The Late Professor Dan Bar-OnPRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East) |
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“ In '85 I launched a pioneering research project in Germany where I interviewed the children of Nazi perpetrators, which I did for over 3 years. I interviewed about 90 people in Germany. As a result of my interviews, a group was formed of my interviewees; there were about 10 or 12 of them who met as a self-help group for over four years, from '88 to '92. In '92 (I don't think I had the courage before that), I asked them if they would be willing to meet a group of children of Holocaust survivors. When they said yes, I suggested it to some of my students in Beer Sheva [University in Israel] and some colleagues from Boston and New York. That group, which is called TRT, To Reflect and Trust, started to meet in June 1992 and has met every year since then. In '98, I brought practitioners from current conflicts into the group, people from Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Palestinians and Israelis, to see if what we did in that group was relevant for current conflicts. We knew that they were very different situations, but we wanted to see if it was relevant. We had developed a method for storytelling, which we felt might be relevant. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ What you find in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, in general, is typical to conflict situations, where the goal of the textbooks is to support and legitimize your side of the conflict, and to de-legitimize the other side. That's what you find on both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side, and it's very typical in other places that were in such intractable conflicts. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ One of our projects is to develop a new school textbook with a group of Palestinian teachers and Israeli teachers and two historians. We suggested that they take some dates from the history of the conflict... there were three dates: 1917, the Balfour Declaration, 1948, and the first intifada. Each teacher should write his own narrative about these dates. Then they read each other's narratives, they commented on them, and they asked questions. Finally, they were written up as two separate narratives. The task of the teacher is to teach both narratives to the pupils, and thereby to make the pupils aware, and to respect and acknowledge the fact that there are different narratives, that it's not one legitimate and one not, and not that one are facts and one are propaganda, like the public says. These are two different perspectives, two different understandings of what happened in the history of the conflict. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Vision and Education and History:
“ Our idea was to build two narratives that will exist in the public for a long time, long after there are two states. We believe in the two-state solution. Our idea was actually to prepare the pupils to accept that that there are two perspectives to what happened here. So for example, for the Palestinians, it will always be that the Balfour Declaration was the first time that their rights were not recognized. And for the Israeli-Jews, it will always be the first time that the international community recognized their right to a national home in this land. These things will not change, even if there is a political solution. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ The Palestinian refugee issue is the issue that from the psychological point of view has been most neglected among all the other issues. All the other issues have been tested to some extent, but there is a total denial and repression of the Palestinian refugee problem […] [Addressing the refugee issue] demands that Israelis recognize their partial responsibility for its creation, and the Israelis are afraid that once they provide this recognition, it may delegitimize their own existence in this space. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ We definitely think that part of the problem [with the refugee issue] is the big numbers which are depressing for everyone and require a kind of total solution. We believe the opposite has to be done, that you have to break it down into small facets... to look at it locally... to see the situation of the refugees in Lebanon as the worst, so you have to help them first of all. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ I don't like the equation of what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians to what happened in the Holocaust. I think these are simplified versions; they are vulgar, and I don't like them. But my experience with working in that conflict did help me understand things I see in our situation. For example, I did a seminar in the '80s where my students interviewed a Holocaust survivor and a child of a Holocaust survivor, and they brought the interviews into the classroom and we discussed them. Now I am working with a group of Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and they are interviewing someone from their parents' generation and someone from their grandparents' generation, then they bring the interviews into the classroom, and we discuss the interviews. So, I learned how to translate things from that issue into the current one. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ Even through the darkest moments where there was no hope at all we were stubbornly continuing to do this work. We believe there will be the moment after, and at the moment after, we should be ready with our materials. That was our concept. I think politicians should go through the lessons that our teachers went through, of listening to the other narrative, asking questions about it, telling the other side what terminology is insulting for them, seeing how the narratives will have to fit together so that each teacher will feel that they can teach in their own classroom. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Obstacles and Challenges and Fear:
“ The fear that listening to the other will de-legitimize their own position... their own experiences, their own feelings... that [is] a major fear of both groups, I think. The success was that they could listen to each other and not de-legitimize either their own or the other point of view. It's very difficult to contain in yourself both stories. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Vision and Lessons Learned:
“ For more than half of my life I have been living in a society that is always going the wrong way, from my point of view. That is very difficult. You have to find a way to live with it without developing self-hatred or hatred toward your own society. You have to understand how difficult it is for people but at the same time try to push them to move out of it. I learned a lot about change processes, and our limitations in terms of how much we can push people forward-when and how-and that we should never give up and say what didn't work yesterday may not perhaps work tomorrow. So you always have to look for new opportunities to try things out. Sometimes only by trial and error can you know if people are ready or not. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Vision and Conceptions of Peace:
“ We think that true peace means that you recognize how the other is different from you, not how the other is the same as you are. To create a bridging narrative means to create a same-ness. We don't want to create an illusion of same-ness; we don't think that will happen, not in the near future, at least. So first of all you have to recognize that the other thinks differently from yourself. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Political Peace Processes/Political Leadership and Education:
“ I think a change in the political situation is necessary [before The Ministry of Education accepts our textbooks]. I think education will be one of the first issues that will come up on the agenda when dialogue begins again on the political level. Both sides are aware today that it's important to do something to change education. In Oslo it was neglected. We see it as a problem that in Oslo and even in the Geneva Initiative there was no chapter on education. We feel that education should be a major issue in any upcoming peace agreement. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ People from the outside can help but it’s limited. We saw it in our seminars, when you bring a third party in, as helpful as he wants to be, first of all he has to learn all the refinements of the setting, and then also right away it creates a situation where each side wants to grab him for themselves. It disrupts the process. So sometimes it’s better to keep the third party out and to really move forward with the two parties. Third parties do not always know how to play that role. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
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