[Buddha-l] Tovanna: Insight meditation in Israel

[curt]

Richard Hayes wrote:
>
> What Fulder spoke about last night was the work that his group has been doing 
> for about fifteen years. They have been organizing workshops at which 
> Israelis and Palestinians meet to learn about one another and to talk frankly 
> about their dukkha. They have borrowed all kinds of "deep listening" 
> techniques from Quakers, from psychologists, from negotiators, and from 
> Buddhists such as Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh. What they have learned to 
> do is to create an atmosphere in which people feel comfortable just talking 
> about their suffering and thinking creatively of practical things they might 
> do to reduce the amount of pain in their lives. Fulder spoke quite frankly 
> about the successes and the failures of this process. 
>
>
>   
Significant political change will come to Palestine one way or the 
other. The type of dialog that Fulder is involved in will do little to 
bring about actual change, but it does have the potential to greatly 
impact HOW the changes will come about. A case in point is South Africa. 
It is very important to remember that the main organization that led the 
freedom movement against Apartheid was the African National Congress, 
which consistently and emphatically preached (and I think that is the 
right word) a message of racial conciliation, while simultaneously 
preaching the overthrow of the racist regime "by any means necessary". 
The result was not a completely peaceful revolution, but rather one that 
was "as peaceful as possible." There can be a tendency, and sometimes a 
very strong tendency, for people who advocate "dialog" to see it as an 
alternative to the much messier methods that are still required to get 
the job done. Sometimes this goes so far as to "cry peace, peace - when 
there is no peace" as a famous extremist once put it. The State of 
Israel did not come about as a result of dialogs - but if there had been 
more and better "dialoging" during the process by which it did come 
about - well, it's worth considering how differently things could have 
turned out.

- Curt