July 2002
Listening Shop
Kingston View
May 2002
Group on a Mission for Peace in the Middle East
Compassionate Listening Project does what words can't.
by Tracy Cooper
INDIANOLA - Leah Green has seen immovable resolves budge. She has seen seemingly impenetrable grudges dissolve.
From her home in Indianola - a month has gone by since her trip to Syria and Lebanon - Green credits an ordinary act for these extra-ordinary effects: Compassionate Listening.
"An enemy is a person whose story we haven't heard,' said Green, who as director for Mid-East Citizens Diplomacy has spent the past 10 years building understanding between Israeli and Palestinian people.
One person at a time.
Since 1990, 17 delegations have visited Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. This was the group's first visit to Syria and Lebanon.
She tells the story she has seen countless times - fear turning to the beginnings of a friendship.
"There's paper peace and there's human peace," she said, and the two are quite different.
On one visit the American group brought together Palestinians with their Israeli neighbors who literally lived next door. The spent hours talking at the end of the session the Palestinians were reluctant to leave.
Volunteers in the U.S. receive Compassionate Listening training at Camp Indianola and then go on a two-week immersion into the challenges the people in the Middle East have faced for a lifetime.
"They come out with a great understanding of the issues," Green said of Americans.
"Many of these people want to come together, they know that war is not the way," she said about the Middle East natives.
During the sessions the two opposing groups are taught to hold each other's pain, not to discount it in light of their own.
"We're teaching them to listen without denial of the other's suffering." Green said.
Listening she cautions is not the same as agreement, it is simply opening a bridge to communication.
"We thoroughly believe that bringing people together face to face to listen to people's pain and suffering is a re-humanizing process," she said.
The Compassionate Listening Project spun off from the Mideast Citizen's Diplomacy group. In 1997 formed its own non-profit entity. The aggressors effort has primarily been used to create understanding between Israelis and Palestinians, but Green hopes the tools will be used on the domestic front as well.
Sept. 11 and America's new war on terrorism in the past year has wiped out bridges the groups efforts have built.
"All of our work is set back years, probably generations at this point," she said. The work, she said, is needed more than ever.
"Those of us working on the ground could see this coming," she siad of the current situation in the Middle East.
At the same time it's hard for her to believe the worst case scenario is unfolding each day in the newspaper headlines.
"I would have never thought it would hav gotten to this point. I'm shocked," Green said about the even more recent escalation of the hatred between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The only resolution at this point can come from America's leaders.
"The U.S. is the only party that can enforce a solution," Green said.
She said Palestinians want to get the message out that they want possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These areas make up about 22 percent of the Palestinians' original lands.
In Israel there is no one position on the conflict Green said. The "far left" wants one large secular state while the "far right," the faction in charge, now wants ethnic cleansing.
International peacekeepers and two separate states are the only solution to this problem, Green said.
"The only way we're going to put together the pieces is to listen."
Home | About | Trips | Articles | Compassionate Listening Shop | Links | Support | Contact