This time we stretched Zoom’s capabilities and held a long morning session in three units. We started with parallel uninational units, which was needed by the participants after two earlier meetings, then continued with a lecture and dialogue with the historian Prof. Hillel Cohen, and ended with a dialogue unit.

We invited Prof. Hillel Cohen following the group’s repeated and ambivalent preoccupation with the question of narratives: the need to tell them, clarify them and gain recognition for them, while fearing that the discourse around narratives could lead the dialogue to a dead end.

In the last meeting the group listened together to the two narratives / opposing historical conceptions of the conflict – the Zionist and the Palestinian, as Hillel described them. Such a hearing, according to Hillel, is a prerequisite for any discourse – “this is where you can start talking.” And we understood and discovered together (again) how it is not a trivial matter to even ‘just’ listen to history as it is perceived and described by the other side. But we also received confirmation of how important and meaningful it is to listen and try to understand our own place within the historical story and within the reality of our lives here together, while engaging in dialogue, meeting and trying to establish a partnership.