Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group
The Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group is a non-violent conflict resolution group established in 1992 in San Mateo, California. Its first meeting was held in a local neighborhood residence. As of September 2019, the group remained active and continued to meet monthly in members' homes. The one-to-one, face-to-face method of conflict resolution, modeled by this dialogue group, was increasingly looked to globally by educators, researchers, journalists, activists, trainers, and strategists including the U.S. Department of State, which distributes the dialogue group's instructive films in Africa. Members of  the group have initiated and provided facilitation support at seminars, conferences and youth gatherings, created both printed and video facilitation guidelines, and responded to requests for media interviews. Interest in their work increased in national media during the 2000 Intifada. The group co-founders gave the 2017 Commencement Address at Notre Dame de Namur University,"STORIES OF CHANGE: Creating a Culture of Connection in The Citizens’ Century". Beginnings. Initial incentive to form the dialogue group came from coexistence models of the 1980s in the Middle East and Africa. Examples are: Neve Shalom ~ Wahat as-Salam (Oasis of Peace), a village  where Jewish and Palestinian Israeli families live and learn together, and Koinonia Southern Africa, founded by Reverend Nico Smith during apartheid years, which gathered thousands of Blacks and Whites together to share meals and stories, sometimes in public at risk to their lives. Both initiatives were honored together during the San Francisco 1989 Beyond War Award Ceremony. The word Koinonia means "belonging together" or "communion by intimate participation" Several members of this dialogue group have deep roots in the principles and educational tradition of the Beyond War movement of the 1980s, which was succeeded by the Foundation for Global Community , the group's first fiscal sponsor. Fiscal oversight support was later provided by the Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center. In 1991, several of the dialogue group founders, who had worked with the Beyond War Foundation and the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, brought together Palestinian and Israeli citizen leaders who forged and signed the " "Framework for a Public Peace Process" ". The Living Room Dialogue model. Engaging in peacebuilding, the early Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women and men participants in the dialogue group were determined to export solutions, rather than import problems. They intended to create a people-intensive—not money -intensive—easily reproducible, in-home model to parallel and complement the government peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as in other regions of the world. By 1993, government negotiators were clarifying their own plea for mandatory citizen participation and the need for the creativity of People-to-People Programs, as found in Annex VI of the 1993 Oslo Accords. As designed, the living room dialogue group format gives dynamic form to the emerging paradigm of people-centered human security that challenges traditional notions of government-centered national security and is focused on sustained state, regional, and global  stability. Means of change. Change is viewed by the dialogue group in binary terms—a "no" component and a "yes" component. While defining the "no" component—what is wrong, disintegrating, and in need of correction—the dialogue's larger intention is to embody and paint a picture of the "yes," The intent is to focus less on the old and the obsolete—what does not work—and more on modeling the new, the "yes" component that works for the good of all. The dialogue group's ongoing experience is that change begins in small circles of local innovators and Culture  Creatives. The means of Communication to strengthen relationships, release creativity, and effect change is Dialogue, with its quality of Listening for Learning. While the action of dialogue is designed to deepen and enhance circles of relationships, it is not to be mistaken for safe, casual Conversation or adversarial, win-lose Debate. Furthermore, this type of dialogue's contribution to Conflict Transformation is not in Conflict Resolution or Deliberation. Rather this type of dialogue is used to introduce, familiarize, humanize, dignify, and empathize with all the people in the room, so that Conflict Resolution and Deliberation can then take place on  a solid foundation. In particular, the dialogue process begins with exploring each person's life narrative, because in many cases "an enemy is one whose story we have not heard". A beneficial outcome of this type of dialogue is a reduction in the widespread humiliation and rankism on Earth as defined by Robert W. Fuller. This Track II Diplomacy approach is not a quick fix but requires time, and thus is rightfully referred to as Sustained Dialogue, as defined by Dr. Harold H. (Hal) Saunders. Useful practices of this cross-cultural communication continue to improve, drawing from the best of  Bohm Dialogue, Interfaith Dialogue, and the ongoing global Dialogue Among Civilizations. Activities. The contributions made by this dialogue group to the expanding effort to choose conversation over conflict were recognized in the Directory of Arab/Jewish/Palestinian Dialogue Groups published by the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota. Always seeking to expand the network, participants in this Dialogue Group communicate daily face-to-face and by e-mail, telephone, and Skype with citizens worldwide to encourage new groups and provide both graphic and written how-to guidelines (pdf). This dialogue group regularly publishes e-mail  reports on the global success stories regarding the expanding public peace process. Creating and Distributing Educational Tools and Instruction Guides. The dialogue method draws on the wisdom of Elie Wiesel: "People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell." Dialogue-initiated peacebuilding successes are documented in film and other tools of education that are available for community building. Documents created by the group and freely distributed for use by others include: Palestinian & Jewish Recipes for Peace, Camp Activities for Relationship Building (pdf), The Public Peace Process of Change (pdf), MEETING MOHAMMED: Beginning Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue (pdf), STORY AS  ENTRY TO RELATIONSHIP: Teacher's Guide (pdf), ENGAGING THE OTHER: Teacher's Guide (pdf) and also see related Theses and documents of others. The dialogue also maintains a web resource page referencing multi-lingual graphics that can be used by other groups wanting to use dialogue as a communication tool. Dialogue groups launched and supported. Many dialogue and relationship-building endeavors continue to be birthed and deepened with assistance from this dialogue group: Building Bridges in Western New York, The Dialogue Project in Brooklyn, The Houston Palestinian-Jewish Dialogue Group, Jewish-Arab Dialogues in Atlanta, Jewish-Palestinian Living Room  Dialogue in San Diego, documented in the film, "Talking Peace", West Los Angeles Cousins Club, Monmouth Dialogue Project: Founder Saliba Sarsar, Potlucks for Peace – Ottawa, Arab/Jewish Women's Peace Coalition, Montreal Dialogue Group, and Cousins Club of Palestinians, Jews Seeks Peace. International initiatives and support. Bauchi State of Nigeria. Participation by the members of the Forward Action for Conservation of Indigenous Species.(FACIS) in the conference in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria gave this group the confidence to gather Muslim and Christian men and women for a Dialogue. Documentary filmography. A variety of films document The Dialogue Group's domestic and  international experiences. Over 13,000 DVDs have been requested from all continents and every U.S. state including citizens from 2,594 institutions, 2,601 cities, in 82 nations including 20 countries in Africa. Films include: