Melisse Lewine-Boskovich
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Where did you get the training to be able to do this?
Some of it was on the job. When I was hired, it was to be the director. Part of it was working in theater and the arts-- and I had that background. Part of it was to be the administrator, and I also had that [experience]. What was missing was group facilitation, which I hadn't done. In fact I didn't even know what a facilitator was; I didn't know what that word meant when I got started, and that was 1996, it's not so long ago. I did that course three or four years ago. I was pretty fresh in it. I did a lot by instinct and I made some mistakes, too. There were things that needed to be altered due to circumstances, and I learned a lot. I wasn't facilitating in the beginning. This year I facilitated by default, I wasn't supposed to. However, I do have a flair for it because I'm sensitive to people. It's because of the nurturing that I didn't get because of my own personal issues. It's all connected. I see things happening. Theater people have that... I've had very intense experiences working in theater on acting scenes; allowing yourself to be vulnerable is part of the deal when you're doing theater. We support a safe environment. We try our best to create a safe environment so that people can allow themselves to be vulnerable or to honor a person's discomfort, to acknowledge it. In our group here in Jerusalem, when Palestinians were making some claims against what the Israelis were doing, and the Jewish kids, see here's another digression: the wrong people are in the room! The ones who are willing to come these days, for the most part, on the Jewish side anyway, are kids or adults who grew up in families who already have some sort of inclination to accept the other or to honor and respect the other. And they're no match for the really hyped-up, super-charged, identity-driven Palestinians these days. So it's not a fair fight. It should be the kids of Lieberman.1 Even what very moderate Arab kids have to say, and even when they say it in dulcet tones, is not hard to hear. The Jewish kids don't have the backbone. I mean, I don't think that the backbone of Lieberman or Benny Alon2 or any of those people is a healthy one, but they certainly have an answer for anything anyone would say to them. So if you would ask Lieberman's kids to understand the pain of what the Arabs went through, "just imagine it was your land that somebody took from you," or whatever, and that would make a major shift. There's something out of whack with who's in the room these days. Not many people will admit it. Everybody talks about the fact that in a lot of cases we're already working with the convinced in some ways. But they don't take it as far as saying that the process itself is unfair. What's your solution? Stick it out until this comes back in style. Purposely look for communities where it's needed. They're not particularly willing to do it now, and things got really bad in the last couple of years. They don't want to hear about it. Another factor is the financial situation here. This is the last thing they're going to invest in when the economy is going to hell in a hand basket at warp speed.- 1Resigned from the Israeli parliament in 2003. He founded the right wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and was a proponent of what he called "voluntary transfer," the resettlement, deportation or expulsion of Palestinians, including Israeli citizens, to other Arab countries.
- 2A member of Israel's parliament with National Union, a coalition of right wing parties, which was dismissed from Ariel Sharon's cabinet and coalition government for opposing the disengagement from Gaza.