A Discussion with Andrea Blanch, President, Center for Religious Tolerance

With: Andrea Blanch Berkley Center Profile

June 13, 2010

Background: This June 2010 discussion between Andrea Blanch and Katherine Marshall focuses on Dr. Blanch's work as a supporter and partner in the Women Reborn Project in Israel. The project centers on the Palestinian village of Fureidis and is a remarkably successful example of women’s empowerment that starts with leadership and has engaged a wide range of partners, including secular women’s organizations and both Muslims and Jews. Blanch highlights the importance of a path that women individually and as groups follow, from building trust and relationships towards wider engagement in political processes. Women's approaches offer powerful ways to heal even deep wounds in communities and societies. Blanch highlights that the project over time focused increasingly on the roles of religion in women’s lives, and helped to bring an appreciation that feminism and spirituality are indeed compatible in most faith traditions. The project highlights “interspiritual” work, bringing people of different religious backgrounds together for activities and worship. The key take-away from these efforts is that the women appreciate well that violence and trauma go hand-in-hand and that by working on interfaith trauma healing projects, they were one step closer to ending the conflict.

Can you start with your own path? How did you come to be so much involved in conflict resolution work and to focus so sharply on its religious dimensions?

To go back to the beginning, I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and from the time I was a very little girl, l loved going to church and felt a deep connection to the divine. I was also very drawn to other religions, and took every chance I found to learn about other religions. As I did, I found something deep and true in every religion I encountered. At the same time, through my church youth group, I was learning what it meant to be a political and social activist. This was in the 1960s. In the following decades, through college and graduate school, I focused increasingly on social change and on women’s issues.

However, only recently have I been able to bring these two sides of my life together. Combining the worlds of activism and religion, especially where women are concerned, was very difficult. As a social and political activist I found a major chasm between the two. Most activists and feminists see religion as an impediment to change, particularly in the United States. For the last 15 years or so, I have worked to weave together these themes.

I trained and have practiced as a social psychologist, and throughout my career, have worked in mental health and on women’s issues. In that work, I became very interested in the degree to which violence and trauma underlie our social problems—not just for individuals but also for groups and for societies. When unresolved, trauma can become the central organizing principle of personal identity for individuals, and of cultural identity for groups and nations. Through my work in mental health, I also became interested in conflict management and issues of power, and I set up a center on conflict management in mental health at the University of South Florida. As a result of both experience and reflection, I realized that all these issues are related. People don’t like to look at conflict, so they become conflict avoidant. And by not looking at the issues, they can’t heal the trauma they’ve experienced and they set themselves up to repeat the cycle of violence. Religion and faith tap into people’s deepest beliefs and can provide one tool to begin addressing the trauma and the conflict at a personal and societal level.

What about your specific work on peace?

My international peacemaking work began with the first trip I took to Israel, in 2000, as part of a group. It was just after the second Intifada started, and the newspapers were full of stories about violence and hatred. It seemed from the press that every Jew wanted to annihilate every Muslim and vice versa. To our surprise, we found countless people who were organizing for peace. To cut a long story short, I have been working and going back to the Middle East every since.

In my initial explorations, I focused on interfaith work, and as I met more and more people and asked different questions, I kept being referred to men. After a couple of visits, where I was steered towards sheiks, rabbis, and priests, all of them men, I began to ask where the women were and I determined to keep pressing until I found them. It was then that I met Elana Rozenman, who introduced me to many women doing peace work, and that became my focus whenever I returned to Israel, now ten or twelve times.

What I began to see was that the women there were doing interfaith work differently. My training as a feminist prepared me to see that women, as we know well, build on relationships. What women were doing extremely effectively was what Brother Wayne Teasdale calls “interspiritual” work: bringing people together to do and to be together, to worship together, to experience their own spirituality in common. This was different from many “interfaith efforts,” which instead tended to talk about how religions are similar or different, or about the political situation. The women’s groups were very focused on healing and very interested in trauma. They understood that violence and trauma occur in relationship and have to be healed in common. They were facing the challenge in that region of conflicts that left deep wounding, extending over generations. The women come together, tentatively at first, and their first step was to build trust on an interpersonal level, by getting to know each other. The work was very powerful. I came to see and to believe that there is a potential for building the conditions for sustainable peace that lies in women who are part of religious communities. They offer a key to the solution.

My work with the women opened my eyes and piqued my interest in the issue of how women from different religious traditions, who are deeply spiritual or religious, come together. How do they start, and what is the process through which they are building relationships with others, even and especially those who are seen as the enemy. How do they come to identify with a positive vision for the future, rather than the hurts and anger of the past?

Along the way, we formed the Center for Religious Tolerance. It was, in fact, inspired by that very first visit to Israel. On the plane back home, I began talking to my friends. What we had seen was totally surprising. From what we had read and heard in the United States, we would not have been aware of the interfaith peace movement. But it existed and had powerful potential. We saw that it needed support, and we also were convinced that people in the United States needed to know about it. It was one of those situations where you are given the information, and you have a responsibility to do something about it.

We decided to set up a nonprofit, with two goals. We appreciated that we were not the actors and doers; it was not really our program or our idea, but our mission was to support those who were doing the work and had the ideas. We recognized that there are people over there doing amazingly good work, and that we can learn from their work. So the first goal is to support the on the ground, interfaith work that women are doing for peace, because they do not have access to funding, grants, or publicity. The second goal is to put good information out here, to educate people about the realities of what is happening. And the basic framework is women’s interfaith work for peace.

The Abrahamic Reunion was one of our first projects. It is a group of religious and lay leaders, men and women, from all the four Abrahamic faiths that are represented in Israel (Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze). There are also some members who come from the United States. What stands out is that there are very different combinations of people who do not usually come together. The fact that there are religious leaders of some substance sitting at a table with non religious people is already quite unusual. The sheikhs and rabbis do meet and talk occasionally but they rarely meet with the grassroots groups. And having men and women at the same table is still fairly unusual in Israel, in the religious circles.

When the group meets, the usual rules go out the door. People just don’t know how to behave. They are used to fairly set patterns, for example a situation where they are conscious that they are present as clerics. But in this intergender, intercultural, interfaith setting, they do not have that to fall back on. As we watched men and women interacting, we could see new patterns. Compromises had to be made when the full mix of groups was present at the table, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, men and women.

One element that this helped us to understand was the real power that women actually have within religious communities and institutions, as well as the culture. Even though they do not have formal titles, they have influence. Building on this observation, Elana Rozenman and I have continued to focus on issues of women of faith, and or religious women and peacemaking, always exploring that question, how does it work, and what can make it happen? How do religious women work and act differently when they come together to work for peace? What does leadership look like for religious women?

A women’s interfaith leadership workshop that we ran in Amman a few years ago was an important example and marker. At the meeting, there were representatives of three faiths (not the Druze) and four or five countries. We spent two days together, explicitly focusing on exploring women’s religious identities, and how those identities informed their work as peace makers. We looked at how the women’s religious identities were formed, and what it meant to each person. Then we explored how each person thought their life would be different if they came from a different religion, and thus how your religion informs relationships, consciously and unconsciously. And then, we asked, how does your own religion contribute to peace. That part of the workshop was lots of fun. Participants drew on scripture to find examples of how their faith had teachings about peace. Then we moved on to the next question: how does my own religion contribute to violence? The session was more difficult but also more instructive. We also went into questions about how the participant’s religious identity was related to their national identity. As in other sessions, we had spent the first day building trust and getting to know each other. Because of that, in subsequent discussions we could go quite deep in exploring the more difficult issues.

The pattern we saw was consistent. The women began with efforts to establish their personal identity, thus establishing links and building trust. They then went on from this interpersonal connection to building trust as a group, and then on to larger issues of social and political matters. The women learned so much just from being together. It is always surprising how little we know about each other’s faith traditions. The Muslim participants, for example, were surprised to learn that there are secular Jews in Israel. They thought that all Jews were religious. The workshop was very successful. It contributed to my growing understanding of the process that women go through or can potentially go through when they come together to do interfaith work. That continues to be way we work.

Can you tell more about the specifics of how this unfolds, a “case study”?

The Center’s work has supported exciting women’s initiatives in Israel. One, the most advanced and most exciting, is a project that began about three years ago. It is an Arab women’s empowerment enterprise in north Israel whose title is Women Reborn. The leader is Ibtisam Mahameed, an extraordinary woman. Marc Gopin also mentioned her as an example of an exemplary peacemaker. The project is also part of the Abrahamic Reunion. (information on the project at http://www.c-r-t.org/project-WmnReborn.php).

The project is located in a very traditional Israeli Arab community, Fureidis, which is near Haifa. The culture there is typical of a Arab Muslim Palestinian community in Israel. Thus the town is surrounded by Israeli towns; you can imagine the politics of the situation. Ibtisam wanted to do something for women in village. She had got involved in interfaith work a time back. Our center helped her to write a grant proposal for a United Kingdom (UK) foundation, for a project for women in Fureidis. We also support the project through documentation and evaluation, on a pro bono basis.

What stands out in looking at the experience of the project and Ibtisam’s leadership is that she was a true visionary. The ideas came from her and, organically, from her work in the community, but the partnership involved produced spectacular results. We were able to team up—CRT, an interfaith international group, Shin, an Israel Jewish nonprofit women’s organization, and the Muslim women of Fureidis. It has proved to be a magical partnership. The Israeli Jewish feminists quickly saw the needs of the women in the village, and they bonded as women who wanted to make a difference in world. Despite the ongoing, multi- generational conflict between the communities, they were able to put that in the background while they worked to give the women of Fureidis the opportunity to learn and grow.

As the project began, Ibtisam had to convince the participants’ husbands to let them come to meetings. They were very much part of the traditional Arab culture—with large extended families, most of the women rarely left the village, even their homes. Few had jobs, and many had not even finished high school. When they first came together, they did not know why they were meeting. For the first couple of months, they talked about their sons, fathers, and husbands, because culturally that is what they do. The woman who was the facilitator was an Arab women from the locality, which was important for credibility, and also because she understand the women. But after some time she had just had it, and she blurted out that they only talked about their fathers: don’t any of you have mothers, she asked.

The next day, the women came filled with stories about their mothers, of all they had done, how they had helped them through the war, and their courage and compassion. They saw how they themselves had been colluding with the cultural norm that men are more important. It was an Aha! moment, a real breakthrough. The women started to get it, that they could have goals of their own, that they were important as human beings, and that the effort was about them and about what they could do.

From there, things went very quickly, as the women took on the program, in the spirit that this is for us. Within a couple of weeks, they told the facilitator that she was missing most important thing: that they needed a Hebrew teacher. How, they asked, can we be empowered if we don’t talk the language of the country? So they got a Hebrew instructor, and the women started to learn. It unfolded as a classic empowerment process, engaging the women themselves, their families, and society. Some women went to work and back to school. They studied Hebrew and started to learn about computers. They were having a ball, learning about communications skills, talking about how to bring their husbands and families along with the process, envisioning a new future.

By the end of its first year, a half dozen women were working outside the town, a first ever. Several were even working in Zichron Yaakov, the Jewish town near Fureidis . The program initially had expected that each of them would do a social project of some kind, but they proposed something different, a community project which involved them politically. It was the fall of the Obama election, and they had all been following it carefully. There was a mayoral election in Fureidis, so they decided to organize a candidates’ forum. They invited all nine or 10 mayoral candidates to come and talk about their positions on women’s issues. The expectation in the town was that the then mayor, who had served for twenty or so years, would be reelected, a done deal. But when 300 women showed up at the forum, in a town where it is rare to see a single woman on the streets, something had clearly changed. All the candidates, all men, had to speak to women’s issues. The women decided to campaign for the candidate who had taken what the women saw as the best positions on women’s issues. And lo and behold, he was elected. He and everyone else knew that he had been elected because of their work. He then had to live up to his campaign promise to set up a women’s division in the Fureidis municipal government. This division is only the second one in Israel, and the first in an Arab town. It has a budget, and has committed funds to continue the Women Reborn project when the grant period is over. And now several other Arab towns have come to them and want to start similar projects.

How did religion per se come into the picture?

The religious piece of the story unfolded in an interesting way. After about six to eight months, the women started to be somewhat troubled, discussing amongst themselves whether what they were learning and doing was in conflict with their identity as Muslim women. On one hand felt they were becoming better Muslims, as the process they were following stressed education and taking care of each other, all things the Prophet emphasized. On the other hand, they were doing things they had always been told Muslim women did not do. They were feeling the rub. So they brought Koranic scholars who could talk about what was in the Qur'an, to sort out what the Prophet had actually said from cultural habits that were part of the patriarchal society of the Middle East. This really helped them to see the program as consistent with their own cultural values. I remember one woman telling me, beaming broadly, when I asked her what she had learned: “What did I learn? That I can be a feminist and also a good Muslim. I can be an empowered woman, have my own life, and be a good Muslim too.” For me, that captures it totally, the process of negotiating religious identity and political empowerment. That process and lesson is incredibly important, and needs further exploration.

While I was at Yale for the semester, that was the issue I honed in on. I found that you do not need to look far, because this is happening in all the world’s religions. It used to be a situation like Sophie’s choice: you can be a feminist and leave your religion, or you can be religious and give up your identity as a powerful, political woman. Now, women are discovering that the political constraints and norms within organized religion that hold them back are not part of the original message of religion, nor are they the essence of religion. They are part of the patriarchal structures that have grown up around religions, in a process that is very similar from place to place. Women of all faiths are going back to their religious roots and learning that they can be good Muslims or Christians or Hindus or whatever as well as strong women. So what we are seeing emerging are various religious feminisms. It is a fascinating and incredibly powerful thing that is happening, basically under the radar screen. It has been written about some, though there is not a lot of cross talk, and very little stepping back and looking at the phenomenon as a whole.

The Women Reborn project in Fureidis, supporting Ibtisam’s initiatives, was all done with a management team that included Jewish feminists and Muslims working together, plus internationals. Although the program is for Muslim women, there was a common energy that came from bringing women of different faiths together in ways that allowed them to contribute to growth and harmony and to access resources. During the course of program, the bombings in Lebanon and Gaza were taking place, and we were on tenterhooks to see if it would jeopardize the spirit of collaboration. Israel’s borders are porous. It is a small country, and everyone has friends and relatives, members of extended families, in Gaza and the West Bank. But despite the tensions, the group was able to keep their commitment to human growth and coexistence. It was a real test.

The next step for the Fureidis group and the Center is to enlarge the peace and interfaith perspective. For the last year or so, as women were working in the Jewish town, they came to know Jewish women and men. They wanted to begin to look at issues that kept them so separate and to build bridges between the neighboring but socially isolated towns. It is unlikely that anyone from Zichron Yaakov, the Jewish town, had ever been to Fureidis. The women want to break this down, and they see that as their next step, to get together with their Jewish neighbors to discuss building bridges and building trust. It is more than discussion, though, that they have in mind: it is to mend relationships and heal trauma. So we will see what comes out, what the next steps will be.

What lessons do you take from this experience?

I think about this very much in relation to other places where religious women have had a role in shifting consciousness, so that peace can become possible. That is what happened in Northern Ireland, for example. There was a whole grassroots movement of Catholic and Protestant women coming together, in each other’s kitchens, over coffee and tea, that had a huge impact in making possible political negotiations. It is, of course, far more complex in Israel. The women do not share a language, they are far more segregated, and there are large cultural differences. Israeli Jewish women tend to be very western, while the Palestinian women tend to be very much part of the Middle East. And the Palestinian women are far more isolated from ideas and people from other parts of the world. So unless they have experiences like those of Women Reborn, it will be hard for them to participate in relationship building in the same way it happened in Northern Ireland. The women need to have opportunities to develop their own self confidence, to have the experience of connecting with other women, before they will be able to participate in coalitions with their Jewish sisters. But I really think that it is possible.

Particularly in Israel and in the Middle East, how do you see the trend and strength of civil society networks? One diagnosis (Rajmohan Gandhi’s) sees a “civil wall of peace”, while others see more fragmented efforts. What is your take?

A wall of civil society organizations is definitely being built, but slowly. For Women Reborn, the power of having Shin, and through it the Jewish feminist network, has helped women to connect with other groups and thus to strengthen them. Shin is a key organization in the feminist movement in Israel. Ibtisam’s project was thus immediately connected to networks throughout Israel. For example, Shin organizes an annual women’s parliament, and has a sharp focus on women’s empowerment in the political sphere. The Fureidis group is now part of that. Last year the women’s parliament focused on early marriage, which is a growing problem among both Orthodox Jewish and Muslim communities and they held it in Fureidis. The speed of development is limited by the lack of resources; it is so very hard to get even small amounts of money for Palestinian women in Israel. Most international resources for Palestinians focus on the occupied territories. There is a general view among donors that Israel should take care of their own people, so getting external resources is a real problem.

For example, UNIFEM had a women’s empowerment grant program, which we thought might allow the Women Reborn project to be replicated. We planned to tie it to a political organizing movement, that would eventually introduce legislation in the Knesset—something that Shin has the skills and experience to do. It was an exciting idea with great potential, but we learned that it was not eligible because Israel was not on the list of eligible countries. But, despite the limitations, civil society organizations are starting to spread, though I would not say yet that they are at a place where you can see any spontaneous explosion. I’m currently working on an effort with ALLMEP, a consortium of over 70 grassroots organizations in Israel/Palestine, to develop an international fund based on the fund set up in Northern Ireland in 1986 that helped to end the Troubles. In my opinion, it is going to take something like that to have the impact needed.

What about competition among groups, a natural phenomenon given the difficult quest for resources?

I have seen some but not that much. A more serious challenge is that the groups are very disconnected. There is an Interfaith Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), but in some ways it functions more like a program than a network. There is clearly a need for mechanisms to support communication between grassroots efforts and between the grassroots and the policymakers. I have actually seen less competition among the women’s groups I have been working with than with others. In general, they support each other, and have not gotten into the gamesmanship that characterizes some social change environments.

What about differences in approach?

I think there is room for every approach under the sun, whether it is compassionate listening, working with the bereaved, environmental action, interfaith encounter, or whatever. The guiding premise of the Center for Religious Tolerance is that we try to provide assistance to programs that exist, that come from the people concerned with a particular focus on women because they are so often neglected. What is needed is a better way to connect the dots, not necessarily to coordinate the work, but something to help support synergy, to help people to see that they are part of something larger, even though they might be working on just one piece. That umbrella framework does not exist. And it is a hard environment. People are discouraged, it is difficult to maintain hope in those circumstances. The trauma is deep. So it is not an easy set of circumstances, and the tensions keep building. So communication and support, hope for the future, building alliances—these are most needed.

What about younger women?

There are a lot of youth organizations, but most are pretty secular. There are not a lot of youth interfaith peacemaking options and openings within the religious traditions. A lot of young people do become involved, but they tend not to be religious, in my experience. The United Religions Initiative has a pretty strong youth component, but they function more globally than in a focused way in any given political conflict—or at least in Israel and Palestine. And I don’t know if they have a specific focus on young women. The Abrahamic Reunion has sponsored a few youth activities, and Ibtisam wants to get a program going for young women in Fureidis, but the reality is that it is harder in religious communities, and it is even harder for young women than it is for young men, for obvious reasons.

What about the interfaith movement? How is it taking shape and how is it changing?

I think that it is changing and growing, both. When I first went to Israel, Elana Rozenman was one of the only women readily identified as an interfaith peacebuilder. Over the last ten years, there are more and more women involved, although the lion’s share of the work is strictly grassroots, along the lines of the Interfaith Encounter Association, and that is basic person to person exchange across religious lines. In our work, we try to connect this grass roots activism to the political process. That involves various kinds of information exchange, as well as efforts to energize the movements. But it is still quite limited. There are not many women religious leaders in Israel, at the senior levels, though there are many women who are de facto the leaders in their communities. So we are focusing on the middle, trying to support women to take leadership roles, even if they are not formal roles. You don’t need to be a rabbi to be an opinion leader, and to make a difference. You don’t need a title, because there are other ways of exerting leadership. That’s where we have been trying to operate in this field. The idea is to help women to work within their faith, to be true to their faith, and in doing so to step out so they can become leaders in their own right. That is the beauty of it. Women in fact do well operating between the lines, though that is not happening enough.

We need to discuss more what we mean by leadership, especially but not exclusively in this religious field. There are too few forums that bring women together. The women who are there, wherever they are, are leaders. Leadership sounds more elitist than I mean it. But there are gaps: for example, there has never been a conference on peacebuilding in Israel. People meet informally, they know each other, but there are very weak mechanisms that allow these efforts to be translated to a larger scale and to have greater impact.

To switch the subject, what came out of your semester with the Women’s Religion project at Yale? It is rare if not unique.

Personally, it was a blessing from Heaven, giving me a semester to take a break from my very practical, action-oriented work and world and to explore more of a theoretical understanding. It was a chance to connect action to theories and concepts. It was also a wonderful opportunity to connect with women from other places. As is often the case, the relationships have the most lasting effect.

Sadly, the project is coming to an end. The vision of Serene Jones was very important. I think that they underestimated the difficulty of bringing religion and spirituality into the political discourse. The split between political action and religion is really deep. And many of the peace concepts and networks are very top down and very male dominated. The political system is what it is, top down, male, and secular, and the discourse is very hard to break through. The concepts we are talking about, important as they are, are often not seen as legitimate. At Yale, this was perhaps reflected in a sense that this was a nice little project, but it is not clear that it was taken seriously by the powers that be in the organization.

Do you have any counsel on the July Symposium? What tangible objectives can we hope to achieve?

I hope that we can focus on the important phenomenon of the growth of religious feminisms in different world religions. It has the potential to be a real force for peace. We should be looking at it globally, seeing where it is happening, and finding ways to connect the women involved, so that they can see that they are not alone. That is the work of a movement builder. There are the Catholic nuns who are standing up and reclaiming Catholicism in a different way, for example, and they should know about their Muslim sisters who are doing the same thing. To have a better view of this trend would be enormously empowering.

The issue of defining new forms of leadership is also important. We can help to build support networks and to recognize a different kind of leadership that emerges from the grass roots but then moves beyond that. We are seeing with many of the women we work with, who are making a difference, that they come from modest backgrounds, and through some combination of inner drive and spiritual succor and support from outside, they are able to see beyond their immediate life to new ways in which their power and influence can expand—sometimes through traditional political channels and sometimes outside of them. We need to figure out a way to support women who are doing this. You can’t train people to be leaders. It has to be organic. But given the chance, women gradually take own power, and some decide to grow with it and move on.

Women of faith who take on leadership roles are often very much grounded in local realities. They focus on the community and political organizing from the ground up. They are going to be the ones to make a difference in the twenty-first century.

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