New Approaches to Israel and the Middle East
Douglass Carmichael and Don Straus

This conference was longer than most of our other conferences, so rather than have you, the reader, stuck with going from page to page through a navigation system, the Digest is making the conference available in it's entirety as a downloadable MS Word document.

Just click here to transfer it to your own system.

The first few pages are reprinted below to give you an idea of the content.

Introduction by Richard Farson

Welcome to our ILF policy conference on New Approaches to Israel and the Middle East. Our relationship to Israel and its neighboring nations is clearly central to the War on Terrorism, and the need for fresh insight to these matters is urgent. Recognizing the difficulty our policymakers have in discussing this emotionally loaded and politically sensitive subject, we have constructed a special conference to help us to dig deeply, maintain a focus, deal with the potentially highly polarized feelings about it, and make certain that it takes the direction that the participating Fellows choose. Accordingly, we have two leaders for this conference, one to lead us through the subject matter, and another to facilitate the conferencing process. We're fortunate indeed to have two ILF Fellows ideal for these roles. Psychologist and broad ranging intellectual Douglas Carmichael, who has paid close attention to the ancient and modern history of Israel's development in the politics of the Middle East, will serve as our content leader. Donald Straus, former president of the American Arbitration Association, and an experienced mediator, who did such a masterful job managing our abortion conference back in 1983, will facilitate the process. We are grateful indeed for their willingness to tackle this most difficult matter. Welcome Doug and Don!

Douglass Carmichael
Difficult for sure. Thanks Dick. This will be another opportunity to clarify what I myself am thinking, and I am very grateful for the nudge to take this on.

Is a better approach to issues and opportunities for Israel/Palestine/ Middle East/ (bearing in mind the quality of future world development) possible?

My current starting view is that the US supported what could be called an opportunistic or tactical policy with and toward Israel largely because of the strategic significance of its Middle Eastern location and oil as center pieces in the cold war, and the US now supports basically the same policy because of the Bush focus on terrorism rather than issues of justice, environment, youth, business.. and we have become frequently seen as an illegitimate broker in the Middle East because we are perceived as so one sided.

I'd like to open the conference at this point and see what others are thinking: issues, opportunities, factors, ideas, and perspectives. But Don is already nudging me to take an initial question to start.

So, first question: Is US policy towards Israel and the whole Middle East on a reasonable development curve? As hinted at, I really don't think so, but I am also aware that, like a game of pick-up sticks, it is a difficult situation and any change—or none—looks terrifying.

We will use this item as the place for the main conversation, and Don will act as facilitator, which lets me be a bit freer with my own emerging point of view (I am conflicted and unsure). If side issues develop that need exploration we will create new topics for those. We are starting with two additional topics: one for news that pertains to our core question, and the other for background readings that help frame what we are about.

Jewish Influence in the United States

Participant
Doug: "the US supported . . . Israel largely because of the strategic significance of its Middle Eastern location and oil . . ."

I suggest that the size of the Jewish vote in the USA may have had something to do with it, historically.

Douglass Carmichael
definitely, and it may be the elephant (no pun intended) Dick mentioned in the opening. Here is some text from The London Review, fairly mainstream British review, giving view of the issue. If it is true, we have some hard work ahead.

"Rather, the force durably proscribing any more constructive policy is the Congress, where one-sided support for

Israel is deeply ingrained. This is the result, very largely, of Israeli-lobby leverage and campaign contributions (of various kinds) but major US business interests in Israel have to be borne in mind, as does the well- organised Christian Right, with its bizarre millennialist fixation on a Jewish Israel as portending the Endtimes. Even more limiting of US foreign policy are the attitudes of individual Congressmen and women. Their public statements indicate that the great majority have internalised right-wing Israeli propaganda. For decades, the Israeli lobby has presented Congress with the narrative of a beleaguered Jewish people trying to build a homeland in a tiny country huddled on the Mediterranean while fending off irrational Islamic/ Arab hostility. With members from both parties saturated in these assumptions and hooked by hard financial and electoral clout, the Presidency is greatly constrained in any attempt it might make to lever the Israeli Government towards a loathed and costly policy change—withdrawing or freezing settlements, for instance—even though there are dissenting Israelis who would ardently endorse it. Any move in this direction on the part of any President would be political suicide. The US, then, is not neutral, but neutralised; its foreign policy remains committed to supporting Israel's 'welfare' however the Israeli Government conceives it, which is why it can have no independent impact on settlement policy."

from Virginia Tilley: The One-State Solution

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/till01_.html

Douglass Carmichael
Oil is one of the motivators and the Israeli lobby (or is it the vote?) an enabler. The American Jewish community is within itself deeply divided, and I do not know recent statistics, but lack of agreement with current Israeli policy may be in the minority. The lack of any meaningful broadly acknowledged alternative to the rising violence keeps much of what support there is intact.

(Side note: Facilitator Entrance)
Donald Straus
I am Donald Straus. Dick has asked me to introduce "facilitation" to this program. A facilitator, like the better known arbitrator, is a "third party" in any discussion -- which means he/she has no personal interest in the proceedings other than to help the active parties understand a problem or resolve a dispute.

Unlike an arbitrator who is seldom called upon unless the parties have dead-locked after long negotiations, a facilitator is usually called upon early in the proceedings to help the parties move toward a solution before it becomes adversarial.

Facilitation is still a relatively new skill, but its use is growing fast and some think it is of increasing value for resolving the kind of issues that ILFers like to discuss. While its use is uncommon in discussions like this one, I believe with your help it can be both useful and exciting.

Another way of describing a facilitator is to think of him/her as a chauffeur that has been hired to drive the car but has no opinion or desire to decide where to take you. He/she can warn you of difficulties in the road ahead and suggest better routes, but you are the boss. And above all: if you as a group feel that your chauffeur is no longer useful, you ask him to leave and he will do so without trouble or sorrow. This is central to facilitator ethics.

I view facilitation being at the end of a spectrum of human behavior that goes from warfare at one end, past various forms of resolving different opinions, and finally to facilitation that is designed to help in deliberative problem solving.

I will end by trying to explain why I think facilitation can be useful here. It may help us move towards solutions that might not be reached in our normal free-wheeling discussions. All of us have been imprinted by our American expectation that fame and fortune results from inventing solutions and then getting others to agree that their solution is wise and useful. But many who have had a good experience with a facilitated discussion get almost equal pleasure in participating with a group that has developed new ideas not previously considered.

Now this is not a promise that any such miracle will pop out of my (really our) facilitation efforts here, but it just might. We can always convert to the more accustomed form of discussion if the facilitation process seems to be bogging down.

Finally, here are just two preliminary "rules" your facilitating chauffeur would like you to accept:

* At any one time, you will be asked to keep your offerings within the boundaries that Doug has suggested. Our purpose is to mine as much of our group wisdom as we can before moving on to the next level of our discussion.

* Help develop a list of solutions, describing both their values and faults, before seeking to move on to the next topic.

Donald Straus
As your facilitator, my first duty is to ask that you all read carefully Doug's first choice of the area we should consider, and please keep your responses relevant to his question, e.g.:

"So, first question: Is US policy towards Israel and the whole Middle East on a reasonable development curve? As hinted at, I really don't think so, but I am also aware that, like a game of pick-up sticks, is a difficult situation and any change—or none—looks terrifying."

Let me suggest a few ways for doing this. These are not "instructions" but truly suggestions.

Start with addressing the question: Is US policy on a reasonable development curve? Doug has already revealed that he doesn't think so. You can agree, disagree, or, as would be in the spirit of facilitation, ask yourself and others what would be the ingredients of a "reasonable development curve", where we have deviated from that, and what might be a better target for us to follow.

As I suggested in my opening notes, withholding a strong conviction on such troublesome issues often can help you to review where your first convictions are rooted, and are there other factors which you haven't considered.

I could go on with further questions, but at this early stage of our work together, it is always useful to be sure we understand each other's views and compare them with your own. It could take several days to establish a common understanding of the question we are addressing. But whatever time it takes at the start, it probably will save much more time on the path to a solution.

Let me know if this makes sense to you. Early mutual understanding of the issues is central to facilitation, but there are many ways to get there.

This conference was longer than most of our other conferences, so rather than have you, the reader, stuck with going from page to page through a navigation system, the Digest is making the conference available in it's entirety as a downloadable MS Word document.

Just click here to transfer it to your own system.

top