Many factors play a crucial role in a successful negotiation. One of these is the context in which the negotiation takes place. In this extract from his forthcoming book, Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement, Israeli peace negotiator and former ambassador to the United Kingdom Daniel Taub draws from his diplomatic experience to consider how we might create environments more conducive to understanding and compromise.
If you want to feel a sense of hope for the possibility of peace in the Middle East, go to an Israeli hospital. You will witness a level of cooperation that transcends religious and ethnic boundaries. In an operating theatre it is by no means unusual to see a Russian surgeon, an Arab anaesthetist, and a team of religious and secular nurses of every political persuasion, all working together to save the life of a patient who could be of any faith or background. During my army service I spent three months training as a combat medic. At the ceremony marking the end of the course, we took the combat medic’s oath, some version of which is sworn by medics in militaries around the world. It swears to offer medical assistance to the needy ‘without regard to whether they are friend or foe’.
I remember that, even as I was making this oath as a young soldier, I wondered dubiously whether such a high aspiration could ever really be implemented in practice. But some days later I was stationed in an emergency room and a would-be terrorist in his early twenties was brought in on a stretcher. He was seriously injured. His injuries, it turned out, were self-inflicted – an explosive device he had been preparing for use had blown up in his hands. I was surprised and moved to see that the medical protocols and treatments he received were identical to those that any Israeli patient – including his victims, had he succeeded in carrying out the planned attack – would have received.
Not only in Israel, but around the world, healthcare seems to be a unique arena in which we find ourselves able to rise above difference and work together in pursuit of a common purpose. Is there a way that we can bring this spirit into our debates?
Mediator and conflict resolution expert Adar Cohen suggests crafting what he calls a ‘gem statement’ to serve as a reminder of the core value or emotion that holds the relationship together. Particularly at moments of high emotion, it can be hard to take time to distil such a gem statement. Cohen suggests a thought experiment that can help. Think about the person with whom you need to talk, he suggests, and allow yourself to imagine that you have just finished having the best possible conversation with them. You were heard fully. If an apology was appropriate, you received an excellent one. You’ve reached an understanding that gives you confidence in the future of the relationship. Now, in this imaginary scenario, ask yourself what you would say to them in that moment. What would come to the forefront as being true in the relationship, once you’re not consumed with negative feelings? Write down the first thing you think of. Cohen says you can follow up with other things too, but usually the first one is the real deal. He gives a few examples: ‘We’ve kept on fighting in part because neither of us is willing to walk away from this friendship. That’s something.’ Or: ‘Even when we can’t agree on Dad’s medical care, I’ve never doubted your good intentions. I know you want the best
for him.’ Once you’ve identified the gem statement, there’s one small step left to take – actually saying it to your counterpart. If you are willing to repeat the statement to them, that may be a sign that your relationship is ready.
A gem statement may enable us to address a particular relational challenge, but we often don’t need to go through the process of crafting one to give expression to our shared values or feelings. We can convey our common bonds in many ways. Within the Jewish and Israeli world, many conversations over the most provocative political and personal issues take place over the Friday night dinner table. With a candle lit for each member of the family, parents laying their hands on the heads of their children – even adult children – to whisper an ancient blessing, and a meal spiced with recipes and songs handed down from grandparents to grandchildren, there is no need to verbalise the implied gem statements that remind us of the truth that we are family together.
Can we bring a Friday night spirit into our other conversations, even our most difficult ones? During the 2012 violence in Israel and Gaza, when I was serving as Israeli ambassador in London, I received an invitation from Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, to join him, together with the Palestinian ambassador, for a meeting to talk about the Middle East and pray for the people of Israel and Gaza. When I arrived at his residence I was surprised to find that the only participants in the meeting were the Archbishop, the Palestinian ambassador and myself. Then the door opened and one more person entered – a young choirboy from Westminster Cathedral. For a few extraordinary minutes we sat in reverent awe as the angelic voice of the choirboy sang out a Christian psalm for peace between Jews and Muslims in the
Middle East. As you might guess, we didn’t then go on to solve the Middle East conflict, but something in our conversation was made different by the pure choral notes that rose above the differences that divided us.
The location and circumstances in which we conduct our conversation can create a powerful context to change attitudes. In the world of conflict resolution, it is common for warring parties to visit post-conflict situations. Doing so conveys a powerful message that even in conflicts that seem insoluble we can in time find a resolution. I had such an experience when I visited Northern Ireland together with my Palestinian counterpart in the Israeli-Palestinian Culture of Peace negotiations. There was much for us to learn from the experiences of the two sides in the years after the Good Friday peace agreement, but I think that for both of us the most inspiring aspect was to see how hard it was, not only to reach a peace agreement, but to keep it alive after the initial celebrations. Every official we met with described the extraordinary efforts required to maintain the peace, and indeed when we visited, not a single one of the ‘peace walls’ separating rival Protestant and Catholic groups in Belfast had yet been taken down. None the less, hearing about these challenges was indeed inspiring. It made peace seem real to us, not just a distant utopia. Peace, the context seemed to suggest, is not about finding a solution to all of your problems. Rather, it means changing one set of problems for another – but they happen to be a much better set of problems to have.
With the significance of physical locations in mind, while in Northern Ireland we were interested to learn what had happened with the Maze prison. Memorialising sites which are seen very differently by two sides to a conflict is a complex issue, and the Maze prison is a prime example. Used to detain paramilitary prisoners during the years of the Troubles, it was the site of many hunger-strikes and vigorous protests. Seen by republicans as an icon of resistance and by unionists as a reminder of acts of terror, the question of what to do with it presented a serious challenge once peace was achieved. The idea under discussion at the time of our visit was that the site would be repurposed as a ‘conflict transformation centre’. For us, as visitors from the Middle East, aware of how powerful the experience of being in a post-conflict environment could be, this seemed like a powerful and positive idea. At the time of writing, though, the project has not progressed, suggesting that the shadows of conflict are long indeed.
Sometimes the context that shapes our conversation can be as basic as the seating arrangements. In international diplomacy these are notoriously complex. Within the United Nations, where nations are seated alphabetically, Israel should, strictly speaking, be seated next to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The UN’s canny bureaucrats, recognising that this could be problematic, decided that within the UN system Iran should be referred to as ‘Iran (Islamic Republic of . . .)’ – a small tweak which ensures that the representative of Ireland takes their seat as a buff er between the two potential combatants of Israel and Iran.
But a helpful seating arrangement can achieve more than simply conflict avoidance. It can signal a commitment to cooperation and common goals, thus opening the path to resolution. As a student at Harvard, I had the privilege of getting to know Jamil Mahuad, former President of Ecuador. He had been a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for his role in ending the long-lasting conflict between Ecuador and Peru. Jamil told me that before meeting with his Peruvian counterpart, Alberto Fujimori, he consulted with Harvard negotiation professor Roger Fisher. Fisher advised him that in their first meeting Jamil should seek to achieve only one thing: a photograph in which he and Fujimori were seated, not across the table from each other, but on the same side, looking at a map together. The goal was to send a message that, although the two sides might have serious differences, here was a collaborative effort to reach a resolution. Jamil succeeded in securing the photograph, which was duly published in the newspapers of both countries. The peace agreement that eventually resulted from those negotiations ended the longest-running war in the Western hemisphere.
The realisation that working side by side can be more effective in addressing our differences than sitting face to face was creatively demonstrated by the British politician Lord Victor Mishcon. He cared deeply about the prospects for peace in the Middle East and in the early 1980s he invited King Hussein of Jordan and Foreign Minister of Israel Shimon Peres to his home for dinner. At the end of the evening, the two guests got up to leave. ‘You can’t leave yet,’ said Mishcon. ‘What about the washing up?’ When the two men realised that Mishcon wasn’t joking, they took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and continued their conversation as they cleaned the dishes at the sink.
Restructuring the framework
Often the very structure in which we are having our discussion corrals us into positions with little room for nuance or empathy. Yale law professor Stephen Carter shares his frustration about trying to discuss complex issues on television talk shows: ‘What immediately strikes me, whether as viewer or participant, is how difficult it is to construct an argument within the time-conscious frame of the medium.’ But the challenge runs deeper than the lack of time available. Carter suggests that there is a fundamental misalignment between the goals of the media and the idea of a genuine conversation: ‘The media fundamentally disbelieve in – or rather, are unable to squeeze profit from – the possibility of humans reasoning together to find truth.’
CNN analyst and author Van Jones has written about the unspoken rules that dominate any discussion in the media, including: ‘Always attack your opponent’s views, even if she has made a good point’, ‘Defend your own side at all costs’ and ‘Expose your opponent’s weaknesses; conceal your own’. He warns that the ‘nightly “death match” between talking heads is in danger of reducing our national discourse to a farce’.5
Stephen Carter may be right in suggesting that the gap between the desire for genuine truth-seeking discussion and the desire for ratings in television formats is unbridgeable. But in our own contexts we can think about shaping frameworks for discussion that welcome rather than penalise nuance and understanding.
I recently attended a conference on divisions in Israeli society held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. The organisers had given thought to precisely this question. How could they encourage panel participants to break out from behind the labels that defined and constrained them? They decided that instead of the usual panels about Israeli society, in which each sector (secular, ultraorthodox, Arab and so on) had its own representative to defend them on each topic, each panel would relate to only one sector and present a range of voices within that group. The result was a far richer and franker conversation, and one which served to break down the sense outsiders often have that each such group is monolithic.
Another way to ease the pressure created by having sensitive conversations in front of the world at large is to take them off-line, and address the most difficult issues away from the public eye.
In 1994, in a brutal shooting attack at an abortion clinic in Boston, two people were killed and five injured. Following the attack, Laura Chasin, a family therapist and philanthropist from the Rockefeller family, was watching a televised debate on abortion. In the high decibel exchange, the respective pro-choice and pro-life advocates were totally unable to communicate with each other. Barely able to quieten the verbal attacks and counterattacks of the participants, the moderator lamented, ‘There’s nothing going on here but a lot of noise.’
Chasin wondered whether there might be a better way of conducting the dialogue and, together with colleagues at the Family Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts, convened a series of small dialogue groups to talk about abortion. All groups were evenly balanced between people who described themselves as ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ and, most importantly, the groups met away from the public eye. At the start of the process, which took place over several years, many of the participants found their positions hardening, but over time, as the relationships deepened, they found they were able to think about the issue in more nuanced, less simplistic ways. Taking the conversation off -line succeeded in lowering the identity stakes and opening up ways of communication that had seemed unimaginable before.
I certainly noticed this in my own negotiation experience. Often international negotiators are charged with two separate functions: first, trying to reach agreement with the other side, and second, defending their side’s position to the international community. The members of the Palestinian Negotiation Support Unit, for example, would serve both as negotiators at the table and as spokespeople in the media. These are two very different tasks, and ones which require very different attitudes. Success in the negotiation room calls for creative thinking and empathy, while most media formats tend to reward forceful and even intransigent positions. I suggested to my counterparts that it might be helpful to divide their team into two, so that at least the people sitting at the table would not be the same ones who had only moments earlier been broadcasting more extreme and inflexible positions. For my part, during the period I was involved in the peace talks, I asked to be excused from any spokesperson assignments so that I would feel freer to think more flexibly and openly in the negotiation room.
Another way of lowering the temperature around hot-button issues is to create environments in which the issues themselves do not take centre stage, but are addressed in a broader and less divisive context. Media entrepreneur Eli Pariser has noted that some of the best American political discussions online take place in sports team forums and bulletin boards.6 The fact that the participants start from the knowledge that they have common ground, a shared love of their team, means that they are less likely to feel their identities are invested in their political positions and so are more at liberty to be open to alternative viewpoints – both across the table and within themselves. (One cannot help wondering whether we might also find less emotive and more substantive discussion of sports competitions if they were to be conducted in political forums and bulletin boards.)
I have also had the opportunity to participate in a number of ‘Track 2’ processes, discreet dialogues aimed at advancing relations between Israelis and Palestinians. One of the most effective, in terms of building relationships and nurturing deep and frank discussion, involved representatives from the two sides who had previously been members of their respective negotiating teams. The originality of its approach was that a key ground rule was set for the group: these discussions would not directly address any of the substantive issues at the heart of the conflict. Instead, they would revolve around process issues, encouraging the Israeli and Palestinian participants jointly to explore different approaches to the conduct of negotiations and to consider whether any of these tools and techniques might help improve the ongoing process of negotiation. The fact that we were engaged, ostensibly at least, in a joint exploration, rather than the more traditional arm-wrestle over the same old issues, created a space for building a collaborative dynamic. The real issues in the conflict, of course, were not forgotten, but we found that in coffee breaks and after-hours discussions, these were talked about with an openness that might not have been possible otherwise.
Our arguments do not take place against a blank canvas. The context in which they occur can serve to highlight our differences or remind us of the ties that bind us. We can help shape this context by looking for ways to remind ourselves of these ties and shared values. This can be explicit, as Adar Cohen suggests, through the declaration of a gem statement, or implied by our environment, whether the angelic notes of a choirboy or the lively family debates at a Friday night dinner.
Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK on May 22. It is available for order.
