On April 28, 2023, we held the first meeting in the series of meetings “Advanced Issues in bi-national group facilitation” at the School for Peace in Wahat Al-Salam – Neve Shalom.

The series was built out of a need we identified among facilitators of bi-national meetings, to process issues that arise in such meetings with a professional group.

We started with a lecture by Prof. Uri Hadar, who shared his experience in binational work in the field of psychology.

After the lecture, we entered into a discussion about issues in facilitation. 3 facilitators who work in the same framework presented an issue they deal with. The issue dealt with a situation where the expectations of each national group from the other national group are not realized. For example, the Palestinian participants expect from the Jewish participants, after hearing a lot about the atrocities of the army as  part of the occupation, that the Jewish participants will not want to send their children to the army and this is not happening. On the other hand, the Israeli Jews expect the Palestinians to acknowledge their process, the transformation of consciousness they are going through, and also acknowledge the right of the Jews to exist in the country. This expectation is also not realized.

We talked about the opportunity to find out more in depth about these expectations at the uni-national and bi-national sessions – where they come from and why it is difficult to meet them.

We also talked about the limitations of the framework and how to deal with them.

The discussion was lively and insights emerged alongside important question marks.

The next meeting will be held in Haifa on May 12 and we will host Prof. Amel Jamal.

At this stage it is still possible to join the group: people who work as facilitators of bi-national groups are invited to register for the series (it is obliged to commit to the entire series).

 For details and registration click here