12th Al Jazeera Forum: Session 4 - Changing Alliances in the Region

Israel-Palestine Mediation Circle

Nov. 7, 2003

 Hosted by Mediator Vikram and Ken Cloke

130 online attendees

Video recording here: (12) Israel Palestine #Mediation Circle - launch by Ken Cloke | LinkedIn

Ken Cloke’s Opening Comments at 5:50 to 21:00 minutes

Ken Cloke’s Biography  

“Ken Cloke is a world-recognized mediator, dialogue facilitator, conflict resolution systems designer, teacher, public speaker,  author of numerous books and articles, and a pioneer and leader in the field of mediation and conflict resolution for the last 37 years.

In 1980, [he] became a mediator, and in 1983, created the Center for Dispute Resolution in Santa Monica, CA, where [he has] been a mediator, arbitrator, facilitator, coach, consultant and trainer, specializing in communication, collaborative negotiation, dialogue facilitation, and resolving complex multi-party disputes, including thousands of marital, divorce, family, community, grievance and workplace disputes, collective bargaining negotiations, organizational and school conflicts, sexual harassment, discrimination, and public policy disputes; and designing preventative conflict resolution systems for public and private sector organizations. 

For an independent review of review of [his] mediation skills and experience by the International Mediation Institute (IMI), click here.  

In 2006, [he] co-founded Mediators Beyond Borders, based in Washington D.C.  MBB is an organization that mobilizes mediators around the world to support individuals, organizations, communities, and governments in building conflict-resolution literacy and capacity in under-served communities.  

The countries in which [he has] taught and mediated include Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Denmark, England, Georgia, Greece, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Slovenia, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, USSR, and Zimbabwe.”

He has written 13 books on dispute resolution, several of which deal with large scale, value-based conflicts. books — Ken Cloke

Transcriber’s Notes 

Transcript by Dr. Paula Marie Young.  I have paraphrased some of his comments for clarity, but otherwise this transcript is a very close approximation of his remarks.  I have added the organizational headings and links to the original quoted material.

 

Introduction

Core idea:  Every mountain was a molehill once.  Problems start out small, but escalate.  How do you avoid escalation?

Context: Every past, present, and future war, not the least of which are the Israeli-Palestinian War and the Russian-Ukrainian War.

How do we get here?  What happens to allow us to shift our thinking?  What are the psychological components that lead people to war?

Ways of Thinking that Create Escalation

1.  I am (or we are) decent, reasonable, and nice people.
2. Therefore, I (or we) do not deserve to be treated badly.
3. If someone does treat me (or us) badly, it can’t therefore be because of something I’ve (or we’ve) done.  So, it must be something about who they are.
4. The hostility that is directed towards me (or us) is therefore unbalanced, disproportionate, unfair, and unjust, meaning I (or we) did not deserve it.  
5. The only reason why the other person would engage in hostility towards me (or us) is because he, she, or they are cruel, insane, immoral, or evil.  George Orwell wrote in Unpleasant Fact: Narrative Essays:  “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”  Quote by George Orwell: “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is...” (goodreads.com)
6. Then, the other side’s cruelty, insanity, Immorality, and evil justifies me (or us) in suppressing our empathy and responding in a hostile way.  So, if someone is evil towards us, it justifies being evil towards them.  This is a key element in creating a “blood feud.”
7.  Because they are cruel, insane, immoral, or evil, there is absolutely no point in communicating, negotiating or mediating with them.  It’s pointless, because it will never ever result in anything positive.
8. Indeed, doing so would mean condoning their cruelty, insanity, immorality, and evil and would permit it to continue.  [Condoning] it makes us complicit in their evil and thereby gives them permission to perpetuate it again.
9.  I am (or we are) not morally or ethically responsible for communicating, negotiating, or mediating an end to our conflict.  It’s their problem.  They must be the first to make a move.
10. Since he, she, or they have ignored my (or our) needs, wishes, and interests, and they have spurned our innate decency, reasonableness, and niceness, we are justified in acting unilaterally and autocratically using war and violence to force the other side to provide what I (or we) reasonably want or need.

You can see the logic in this escalation.  This is the way we create enemies, historically, and in the present.

But, it can be reversed and redirected in another way.

Desmond Tutu said: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.  We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”  Quote by Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just ...” (goodreads.com)

We need to support a ceasefire and communicate in ways that don’t make us complicit in, for example, war crimes.

Mediator Neutrality

Neutrality, a kind of distancing from both sides, is seen as a gateway for empathy.  But, what it actually does is reduce our capacity to empathize.

So, as mediators, it is very important for us to treat people, cultures, and nations with equal respect.  But, this does not require us to equally respect their kindness or cruelty; their fairness and their bias; their defense and their invasion; their freedom and their slavery; their dignity and their contempt.

And, it does not require us to draw away from pointing out acts of cruelty, which we can now see in the wars we are experiencing in the Middle East and Ukraine.  The wars have escalated exponentially.  So, part of what is shocking to us about these wars is the level of inhumanity, which seems to be acceptable to both sides.  And, both sides participate in it.  And, there are reasons why that is the case.

There’s a wonderful statement by Sigmund Freud at the end of World War I: 

• The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A state at war makes free use of every injustice, every act of violence, that would dishonor the individual. It employs not only permissible cunning but conscious lies and intentional deception against the enemy, and this to a degree which apparently outdoes what was customary in previous wars.

[1918] Reflections On War And Death (archive.org) (at 8).

On War Crimes

We are slipping backwards in terms of war crimes, and we had not made much progress regarding them in the first place.  We certainly had the Nuremberg trials, but they did not involve the bombing of Dresden.  We had the trials of [Japanese] miliary leaders in Tokyo, but not of the Emperor, because we felt we needed him to stand up against communist China and Russia.  And, the trials did not include the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Our discussion of war crimes has not been humanistic.  It has been political.  And so, where does that lead us?

Call to Action

The answer: Not just a ceasefire, but a ceasefire as a condition for figuring out how to talk to each other.  That’s where the real difficulty comes.  People cannot talk when they are being shot at or when they are shooting others.  There’s nothing in it for them.  They will follow the 10-step logic set out above.

We have to figure out how to keep people from shooting at each other, which is relatively easy compared to what we have to do after that.  We have to separate them to stop the fighting, but then we have to bring them together in a way that allows them to have a constructive conversation.

That is not easy.  And yet, we have all done it in our mediations or large-scale . . . multi-stakeholder consensus building processes.  And, it becomes possible.

Two tasks:

•           Get to the place where peace is possible.
•          Create infrastructure to make peace durable.

We need to think about this in the context of past, current, and future wars.  We are planting the seeds right now for the next war.

So, how do we do this? 

Today’s event is a first step by bringing people together who have skills in conflict resolution, peacebuilding, consensus building, teamwork, and principles of restorative justice.  Each modality has some great potential.

We have some responsibility for the deaths that are taking place around us.  We have not been as effective or committed as we ought to have been to allow people to interact with each other in a fundamentally different way.

We can acknowledge the diversity of our experiences, cultures, and ideas for how we talk to each other.  We need to create relationships capable of sustaining disagreement, diversity, conflict, and misunderstandings.  And, figure out how we surmount those issues and return to a state of collaboration and regenerative activity.

I believe this is possible . . . because I’ve done it in my life on thousands of occasions with people who hated each other.  I also know how difficult it is.