Michal Eskenazi
4
Please tell me about the conference you took part in.
For me personally, it was very powerful because I came with opinions that were very clear-cut. Many people whose opinions can be counted as left-wing and who believe in cooperation with Palestinians have simply never met Palestinians. It's important for people who don't believe in such cooperation as well, but it is especially significant for people who believe in peace or believe in negotiating. My own experience is that I had a very well constructed idea of what was necessary or what I wanted to see happen to end the conflict, so you would have thought I'd be a fairly "easy" case. But when I arrived, I understood that reality is different. You can think you know what you want [to know] but you don't really know the other side, so you don't even have the means to imagine such negotiations or dialogue. It is impossible to get a sense of this from reading the headlines, interpretations or those articles you read in school. In the meetings, I discovered that it all boils down to differences in mentality, differences in what we want, diversity of backgrounds (ultimately this affects everything) and therefore necessitates bridging matters that are less apparent. This was very difficult for me because it isn't as simple as I thought; you don't just show up, make peace and then go back home, things don't work that way. Other participants came carrying psychological baggage I wasn't aware of.