By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Helping people learn how to listen — to put aside their own feelings to hear what someone else is saying, without judging it or adding the gloss of their own attitudes — has been Leah Green’s mission.
Doing that has taken her to Israel and the Palestinian territories over the past several years, leading groups of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike.
It has also led her on a personal journey of discovery, confronting her own demons by leading a Jewish group to Germany — a place where she said she never thought she could set foot. There, they listened and learned from people who have held a collective guilt for generations. She knows that when people let down their guard and have a chance to not only hear but be listened to themselves, it can change lives and possibly even the world.
“Everybody is so full of their own pain, there’s very little room to listen to the other,” Green said. “What I have experienced over and over [bringing together Arabs and Jews] is that when somebody expresses their experience — just their experience, and they receive acknowledgment from the other side, that’s all they want.”
“Of course they want a political solution,” she added, but humanizing the people on the other side can help them all live together.
Green began leading groups on trips to Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1990, working to support peace and reconciliation. She brought people in the hope that they could come to understand one another better as a first step toward making peace between the two communities. She will return with her next contingent on May 10.
“It takes very strong facilitation, working with Israelis and Palestinians together, as in our trainings,” she said. At some point she adopted the Compassionate Listening techniques pioneered by Gene Knudsen Hoffman.
“It’s a process of every-body getting time and everybody getting to tell their stories — not their political opinions, necessarily — but how the conflict has affected them on a day-to-day basis, and that they’ll be heard and they will listen to the others.
“People really want to believe that there are human beings on the other side,” she said. “When you believe that the world is full of monsters who do evil things, it’s almost like, what gives you the will to live?”
Her organization, which began life as MidEast Citizen Diplomacy, has evolved into the Compassionate Listening Project as their scope has broadened beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict and the focus has turned more toward training facilitators, here at home, as well as in the Middle East. Green said they have trained over 120 Israelis and Palestinians in the techniques, and they continue to meet with them whenever they are in the region.
The basic premise behind Compassionate Listening is acknowledging that people on all sides in a conflict are suffering. The task of the facilitator is to let their grievances be heard and to help those on each side recognize the other’s suffering and to acknowledge their humanity.
Green said they never stopped running trips to the Mid-East, even during the past two years, when the intifada and the Israeli crackdown on the territories has sharpened tensions and eroded the center on both sides. Green said they would not take people into the area if they did not feel they could keep them safe but, she added, they are well versed in the region and have confidence that they know where to go and when to avoid certain places.
Compassionate Listening’s next project was born of Green’s own difficulties with understanding and forgiving what had happened in the Holocaust. A year before, she had been on a trip to Israel. One night, one of “her people,” a nearly 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, was talking about how she had made peace with Germany and now makes regular visits to teach in schools there.
“She saw that I was completely baffled by the things that she was saying, almost horrified,” said Green. The older woman challenged her to go there. Three months later she was on a flight to Hamburg.
“Not only was it a healing experience for me, but I ended up being completely surprised by the depth of pain that the German people are carrying,” she said. “It’s so unhealed and so profound. I ended up feeling like they are in a much harder position now than we Jews.”
In 2002, Compassionate Listening, the Earthstewards Network and the International Fellowship of Recon-ciliation began the German-Jewish Reconciliation. Since then, the project, headed by Green and Beate Ronnefeldt, has brought nearly 60 people together to find a way to heal themselves.
Green said she believes that the only path to lasting peace is through this kind of person-to-person contact, leading to a demand from the bottom up for the leaders to resolve the conflicts that are tearing apart the world.
“Personally, I’m pretty pessimistic about government. I feel we almost have a corporate-run government these days. War makes money and governments invest in war, almost like to give their shareholders some profit,” said Green.
“What I see out there is there are not too many opportunities to invite people into a process of humanization, one-to-one and in a safe way and not in a way that blames the other side,” she added. “People really want to believe that there is such a thing as a higher calling among humanity.”