Berkley Center

Background: This May 2010 discussion between Marc Gopin and Katherine Marshall focused first on Marc Gopin's positive and varied experience of working with women engaged in peace work in many places and of diverse natures. Women's capacity to focus on relationships and on sticking to goals is one reason for their success in many areas. Women led efforts seem to have fared relatively well in the catastrophe of the economic downturn, a testimony to their pragmatism and stamina. A key to engaging women more actively in interfaith work is to refocus and reframe their participation to highlight women representatives rather than formal leaders (since formal leaders are so scared). Finally, the discussion touches briefly on the sources of inspiration that lie behind Marc Gopin's lifetime work for peace.

To start with the question of women, peace, and religion: you have considerable experience giving your unique perspectives on what works and what does not in this area. You have reflected deeply on how women are and could be part of the processes around conflict prevention and peacemaking. What do you see as the leading issues?

A first and important priority is to reframe the discussion around who participates, because that is the key to engaging women more actively. What works and is meaningful is to focus on “religious representatives”. This makes it possible to reframe who is empowered and authorized to represent a religion. Using language and tests of eligibility that focus on women “religious leaders” is simply a non-starter at the global level, because of the barriers that block women’s participation in several traditions. It is important to look for women clerics, to have affirmative action to bring them in, but that should not be the central focus, and it simply excludes, for example, most of Islam and Orthodox Judaism. Some refer to “religious actors” but to me that tends to trivialize their roles and work and it lacks clarity.

A real key to social change here is thus a change in construct that can open up doors to more effective religious programming and jettison some of the current obstacles. The same principle applies for youth, because that too involves bringing in those who are not necessarily in formal positions of power. Looking for religious representatives gives us the freedom to look at interesting and important work women are doing even in the most conservative settings.

And it is also important to make clear that the feminists at the table are not all women. There are men who are actively subverting systems, and changing laws. And a women’s agenda should not be just an elite group of women, for example powerful women CEOs, who may be neither particularly religious nor focused on women’s roles and groups. The idea is to have an agenda that is gender sensitive, and brings in whoever is needed to press and achieve it.

The wide range of kinds of activities that engage women is striking, and women are the creators and leaders in many of these activities and organizations. Women seem to have a capacity to make connections and to use many means to achieve that, including film, arts, and music. They are often able to connect, in places like Somalia, on a totally different level. Women there have been able to make connections between warring parties in a different way. There is a different level of seriousness and respect that they bring. To my mind bringing women into the process represents an important interfaith opportunity.

You highlight your partnership with Hind Kabawat in your recent work on Syria. How did that come about and what do you see as its significance?

Hind Kabawat and I have worked closely together on Syria over several years and are close partners. Quite beyond her specific and extraordinary talents and intellect, there are some interesting elements of process that offer real lessons. [Hind Kabawat, an attorney, lives in Damascus and Toronto; she is an International Advisor at Joseph Young and Associates, Toronto; Foreign Affairs Director for the Syrian Public Relations Association, an associate at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, and a founding member of Mothers and Daughters for Peace in Middle East.]

Hind and I met at a World Economic Forum meeting at the Dead Sea in Jordan. In the irony of such meetings of the super powerful, many who participate and have extraordinary achievements behind them are actually rather disempowered in such settings, and the Syrian delegation fit in that category. This disempowerment creates a rather interesting dynamic of solidarity among disparate groups. Hind and I began, against that backdrop, to talk and realized an instant connection. Our work in Syria started there.

There were circumstances in our favor despite the seeming improbability of a peace effort involving a woman and a Jew in a Middle Eastern country. Hind was a vivacious, highly intelligent woman, well connected, and a proud nationalist. I was a Jewish activist, with 27 years of experience in Israel, but an American citizen, so I was able to come to Syria, without fear of arrest. Syria is by far the most open society to women in the Middle East, and despite Syria being the most bitter opponent of Israel in the Middle East, it remains remarkably eager to demonstrate its respect for Jews. So Hind invited me to Syria and we began our effort in conscious, high profile public diplomacy, which opened up relationships more and more, reaching the civil society.

The dynamics of a country like Syria where people in the elite know each other well also worked in our favor. At first, all the participants were male except her; we agonized about what to do about it. Over time, as people built trust with her, we could put more women on the programs. Eventually the press conferences and teaching sessions were half women. And those women were very interesting, and they were doing work as religious people, though they were not formal religious leaders. The dynamic and the process changed the public image on interfaith. Early on, starting the process of change was an interfaith session where the participants were all male clerics, with Hind running the meeting, calling on speakers and ringing the bell, and determining how much the clerics could say. They accepted it and that made possible a further opening up.

A result of the dynamic that developed was that it was more egalitarian. And there was more of a conversation.

What kinds of women were engaged?

Many different kinds. The main criterion was, and needs to be, that they are serious about religion and serious about peace. In Syria, people included Sheikh Shehadeh, a liberal scholar who came in initially as an assistant to one of the clerics but emerged as a strong member of the team in her own right, aggressive and active. Another was a veiled Sunni woman who I have not spoken to much. She runs a center in Syria that works against violence. They were all committed and wonderful women.

Some of the women active in interfaith work (and also the men) are perhaps rather nominally religious. That is generally fine, though it is important to try to create as far as possible common links. If some of those involved are super religious and some are not, there is an imbalance. Having a faith “test” for interfaith dialogue, however, is foolish. What you want to have are program builders. And perhaps even more important are the social networks. What matters are the private meetings, the lunches, dinners, intelligence gathering. Women have to be a key part of that and they are simply better at it, at every level. They are part of social structures. And who is at the lunches and dinners matters.

We had been somewhat less successful in bringing in young people, until this past year, when we started mediation training classes that have wonderful students, some of whom are religious. Overall, the image of interfaith has changed in fundamental ways through this opening up to women and youth.

As Hind and I have moved on, reaching out also to the Jewish world, we have reflected on what has led to the successes we see, and we believe that the women’s connection seems to be much more effective.

A subtle dimension of women’s roles speaks to the complex dynamics at work. When Hind was there alone, as a famous and attractive woman, there was more of a “heterosexual moment” and therefore a special dynamic in the interactions. With more women at the table, a mix of women, it was harder for the men not to take them seriously as women, because the other women were there. But obviously the question of building trust and respect is a key.

Looking more broadly at the peace organizations and efforts that involve women in Israel and Palestine, what trends do you see?

The landscape in Israel is somewhat more complicated for me to navigate, both because I am more personally engaged and because of the complexities on gender relations within the religious worlds of which I am a part. But there are many successful women working for peace, and I have been able to help to mentor some of the younger women who are more and more empowered in social networks, as writers, journalists, and leaders of organizations. They are building their own organizations. What I see is a picture of women who are subversives, often working behind the scenes, sometimes out in front.

I also have seen that many of the women have survived the recent crash in funding better than the men. It’s a phenomenon well worth reflecting on. It seems to have resulted from a combination of idealism and pragmatism. Some of the men are more martyristic, and created ridiculously impoverishing constructs wherein they simply could not survive without money. Women have an idea of how to take care of themselves. The younger women starting out are more practical, even when they seem radical or unrealistic (one who lives an almost hippie life in a caravan, for example, yey is incredibly plugged in internationally). They are self sustaining and they are doing great work. But too often it is work that is really on the fringes.

Prominent examples of those doing creative work, some of which I am focusing on in my current projects, are Ilana Mealem and Ibtisam Mahmeed. Their work is very creative and they are winning some awards, but in many senses it is still at the margin.

How do you see the role and impact of the many groups working in the Middle East for peace, including especially those led by women? I was impressed by a hypothesis put forward some time ago by Rajmohan Gandhi, to the effect that these groups are forming an increasingly powerful “wall of peace.”

Sadly, I am less positive than Rajmohan. I do not think that the many peace groups are succeeding at any aggregate level; and there is no wall of peace emerging because there are no sustainable models. The trend I see since September 11 is, overall, a decline in support for conflict resolution organizations, worldwide and especially in the Middle East. Some activities, around development work, still seem to bring in dollars, for example for social business with Jewish philanthropy, and there are interesting new models. But overall I see no wall of hope but lots of failed experiments.

This is an area that is well worth much more reflection because we need badly to understand better from a global perspective what went wrong. Is this pattern more typical of the Middle East? Could it be because the approaches are male dominated and are not sustainable, whereas maybe elsewhere they may be more sustainable? I am still trying to get my head around why things declined.

I have some hypotheses as to why the peace movement in Israel has declined. In many respects, the Oslo peace process and the initiatives that followed it were not very deep. And they were mostly about saying no. What they were missing were approaches that involved an embrace of relationships, working to build solidarity, together. Most of the efforts have been faced towards other Jews. I saw so many peace activities in the 1980s, that never included Arabs; the arguments were essentially directed towards Orthodox Jews. There was no real modeling of the future. This is typical of a lot of movements in different world regions but especially in Israel. There is not enough focus on equality and social justice. Instead, there is a looking inward, identifying what one is against, and levels of analysis that are at only one level. They have lacked a meta analysis.

But then, far more important, is the fact that efforts to bring peace are truly at the mercy of the larger powers that are pouring money into making conflict worse: Saudi aid, Iran, the U.S. military support, all of which works to perpetuate the cycle of violence. As a result, what we have seen is that the violence has got progressively more barbaric. As it led to the suicide bombings, the situation produced a shutdown of faith in Israel for all Arabs and Muslims, and vice versa. In the 1970s and for a time afterwards, the Jewish occupation was less barbaric, the violence was less racist. But that has changed as the violence has increased in its level and its character.

So the poor peacemakers, all of them, are caught. There are at least two major types: those whose belief is in interfaith and religious, and another group that tends to be more politically engaged. My inclination is towards the latter, because those groups and individuals are more focused on the critical area of relationships. Somewhat apart are the advocates of human rights, who tend to find themselves caught in approaches that do not build ways across the divides, that do not address problems in a relationship way. There are strengths and small successes for many of the groups, and I can evaluate and critique them, as I did in my last book. But even those that deal with the corrupt leaders, that are naïve or tiny in scale, are moving in positive directions. No matter how much one can criticize the efforts of all the different groups and their approaches, they are working at the problems with dedication and intelligence. Given a chance, they might have a transformative effect because, in different ways, they work to bring people to work together. I have some ambivalence about most interfaith work because of my concern that it rarely addresses the real social issues. But I can’t blame any of those involved that the work shows such limited results.

Because none of them really deserve any of the blame for what is happening. The methods and skills are simply not the issue. You can’t place blame when there is not a critical mass and a paradigm shift. You simply can’t blame them that the efforts are small, here and there. Because when you look at the whole picture, they, together, have not had even a tiny fraction of the money that war and the sources of conflict has received and is receiving still to this day. The funding level for peace is simply ridiculous. We simply do not have a global system that is really seriously addressing the need for positive change. It is not even a contest. Both Hamas and the settlers have endless sums of money, as does the Israel military. The U.S. comes in to help and focuses on security forces and personnel, without any thought to what might be in the heads and hearts of the security people. In short, there is remarkable stupidity in the failure to invest in social change. Eight years of Bush plus the increase of violence has completely decimated the peace movement in Israel, and its fate was sealed by the rise of Islamic extremists. People have become comfortable with an incredible level of brutality and violence so that they cannot even imagine peace.

Coming back to the question about women as active peacemakers, can you cite some examples where we should focus case study work?

The problem is that we have no systematic country analyses in this area. What we know about the nature of peace processes, especially in an areas like this one (role of women) is piecemeal, what we happen to hear. So it is hard to answer the question because we lack any systematic gathering of experience and resources, and far less do we have any real assessment of the impact.

One area where I think we should focus more is on heroes and heroines. I am on the board of the Tanenbaum Center, and we are pushing hard there to see and set patterns of celebrating heroes, and there are other organizations that are doing much the same thing.

What is your experience with highlighting the work of women in this worthy effort to celebrate success and find those doing outstanding work?

I have been impressed in two award processes I am involved with by two things: how hard it is to encourage genuine nominations and the perils of those who are “gaming the system."

We had noticed that few of the nominees and those considered by the board were women, so we agreed to create a special award or awards for women. That has changed the dynamic dramatically and now we are seeing exciting candidates and awardees. Women need to be at the front and center in thinking about peace builders and when that happens it can make a real difference. Some of the recent awardees are doing truly exciting work and we are now working to bring greater regional diversity. It would be fascinating to see the archive of all the submissions for awards because the criteria and screening are serious and it will be a goldmine of information. And the criterion is strict: someone who is so serious about religion and peace that they are ready to risk their lives.

We are addressing through these criteria the human tendency we see, the opportunistic aspects of field, a tendency acutely accentuated by the impossible funding situation. Inevitably some respond to what is a dehumanizing and humiliating system of gaining notoriety and thus support and they are going after awards. But self seeking and nominating will kill the system so, like you, I would like to see a properly funded system along the lines of the MacArthur “genius grants” where there is a wide net effort to identify worth candidates and to award a larger group. That way we would know far better who is doing important work and we could also support them.

And, beyond that, we should be addressing the demeaning and highly ineffective systems of funding, that encourages gaming and competition among groups. Those who truly want to support peace, in foundations and the government, should be able to identify the important work and should be coming to us asking, how can we help you? Because we want genius and inspiration to grow. If we want a revolution, we have to stop nitpicking and gimmicks and change the paradigms and the brain dynamics of people around table.

If you look at the amount spent on peace, it pales in comparison to the billions spent on war and conflict.

What do you see as examples of success?

Another way to think about identifying strong women who are doing important work is to dedefine what it is that we are identifying as peace, because the lines between development and peace are fuzzy. I have in mind, for example, Batya Kallus, who is one of the best in Israel. What she does is not called peace, and she does not go over the Green Line, because, she says, it is too despairing. But she is sharply focused on Arab Israeli equality and her work on building bridges to the Arab world, bringing in the Knesset even, is some of the best I have seen. The work of the New Israel Fund and the Abraham Fund is based on bringing Jewish money from America in decent ways, and many involved are unsung heroes. She does not meet my criterion of putting herself at risk for peace, but what she does is very egalitarian, and is working against the tide of extremism. Is she a peacemaker? Damn straight she is.

So any work done in an intelligent, compassionate, and careful way is work for peace, even if we normally don’t call it that.

That also raises the question of how the work of the human rights activists relates to peace, a complex one. There is a real difference in my view between advocacy for human rights and conflict resolution, though they are obviously related. If human rights work is led by firebrands it can bring conflict and not peace. So those boundaries among religion, peace, and human rights need some careful thought.

What do you see looking ahead? Is this a moment of opportunity and if so how?

We have in the United States, with the Obama administration, a real window of opportunity, a rare and important era of government seriousness. And so we face the question of how we can use something like the MacArthur model of selecting for excellence, and how we can advocate for a paradigm shift that is not doling out driblets of money but instead is asking, what money will it take to bring peace? Sometimes we hear that “the money is there” but I just don’t believe it. What we want is to put money in in ratios that support cutting edge work, that give peace a fighting chance.

Take for example the Nigerian team, the Imam and Pastor. What would it take to have that kind of initiative taken to every corner of Nigeria? How much money would it take? There are younger imams and pastors, yet they do not now have a fighting chance. What would it have taken to make the Alexandria Accord work, to have it known everywhere, to have funded the next steps that are needed to take the successes that the process represents to a scale where they can truly show results.

To date no one has calculated, much less presented, a case, a narrative, for what it would take to create a paradigm shift. No one has sat down with the numbers. Maybe that’s what we should do.

So I am arguing that what we should think about, and act on, is to define what it will really take to create the paradigm shifts that we are talking about. Apart from the obvious benefits of direct and decently funded peace work, we can also expect to see the real phenomenon that we know well from science, of unintended consequences. A drug invented for one purpose turns out to work for another disease. That would happen with peace processes also. To take one example, the Alexandria Agreement had a powerful impact in Nigeria because the patterns of Christianity there with their Zionist character were responsive to the image of a real agreement among religious leaders, far more than in the Middle East where there is so much more baggage. In Nigeria, where everything is raw and at a flashpoint, with immediate grievances that have nothing to do with the Arab Israel conflict, the idea of a possibility of a peace agreement made a real difference.

Finding real examples of success and replicating them is possible and essential. Many have no idea that there is a large enclave in Haifa where Jews and Arabs have lived together for decades. We need to put success in their faces, stop funding the extremists, and put the kind of money that is needed into the things that will work for peace.

How did you get into this? I don’t think you have written your own story and you certainly should!

I attribute my passion for peacemaking, that began when I was very young, to growing up in a passionate, complex family, a family that was a minority within a minority community, living with the memory of the Holocaust because they were Holocaust survivors. I also had wonderful, highly educated teachers, one trained as a Talmudic Scholar at the University of Berlin. I grew up as an Orthodox Jew, knowing little that there were other Jewish traditions, in liberal Boston. I had teachers who had high ideals, and I was imbued with the idealism of the times, especially John F. Kennedy who was my neighbor. And in my own family, I had to act as a peacemaker in sometimes violent situations that had roots in part in different Jewish traditions as well as male-female conflicts. I developed a strong sense of commitment to nonviolent religion. I became alienated from the Orthodox world by the mid 1980s as I came to see it as a bastion of Jewish military and political militancy.

I went to Israel for the first time in the early 1970s for my bar mitzvah, with my whole family, and fell in love. It was just before the Yom Kippur War, and I was ready to volunteer, as I had a very passionate love for my fellow Jews. But as I came to understand better the different strands and the impact of extreme positions on all sides, I came to a strong opposition to politics. And I also developed a complicated relationship with Judaism and Jewish tradition, that took me inexorably towards a more progressive approach and away from its elements of militancy. I also came, as my horizons expanded, to a deeper embrace of the Arab world. It was a world that was just as violent as the Jewish side, and I was determined to try to create bridges.

I don’t yet fully understand how my motivations evolved, but they have elements of the personal, the religious, and the political. I have spent most of my life discovering the humanity and decency of my father, who was in many ways a violent man, a wounded person who had trouble controlling himself. That effort of understanding in many ways catapulted me into the analysis of the roots of violence. And it gave me a profound understanding that any critique, writing, or scholarship about conflict and violence that does not take account of the human seeds that make people violent, paranoid, and suspicious is empty. That gave me a fundamental critique of conflict resolution approaches, that generally are far too elitist, and thus do not take into account what makes people fearful, and do not look to what it will take to lead them to be enlightened and nonviolent.

Today, many in America hide behind the universities and lose sight of the masses. But the United States was founded by intellectuals who did not do that. They understood what conflict came from, and built a system that, no matter how uneducated the people might be, has checks and balances that can take advantage of an ability to address the rage and heal the wounded. And I am desperately anxious to work to recapture and rebuild that vibrant spirit of America.

And what are you working on now?

My next book is an in depth study of the transcripts of movies, some of which we have made, that explore the inner life of peacemakers. I am asking why they take risks, why they reach out, and how they succeed in reaching over the divides. Why, when they are traumatized themselves, do they succeed? What do they look for?

And I am excited about my very practical and different effort to bring business into the business of peace. My venture is demonstrating through business relationship that Jews and Palestinians, no matter how cynical and jaded they are, can do business with enemies. Business relationships often create other relationships and I want to exploit that for peacemaking. So please look at my website: Mejdi.net.

It is a social business approach, not quite like that of Mohammed Yunus, because the idea is that the profits will loop back to peacemaking. It is about development as peacemaking. I love this work because it is practical. The sales put money into the pockets of people in Hebron, who for the first time can earn a good wage, despite the crazy Jews down the way who are spitting and pissing on them. Hebron is a study in contrasts, with the insane 400 settler group, but also vibrant and successful business and even the presence of Chinese firms. And through business we can achieve what is important in interfaith work, which is to treat and be treated with dignity and equality. It’s a kind of radical pragmatism which others call development. It’s fun and it can save lives.