch proceedings from the outside too. The facilitator floats between the two and can input questions or reflections to try and move the conversation forward if it reaches a sticking point and nothing new is being added. The intention is that participants gain insights on the how the process itself relates to their and how they articulate them.

We used a simple consensus based decision making tool to select three topics for the dialogues with the GCM group. Number one on the list once votes had been cast was the question ‘Israel/Palestine. Two State Solution. Yes/NO?’ Being volunteered (with full consent and enthusiasm) to facilitate the dialogue on Israel/Palestine was partially poetic justice. I, having encouraged the participants who had keenly raised the issue with me to put it in the ‘car park’ and take opportunities to raise it, was tasked with working the issue through to whatever conclusions our group of 15 or so could hope to draw in 60 minutes on so from such a monumentally complex, conflicted and emotive subject. I relished the opportunity, truth be told, and didn’t regret it for a second, even as my own thoughts and feelings twisted and turned relentlessly. Surfing the turmoil and trying to effect a degree of useful objectivity…following the fast, passionate discussion and keeping an air open for ad hoc translation, felt, if not good, certainly alive!

Whilst a passion for justice was clear in the discourse and some of the contributions were rooted in real experience of time spent on the West Bank, the conditioning that Arab societies cultivate to demonise Israel was evident in many of the contributions, but so was an awareness of the hypocrisy of Arab and Western politicians whose rhetoric and policy on this subject are often worlds apart. What was most worrying for me was the repeated assertion that either Jews have no real history to speak or that, perhaps even more shockingly, the individual talking did not know that history and did not think it important to discover. Ignorance of the other is a key enabling factor in maintaining fear and dehumanising ‘enemies’. Another worrying undercurrent, but not one that went uncontested within the discussion, related to the polarisation of Islam and Judaism. The use of language…’Our’…’Us’….’They’…is intriguing in its reflection of unspoken narratives. Many people speaking seemed to exactly equate Palestinians with Arabs with Muslims. And yet there are many Christian Palestinians and Palestinians are strongly, marginalised within many Arab societies. I wonder how the dynamics of the group would have changed if their had been young Israelis participating. The dynamics of exclusion within MENA countries was not often explicitly addressed as the other was there to take the weight of criticism. Also responsibility, as in ‘they have to this…’ was often assigned to an imaginary interlocutor. When asked to name who might be able to do this, participants mostly named the USA. To me this highlights the sense of isolation that surrounds Palestine, which in turn leads me to believe that solidarity efforts in the West are not working. More and deeper work is needed to support Palestinian and Israeli Civil Society activists to achieve justice for the Palestinian people. Then maybe the feeling of helplessness some of the activists in this dialogue expressed could be transformed into a disciplined, strategic optimism.

Another learning was the danger of terms without interrogating differing interpretations of them and giving space for participants to make clear the own underlying meanings they attributed to language, which often vary wildly and yet are all too rarely aired. Some participants rejected ‘peace’ as a useful or desirable term, finding in it implications of passivity or acquiescence, what I would term ‘the absence of violence; rather than the achievement of justice. The pride of seeing Palestine (and thus at some level all Arabs) standing up to a seemingly all powerful oppressor relies on a bold dream of victory achieved by some form of retributive justice that validates and glorifies all and any violence against Israel or Israelis.

Dialogue is about pushing imaginative and creative borders by making a safe space to talk about issues that often feel dangerous to get out in the open. To do so is to invite participants to invest certain of trust and emotion in the process. If they are expecting a concrete outcome external to their own perception of the situation then they are being set up to fail and to suffer some hurt. As a facilitator being sensitive to this is incredibly important and attempting to demonstrate such a process and allow adequate time to decompress, reflect and process one’s own emotions is incredibly important. Being alive to the energy and inputs of the group and trusting as much as possible that they will steer themselves to new areas of discussion is also something I will concentrate on cultivating for future dialogues.

Taking the above into account it was pleasant that the response to the introduction and the handling of the subject was overwhelmingly positive. I hope that participants derived something from the experience not only about the nature of the tool we used for facilitation, but more importantly about their own expression and interaction in such a setting.

The UK team involved in GCM MENA was in attendance to develop an online dialogue initiative and I look forward to seeing how it develops over time.

Resources

Introduction to Paulo Freire

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm

A fantastic report compiling reflections on different tools for dialogue.
http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/papers/pioneers_dialogue/00_all.pdf


A set of resources based on the work of Physicist David Bohm, a trailblazer in the field.
http://www.david-bohm.net/dialogue/

The Art of Powerful Questions
http://www.theworldcafe.com/articles/aopq.pdf