Dunedin Abrahamic Interfaith Group

Tēnā koutou katoa,

He Uri no te Kainga tuturu o Iharaira	My ancestry locates me in Israel
Ko te whānau mai ingoa a Fridberg	my ancestral name is Fridberg
Ko Nahareta te Maunga	my mountain is Mt. Nazareth
Ko horiana te Awa	my river is the Jordan river
Ka Rere atu kei kōnei a Aotearoa	I flew here to New Zealand
Ka noho mai kei kōnei a Ōtepoti	I live in Dunedin
Ko Danny Fridberg Taku ingoa	My name is Danny Fridberg

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

 

Good evening, friends and whānau. 

Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today. It is a great honour and I am humbled by this opportunity. 

I would like to start by acknowledging the terrible time that the part of the world from which I come is experiencing. People's lives have become dispensable. Human rights and physical and mental health are now considered luxuries. People are being held hostage, being deliberately tortured, starved and killed with no hesitation. I mourn all those lost lives – both Israeli and Palestinian; Muslim, Christian and Jewish – they are all our children.

However, as an Israeli citizen, I must express my utmost dismay and rejection of the actions conducted by Israel against Palestinians in my name and on behalf of my whānau and friends living there. I strongly object to the actions and the motivations driving them.

I realise that many Israelis do not share these views, and I acknowledge that I am only representing myself, in my protest. I do wish, however, that more Israelis joined me in saying this.

***

As some of you know, I arrived in Dunedin with my family 10 years ago to study Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, after practising conflict resolution and peacebuilding for many years. 

Before leaving Israel, when I told this to friends and family, often their response was:

“New Zealand? What do they know about conflicts?”. 

Then we arrived in Dunedin, and when I was telling people at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies that I am from Israel, the response was often: “Israel? What do they know about peace?” or, on other occasions: “Why, for goodness sake, can’t the Israelis and Palestinians just stop fighting each other?”, which I found to be a reflection of the first. I would then spend time describing to my supervisors, my peers and my students, how understanding our human nature explains this ongoing conflict. How anyone in a similar situation would respond in a similar way. And, as much as I did not agree with that, I accepted it as an inevitable state of affairs.

I’d like to start by talking about conflict, which I know a little bit about - why we are so drawn to it, and why the Israelis and Palestinians (and many others, for that matter) cannot just stop fighting each other. 

I will then share some thoughts I have about peace, which I am still learning.

I do hope that you will find some relevance and connections to your own lives and areas of interest in what I have to say, and be able to share with me your thoughts and reflections – especially challenging ones - as your koha to me. If not today, then some other time over coffee at the Polytech hub would be great.

***

We all experience conflicts in our daily lives, and while nobody likes being in a state of conflict, many positive accomplishments have been made throughout history due to people being willing to stand up for themselves and others and fight for their rights. The difference is in the measures these people are willing to take. The question we need to ask ourselves, therefore, is not whether we are pro-conflict or pro-peace but rather, does the end justify the means? Are we fighting for the right and just cause? How far are we willing to go to meet that end and at whose expense? And, finally, once the battle dust settles down, where do we go from there?

***

We live in the safest era in history. This is what historians tell us. And yet, the world around us feels anything but stable and safe, at the moment. The climate is changing for the worse; the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. And although this should be enough to occupy our minds and bring us together in addressing these massive challenges, mistrust and fear keep controlling our societies and our political decision-making. Masses of people around the world endorse and elect leaders who are bigots, corrupt and who promote nationalism and racist chauvinism. Instead of deliberating over solutions to problems, we find ourselves not agreeing on the existence of those problems, of ‘what is true?’ and we don’t see a way out.

This is a very depressing thought, which leads many to lose hope for a better future, to say nothing of being able to imagine one. And this is the first thing that happens to us when we are caught in an ongoing conflict – In the words of John Paul Lederach, we lose the ability to imagine a better reality. Try to recall a bitter, never-ending, conflict with another person that you found yourself in. After a while, you can’t imagine that things could be different: that you could actually enjoy spending time with that person, or that they are capable of making a positive contribution to your life. Now, multiply the levels of violence, mistrust, and length of time spent in that conflict and you might understand why living through ongoing violent conflicts, people can only imagine their relations moving forward through mutual hurting.

A necessary condition to re-acquire that ability to imagine – I say ‘re-acquire’ because we are all born with it but lose it with time – is that we must let go of a profound fantasy which all people in conflict share - that with a little more effort, the other person or people would simply disappear. When we are entrapped in a conflict, we have an internal desire that one day we will wake up and those other people will be gone. Clinging to the hope that a future without the ‘other’ is both possible and better, creates major obstacles to moving past the conflict. As long as we don’t let go of this fantasy of the other side vanishing, we will keep resorting to measures, which we hope can ultimately drive them away, and be caught in an endless cycle of violence. Letting go of this idea means that we may start thinking of how we can get along with each other. We can develop a vision of what we offer our children as their future. This vision is central to peacebuilding because people driving wars have their own vision of the outcomes of those wars. Generals have a vision of how they hope the battle ends. Similarly, if we want to drive peace, if we want to promote reconciliation, we must develop a vision which will be no less appealing. If we don't have a vision that we can share with others, then people won’t have a positive prospect in their sights. They will be left with the price they have to pay for peace - and there is always a price. And so, a first, necessary step to take, if we want to escape from this violent cycle, is to imagine a different state of this relationship, not necessarily a utopia – just a more sustainable one. 

One way to approach this task can be through challenging our binary thinking. We all have someone in mind without whom, we are certain, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, for some other people, we are those ‘other someones’. We have a natural tendency to mourn the loss of our dear ones, while seeing other people’s losses as ranging from desirable to a necessary evil – depending on your political views. But can we train ourselves to change these identity categories? Can we think of ourselves, all of us, as belonging to just one group? One people?

There is a famous saying: “People will only unite if they have a common enemy. In that unity, they will achieve peace, for as long as that enemy lives”. In other words, the only thing that seems to unite us is if we find someone new to fight, and history has an abundance of examples of this notion. But this doesn’t sound to me like a workable plan. So, what are the things that can make us look at ourselves as just one group - one people - without being threatened by an external one? It's hard, but not impossible. For example, in the American Civil War, the North prevailed, but all casualties were American citizens, making it the deadliest war in the country’s history. By saying that, I’m not suggesting that the outcomes of the American Civil War were negative. Just that there are different ways to look at the price paid – that Americans can celebrate abolishing slavery and mourn all lives lost at the same time, and accept that casualties from both rival sides belong to the same people – it could change the deep social divides along these lines that still rule American politics.

Now, what about the actual people on the other side? How can we think of them as ‘us’? And this can be an opportunity to take up a challenge – what can I relate to in that person or those people, my bitter enemies? For example, can I assume that they are doing their best for a better future for their children? Do they have values, which they stand by? Do they have loved ones? One of my former mediation teachers said once, that it's very easy to like people who are similar to you, who you can imagine being friends with. It's much harder to relate to people you don't like, who trigger bad memories and experiences in you, and whose behaviour you find intimidating or obnoxious. However, continued my teacher, she sees her main task as finding a reason to fall in love with that person, even for the smallest thing she can bring herself to appreciate. So, perhaps falling in love is a big ask, but can we find some points in common? Something mutually respectful? If we can find this, it opens the door to recognition - realising that each of us has the right to live, to prosper. It’s a challenge well worth taking on.  ***

When in conflict, one tendency we have is to attribute the behaviours of our enemies to essentialist characteristics and traits. When someone hurts us, it's not coincidental – it’s because they are evil by nature, and their entire existence is focused on destroying us. When someone steals from us, it's not because they are poor or come from a challenging background, but because they are greedy by nature. If it’s in an intergroup conflict, it’s not even by the nature of their individual personality, but by the nature of their race, of their culture, of their religion. And so, when we suffer from other people's actions, the context doesn’t play any role for us. Instead, it's easier to say that those people are vicious, violent, and evil by nature. Everything that's the opposite of us, of course. It's tempting to label them as such because it's easy. Life is simple that way - there are clear good guys and bad guys. We don't have to think so much and, more importantly, there is nothing we can do that will be wrong or immoral when fighting the devil.

This tendency, which is sometimes called the fundamental attribution error, spreads beyond merely the conflicting parties. It forces everyone to take sides. You can see it happening when couples divorce and all of a sudden, their friends must decide who they stay in touch with and who they support; it happens in the workplace, where colleagues find themselves forced to choose who they ally themselves with; And it happens in the international arena, where countries find themselves having to choose sides and support the actions of their allies, even if they disapprove of them. At times, these countries find themselves joining the war for all the wrong reasons. When I visited the exhibition of the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War at Te

Papa several years ago, I was deeply moved by some of the letters written by New Zealand soldiers to their families back home, describing the Turkish soldiers defending their home country with respect and even admiration, at times. However, I have not seen in any of these letters doubts expressed about the reasons for them fighting in the first place or questioning the immense toll that the war was taking on the people of New Zealand. 

And so, such alliances form coalitions and divide nations into those that are on our side and those that aren’t. Harmful and essentialist ideas, such as the Clash of Civilisations, are born. I can assume with confidence, that if you ask a random person who is the just party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they will have one clear answer. It will, more often than not, make them fully criticise the ‘wrong’ side and fully justify any actions taken by the ‘right’ side. At the end of the day, this approach doesn’t do any of the parties much good.

This is not to say that personally, I don’t have an opinion about that conflict. As a conscientious objector in the Israeli military, I made my critical stance on Israel and its actions very clear. Still, I do not approve of many actions taken by the Palestinian resistance either, certainly not the violent ones. And so do my Palestinian friends and colleagues, all of whom have shared with me their utmost horror of the events of the 7th of October and with whom I shared mine of the events that followed. What brings us together are our shared humanist values – not the religion or nation we happened to be born into.

One useful way I found to escape this either-or thinking of ‘the righteous us’ and ‘the evil them’ is by adopting an ironic view of ourselves and others. The truth is that rarely is anyone completely righteous or has never done anything wrong. We all have memories of occasionally behaving in ways we wish we hadn’t. Our glorious pasts are dotted with events we prefer to forget or ignore, and we are conditioned by pain and scarred by trauma - some of us more than fortunate others. Adopting an ironic perspective means seeing beyond the superficial slogans – being the underdog does not automatically mean being right; Violence hurts all people – victims as well as perpetrators - certainly their children. In other words, an ironic view is that grain of salt we can use to make my understanding better and avoid biases which may lead us in the wrong direction.

At the same time, and in order to remember that we are dealing with people’s lives and not just with abstract ideas, we must be compassionate – to ourselves and to others. For the victims and the innocent. There must always be a way of return for people who turn away from violence - on our side and on the other side. A proverb by the ancient Jewish sages states that “Where a Baal Teshuvah stands, even a completely righteous person cannot stand” (Bavli Talmud, Sanhedrin, 91, 1). Baal Teshova, in this proverb, means a person who regrets their sins and consciously chooses to go back to the right path. This emphasizes the virtue of people who make the effort to reflect on their beliefs and actions and, when needed, acknowledge their mistakes and change their ways. This, in my view, is an admirable step, worthy of consideration and compassion.

***

Another thought about conflict that I would like to share with you is that it takes away our sense of agency. When we are entrapped in a conflict, we often find ourselves behaving in ways we would have never imagined we could. In certain situations, terrible actions are taken by normal people, says Hannah Arendt, and rightly so – in times of conflict we feel that we don’t really have a choice. We must respond; We must defend ourselves - and we always only respond and defend ourselves - we never initiate aggression, right? Of course, ‘the best defence is a good offence’, but that’s just the nature of war.

The consensus in Israel following the events of the 7th of October was that military action would inevitably lead to a disaster for the Palestinians, a disaster for Israel, and a disaster for the region. And yet, the same consensus argued that Israel had no other choice but to invade Gaza. In other words, Israel walked into a catastrophe with its eyes wide open without even hoping for a positive outcome – not even for itself. Instead, it chose to take the path leading to mutual destruction. A similar thing can be said of the Hamas leadership, of course. Only the difference is that the damage it was able to inflict was limited and public support for its decisions cannot be established. 

So, how can we explain that? How can we understand that parties in conflict prefer risking mutual annihilation rather than looking for a compromise - looking for a way to save those who can still be saved? The answer is that the experience of conflict creates this lie that we buy into - that we have no ability to choose. In the 1970’s, a famous – or rather, infamous - quote by Golda Meir, the former Israeli Prime

Minister, states that “we cannot forgive the Arabs for making us kill their children”. In other words, Meir claimed that Israel was responding to circumstances that are beyond its control. As long as this conviction is not challenged, it will keep leading to the worst scenario possible - always and inevitably.

Every example in history of reaching peace demonstrates a conscious decision made by leaders - and people - not to be dragged into never-ending violence.

Instead, they chose to own their decisions and actions, however hard and costly they were - and many of them suffered very heavy losses for their choices. However, this ownership of choices offered hope and an ability to imagine and work towards a vision for a better future. This is how I understand Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is by no means a perfect arrangement and many books have been written, and still will be, about how it was misused, causing harm, and injustice. Yet, to me, it represents both a conscious and a conscientious choice to move in the direction of finding a way of living and prospering together. This is one of the reasons, I believe, Aotearoa New Zealand is in a very different place today, than that of Israel and Palestine. Looking at its short history, it didn’t have to be this way. But the choices of New Zealanders, both tangata whenua and tangata tiriti, to honour the treaty and become authentic partners, has put it on a very different pathway and that has made the entire difference.

***

But then comes the question of why people even consider peace? What are the conditions for this choice? Some scholars tell us that in order to bring people or sides in a conflict to ‘ripeness to peace’, they need to arrive at a mutually hurting stalemate. In other words, humans will only consider turning to peace when the pain they have inflicted on others and, in turn, experienced themselves, is both unbearable and didn’t bring about the desirable outcomes. So, peace doesn’t seem to be our default choice. To a large degree, the outcomes of the Second World War provided the ultimate case study for this notion. But I would like to ask if we must accept this as the only way for us to turn away from conflict. Are we doomed to suffer immense pain before we choose another direction? There must be a better way.

An unfortunate characteristic we, as humans, have is obedience. Naturally, it has its evolutionary reasons and benefits, allowing us to collaborate in large numbers. However, under the wrong leadership, the results are disastrous. Despite all the public criticism of the respective leaderships of both Israelis and Palestinians, in times of surge in violence, obedience on both sides is the rule and people acceptingly fight a war they do not believe in, following leaders they wouldn’t buy a car from. Disobedience, I believe, could be key to avoid walking that path. If we don’t just talk critically about those leaders but actually take action to resist them, we might not have to face that mutually hurting stalemate, which, as its name suggests, is very painful. Disobedience is scary, no doubt. But sometimes it’s the only way. ***

As an interim summary of this part of the talk about conflict, there are a few steps we need to take if we want to escape the vicious cycle of conflict. We must remind ourselves that things can be different, and we need to be able to dream, to develop a vision – and the bigger the better - of what this may look like and how everyone’s existence, realities and views are equally legitimate and valued. We must overcome the binary thinking that is engrained in us through years of mutually-inflicted pain, and we must abandon the conviction that we can’t make different choices and disobey those who say otherwise.

These steps are mostly reflective and invite us to do some serious work on ourselves without necessarily requiring interaction or having difficult conversations with those we are in conflict with. Not yet anyway. I did find, however, that knowing that the other party is engaged in a similar reflection and soul-searching, makes it more encouraging for us to do the same.

***

I would like to move now to, what is hopefully not as dark a topic, and talk about peace. 

My friend and mentor, Ngarongo Ormsby, the chair of the Māori Alliance of Dispute Resolution Organisation, has developed a Kaupapa Māori-based framework of conflict resolution, which I find inspiring. He uses the principles of traditional navigation and wayfinding to stir conflicts through contradictions of values, social contexts and processes. The idea is that we keep our eyes on the Southern Cross – our vision of peace - but the way there might take different turns at different times, and pass through contradictions and critical points that we must address. There is no one-way that fits all, but the destination is clear and we will get there through storm and turbulence, if necessary. I find this to be an inspiring way to draw a vision we can all sail towards. 

***

So far, I have talked mostly about the reflective work that each of us must do to escape the mindset imposed on us by conflict. But here comes the difficult part - unavoidably, there will come a time when we have to sit with our enemy and talk. It is usually a very stressful thing to do – no wonder we call it a ‘difficult conversation’. It is never an easy conversation, but it is an essential one.

Where I come from, people don't usually have a problem speaking their minds to those whom they have a conflict with. What they say and how they say it, is where the problem usually begins and where moderation is needed. As a facilitator of such conversations, I would spend most of the time trying to lower the flames and encourage people to interact more genuinely and constructively, rather than cynically and aggressively, where accusations are exchanged, blame is thrown at each other, and pain is inflicted through those interactions. My facilitation would aim to let people listen to one another rather than confront them for the sake of adversity.

When I started practising and teaching mediation in Aotearoa, I found that the main challenge was actually making people engage in the first place. The local culture, I learned, doesn't seem to favour confrontation and people are normally reluctant to face others they have conflict with about the issues and the problems they have.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that people are more peaceful – they just seem to be this way from the outside. Some just keep building up their frustration and anger at each other until they either move on or explode. Neither of these outcomes is desirable. So, we face similar challenge of bringing people to the table to have a constructive conversation. Only here the challenge is not to have a constructive conversation, but to have it at all. So, there are different ways in which it needs to be done – different waterways but the same Southern Cross. And we must believe that the destination is the right one - because it's always better to talk than not to. The encouraging news is that it’s an acquired skill - the more we train and practice it, the better we become at it.

***

I mentioned the term ‘identity’ and it’s worth spending a little time to understand what it means. By identity, we normally mean our fundamental narrative about who we are, how we define ourselves, and what we believe in. The most common problem that our identity suffers from when situated in conflict, is that it loses its independence – we begin to define our identity as linked, and opposite, to our enemy’s identity. If they believe in a certain faith, values or culture I will make my identity to be anything but that. If my enemy is a perpetrator, then I'm a victim. If they are colonisers, then I am colonised. If they are the aggressors, then I am a defender. And so, what conflict does to our own identity is making us lose the autonomy to shape it, to just be ourselves, because as time goes by in a conflict, we forget who we were before it began. Reminding ourselves who we are regardless of the conflict is essential for our ability to represent our needs, and to stand up for what is right.

Learning about whakapapa made me realise that that’s exactly that. Knowing where I come from – what people, what landscape and landmarks, what heritage and culture – All are essential for us being able to shape our identity. My Māori teachers were the ones encouraging me to explicitly explore my whakapapa and speak about it. Thanks to them I am today more proud of my Jewish heritage than I was ever back in Israel. Ironic, isn’t it?

***

Of course, bringing the parties to the table is just the first step. Now, negotiations begin and we need to decide what is negotiable - what can we talk about and what is not up for discussion? The easy bits are the formalistic arrangements of border lines, who holds which ID card etc. Make no mistake, there is no question unanswered about what an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement would look like. In fact, there is more than one answer to each question. The issues that are non-negotiable make such an agreement fail time after time – questions such as ‘Who has the right to the land’? ‘What will happen to our identity if we walk down the path of concessions’? ‘Who will we become’? ‘What will be left of us’? These are much deeper questions, which, if not discussed, prevent any real progress being made.

When I tried to understand the results of the last elections in New Zealand, it occurred to me that a similar thing might have happened here. Leaving such questions undiscussed may be one of the reasons why the current coalition in New Zealand has been elected, overturning some biculturalism-inspired policies and laws, enacted by its predecessor government. I would assume that many people found treaty-related policies and legislation intimidating and opted to vote for a government, which promised to reverse this direction. I would also suggest, that on the grassroots level, people in Aotearoa don’t have enough opportunities to discuss these questions either. And so, deeper questions must be openly discussed and considered, if we would like this dialogue to have transformative qualities.

***

Western ideas of negotiation speak about it being a process of exploring interests and needs. That is to say, ‘let’s look at the things we really want (rather than just what we say we want) and find a way in which we can achieve as many of them as possible. The idea of going beyond merely our public statements and exploring mutual benefit is appealing and it works quite well in the mediation room. Less than that, though, in peace talks because what this approach lacks is empathy – genuinely caring about the other side and not just maximising opportunities for gains and profit. Manaakitanga as a mindset in negotiations offers a great potential to not only enlarging the pie, so to speak, but to develop the relations required for sustainable peace, for having these transformative and deep conversations. That genuine care that everyone around you will prosper, rather than just being selfabsorbed and making it about yourself alone and what you need.

As I mentioned, there is more than one way and possible timeframe to achieve peace. In the same way that conflict has many different ways of being, different degrees of hostility and behaviours to accompany it, peace comes in many forms and intensities as well. We often tend to think of peace as a harmonious friendship where we live happily ever after. Seeing this as the only option for peace may be discouraging to even try, because ‘what are the chances this can happen’, right? Making two parties, that spend every waking moment planning how they can hurt, dominate or destroy each other, cease from violence is almost unthinkable, to say nothing of bringing them to run a state in partnership - be sibling nations again. But every mediator or peacebuilder can testify that successful conflict resolution processes do not necessarily result in warm, or positive, peace. Not immediately, anyway. Other outcomes can be more realistic and good enough, even if they entail only partial achievements. For example, sometimes merely taking out the violent component can be a great first step, which will allow a generation of children to grow up not constantly fearing for their lives. With time we can move on from there and change those relationships even further for the better with our counterparts who also grew up perhaps not loving us but without constantly fighting us. It took the member states of the European Union half a century after the Second World War to see each other as reliable partners but there were many smaller steps taken to get them there.

And, the work is not done yet. Maintaining that partnership and enhancing it is a job that never ends. But how can it be compared to everlasting war? They say that “where there's a will, there's a way”. Well, the way is there – we are just waiting for the will to catch up.

***

Reflecting on my first ten years in Aotearoa, I can still understand why the Israelis and Palestinians just cannot stop fighting each other. But at least now I can imagine a reality in which this does not need to be the case, and I certainly do not accept this as inevitable anymore.

***

Coming close to the end of a talk or an interview on these matters, I am often asked if I can offer any hope. I would like to pre-empt this question with a sort of an answer:

I don’t believe that people are good by nature. Unfortunately, we have strong scientific evidence and everyday experience to suggest that humans are cruel, merciless creatures, who have no particular inclination to morality or ethics.

However, we have an incredible ability to train and improve ourselves. Developing novel ideas and finding ways to realise them is a human trait.

The potential to do good is there. We do not have to accept our cruel nature as a species – we can evolve and create a better reality and a better future for our children. What it requires is some imagination, self-reflection, irony and compassion and a healthy dose of disobedience.

I strongly believe that once we start walking this path, others will join, and good things will follow.

*** I would like to close with one of the first Māori proverbs I heard when I arrived in Aotearoa that has stuck with me ever since: He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata! (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people!)

My interpretation of importance, in this context, is not of ‘value’ but of responsibility – for both the problems we create and for their solutions.

I think that this proverb encapsulates everything I have talked about today - 

For better or for worse - we are stuck in this together. We’d better make the best with what we’ve got.

Thank you for listening.