Coexistence: Two Brothers, Two Groups, Two Peoples

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Ella Stolper and Efrat Zigenlaub

This article explores group and intergroup relations in the Israeli–Palestinian context in Israel through the lens of sibling relationships. The authors analyze the emerging intragroup and intergroup dynamics through a one-directional prism, while unfolding a multitude of identities and resonances within these relations. The article describes two groups that were facilitated side by side: a dynamic group and an observation group, which switched roles after 10 sessions. This exchange allowed members to reenact primary phenomena from sibling life, such as the mother’s second pregnancy and the birth of the second child, relationships between siblings, and sibling play-space. In addition, the fact that half of the group members were Jewish and half were Arab enabled the examination of the cultural aspect through terms such as the favorite child, the rejected child, exclusion, and dialogue.

Ishmael, oh Ishmael

How far will our quarrel swell?

—S. Shalom, “Ishmael, Ishmael”

S. H. Foulkes (1948), the father of group analysis, depicted the group as an intricate matrix comprising several personal and cultural levels. Through the influence of sociologist Norbert Elias and gestalt psychology, Foulkes argued that a given

1 Faculty, Group Facilitation Program, Tel Aviv University and Netanya Academic College of Arts and Society, and private practice, Tel Aviv. Correspondence should be addressed to Ella Stolper, MA, Dafna 28/3, Tel Aviv 64929, Israel. E-mail: ellastolper@gmail.com.

2 Faculty, Group Facilitation Program, Tel Aviv University, and Faculty, Netanya Academic College of Arts and Society, Haifa University School of Social Work. Correspondence should be addressed to Efrat Zigenlaub, 172 Yehuda Street, Modiin, 7175653, Israel. E-mail: efrat213@bezeqint.net.

culture may entail general national or international values or ideas as well as those of specific subgroups. In his view, human beings are inseparable from the society in which they were raised; as Israeli poet Shaul Tchernichovsky wrote in 1925, “man is the image of his native landscape.”

Some of the cultural archetypes composing Israeli culture are rooted in the times of the biblical patriarchs. In both Muslim–Arab and Jewish culture, Isaac and Ishmael are brothers, the sons of Abraham, the primary patriarch. Each of these cultures believes that its national forefather is the favorite son. For example, in Judaism, the story of the binding features Isaac, whereas Islam mentions the binding of Ishmael, which is commemorated by the Eid al-Adha, the “sacrifice feast.”

In many ways, the dynamic group symbolizes and reenacts the original family: Facilitators represent the parents, and group members represent the brothers and sisters (Yalom, 1975). The group provides individuals with an opportunity to go back to their nuclear families, the first group they ever experienced, and work through their relationships with their siblings by means of their peers, their “group siblings.” Thus the experience of siblinghood is present in any group that has both facilitators and members

We describe herein a powerful experience that we encountered in a group whose unique setting gave rise to significant issues concerning sibling relations. This was a dynamic group that met as part of a class called Supervised Group Observation, under the auspices of the MA program in social change at the Netanya Academic College of Arts and Society. Initially designed 15 years ago by Professor Ariella Friedman and Dr. Miriam Golan at Tel Aviv University, the purpose of the class was to create a space where students could experience interpersonal group relations firsthand as well as conduct supervised group observation to learn about the development of the group process and about group facilitation. The group comprised 21 women, divided into two subgroups. The first group, a personal relations group, had five double one-hour sessions (10 in total) with two facilitators; the second group functioned as an observation group—watching the first group through a one-way mirror and supervised by a third facilitator. Each session also included a 15-minute intermission, in which the dynamic group and the observation group would meet. After 10 sessions, the two groups switched roles: The observing group began dynamic interaction, and the observed group began to watch. The facilitators kept their previous roles: The two facilitators who facilitated the dynamic group went on to facilitate the second group, and the one who facilitated the observation group now facilitated the new observation group. Aside from these 20 sessions, two additional ones were held—the first and last sessions, These were big-group sessions, with the participation of both groups and all three facilitators. We treat the dynamic group, the observation group, and the intermission as one unit, a single transpersonal space that communicates with us through the group as a whole. Another unique characteristic of this group was its demographic composition, which stemmed from the unique character of the college. All the students in the group were women aged between 25 and 55 years—half of them Jewish, the other half Arab.

This setting posed a considerable challenge for the members, confronting them with the experience of siblinghood on many concurrent layers. The first two layers, which exist in every group, are the intrapersonal and the interpersonal layers. In these layers, facing the group is much like being born into a new family alongside 10 other siblings. Each member, while looking inside herself and observing others, must find her own unique place in a relatively short time. However, this group was also active on further layers, two of which are presented in this article: the intergroup layer and the intercultural layer.

In the intergroup layer, groups had to deal with the need to exchange roles and with the observation process, which meant that one group witnessed the birth of the other and the emergence of the group facilitators unit, akin to the baby–mother unit. In other words, the fact that the two subgroups watched each other through the mirror and then switched roles had an exceptional impact, triggering primary psychological processes that simulated sibling relations.

In the intercultural layer, the group consisted of both Jewish and Arab members with exclusively Jewish facilitators. Metaphorically, we viewed these two cultures as the two archaic brothers—Ishmael and Isaac, the sons of Abraham. In addition, group sessions were held throughout a period that was laden with politically charged events: national elections, the Holocaust Memorial Day, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Soldiers Memorial Day, Independence Day, Naqba Day,3 the recovery from Operation Protective Edge,4 and a general air of “waiting for the next war.” Observing what was happening “through the looking glass” emphasized intergroup relations in these layers, making them more available for exploration.

We begin our discussion of the experience of siblinghood in these two layers with a short theoretical overview of conflict management groups and of the experience of siblinghood.

DIALOGUE GROUPS

Over the past several decades, dialogue groups have often been used as a means for dealing with various conflicts—around the world in general and in the Middle East in particular. Mixed groups serve as a way of decreasing prejudice and hostility between national and ethnic groups that are engaged in conflict (Bar-Tal, 2002;

3 The Naqba, meaning the “Catastrophe,” is the name given by Palestinian Arabs to the aftermath of the 1948 war, during which some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs left, fled, or were exiled, leading to the inception of the Palestinian refugee problem.

4 Operation Protective Edge was an IDF operation in the Gaza Strip that took place during summer 2014 and entailed some 50 days of fighting. The operation included air strikes as well as tank fire and artillery shelling targeting the Gaza Strip, while Israel was targeted with rockets and faced forays into its territory by armed terrorists who came from the Gaza Strip by sea or through underground tunnels.

Salomon, 2002). The theoretical foundation underlying most dialogue groups is Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis, which states that the best way to reduce tension between groups in conflict is to bring people from the two opposing groups in touch with each other.

Drawing on the contact hypothesis, dialogue groups are divided into two main types, both of which attempt to bring members of rival groups together in the hope of diminishing antagonism and establishing dialogue, but they do so in different ways.

The first type is groups that focus on the interpersonal dimension, which emphasize the interpersonal relations between members. This category includes various kinds of groups, of which the workshops in the spirit of human relations are the most pertinent to the present discussion (Katz & Kahanov, 1990). The raw material of such groups is the here and now: the personal experiences, emotions, and thoughts expressed by the members. In these groups, facilitators only intervene on the level of group process, communication, and interpersonal relations (Katz & Kahanov, 1990).

The second type are groups that focus on the intergroup dimension. This approach was developed in the 1990s at the Neve Shalom School for Peace, in collaboration with Tel Aviv University. Among other things, it was designed to address one of the limitations of the previous approach, namely, the ability to generalize the personal stories told by the members of one particular group, making them applicable to the entire national group (Nadler, 2004). This approach integrates the political and the psychological, focusing on identities, conflict, and intergroup power relations. It links group phenomena to parallel phenomena occurring on a greater scale in Israeli society (Sonnenschein, 2008).

The present group had an interpersonal focus. Its mission focused on creating a space for personal experience in an interpersonal group and on learning about the development of the group process and about group facilitation. It was not defined as a Jewish–Arab dialogue group, nor was it designed to suit this purpose (e.g., the facilitation unit comprised two Jewish facilitators, instead of having representatives of the two peoples as facilitators, which is the standard practice in dialogue groups). Nevertheless, the group’s unique composition, including a virtually equal representation of both peoples and the fact that it was held at a college that advocates social equality, endowed it with the qualities of the first kind of dialogue group mentioned previously, the one focused on the interpersonal dimension.

THE EXPERIENCE OF SIBLINGHOOD

Every psychoanalytic theory, from Freud to the present day, emphasizes the vertical relationship—between parents and children—as an essential and significant factor in psychic development. However, horizontal relationships, those between siblings, often remain in the dark, portrayed as playing a mere supportive role, as “present absentees” in the psychic drama that unfolds between the subject and his or her parents. It was only in the 1980s that the first attempts to provide theoretical conceptualizations of the essential impact of sibling relations on the individual’s psychic structure and its development began to emerge. The pioneers of this trend included Stephen Bank and Michael Khan (1982), who discussed siblinghood in the life and writings of Freud. This discussion gained momentum through the work of Juliet Mitchell (as cited in Altman, 2013), who pushed the horizontal axis—the sibling axis—to the fore, attributing siblings with considerable impact on personality development.

Siblings are the first peer group that children experience. They are a point of reference and a source of rivalry, sharing, and support; they also serve as the initial foundation on which interpersonal interaction with one’s contemporaries develops. Sibling relationships are highly significant, crucially affecting the shaping of one’s personality. Sibling space is the “playground” where brothers and sisters practice relatedness and rivalry. The space of sibling relationships poses an intellectual challenge and develops the person’s initial interpersonal skills and the various capacities required for dealing with human society. This is where siblings learn to fight and make up, to play and compete, and to share their most precious resource—their parents (Stolper, 2015).

In his paper “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Freud (1921) argued that children can identify with their siblings owing to the illusion that their parents love them equally. This illusion, he adds, is extended to the figure of the leader and serves as the foundation for the existence and function of any organized group, such as the church and the army

Living alongside siblings grants children various opportunities to have different kinds of shared experiences. Siblings allow the child to embrace numerous identities and expand his or her inner world—the child can oscillate between “being a baby” and “being grown up.” Siblings constitute a group—they share parental expectations and projections, serve as companions who diminish loneliness, take part in creative play and fantasy, engage in a long-term intimate relationship, and lay the foundation for friendships and romantic relationships (Ashuach, 2012).

Mitchell (2003) claimed that we have a preconception of siblings—a universal concept that involves unconscious feelings and primary fantasy. Before the sibling’s birth, the child believes that the baby about to be born will be more of himself or herself; thus the discovery that it is someone else leads to a crisis. Mitchell argued that most therapists deny the traumatic aspect of sibling relations—the great trauma of being “dethroned.” A sibling’s existence is a “necessary catastrophe”—a universal situation that we experience though the realization that we are replaceable. This process is part of the necessary course of development by which we must accept the fact that we are ordinary. This fact stems not from the individual’s realization that he or she is not unique but from learning that the individual, like all his or her brothers and sisters, is simultaneously both ordinary and unique. This transformation of the self occurs gradually and is never concluded. The crisis triggered in the child by the trauma of having a sibling will recur in repetitive and compulsive behavior, resurfacing any time the child is replaced, expelled, or uprooted from his or her place, and the process of working it through may last a lifetime (Mitchell, 2003).

Lacan discussed the issue of siblinghood through his notion of the invasion complex, defining it as one of three familial complexes. This particular complex occurs when the child realizes that he or she has brothers or sisters that are like the child in size, age, and familial role. The force of this complex depends on the child’s age and his or her developmental stage at the time when the family is invaded by the new sibling (Evans, 2002).

THE EXPERIENCE OF SIBLINGHOOD IN THE INTERGROUP LAYER

Working simultaneously with two groups, one of which was interacting “in the light” while the other silently observed from the “darkness,” we had to keep both groups in mind at any given moment—the one in plain sight and the one sitting unseen behind a one-way mirror. The members of the observing group and the dynamic group (as we will henceforth refer to the group that was initially “in the light,” even though both groups were engaged in dynamic work) met during the intermission as well as in the other classes they took on the days the sessions were held; both the members and we group leaders were preoccupied with the relationship between the two groups. The observing group invaded the dynamic room through its requests that the members of the dynamic group raise their voices and change their sitting angle to be more visible as well as by expressing concern about its members or criticizing their behavior and the choices of the facilitators. In one of the sessions, when attendance was sparse, the members of the observing group even asked to be united with the dynamic group to fill the empty chairs in the room. But above all else, the observation group was present in the dynamic room as a fantasy, through the projections of the members of the dynamic group regarding how the members of the observation group saw them and through the way these projections shaped the dynamic group’s behavior.

Being involved as facilitators with two groups that operated both at the same time and one after the other was reminiscent of being parents to two children who are simultaneously twins and an elder brother and a younger brother. On one hand, both groups were “born” at the same time—much like twins—in the first session, when the big group was divided into two subgroups that would work alongside each other and meet only during the intermissions. However, besides this parallel birth, the two groups were also “born” one after the other, because one group began with observation and the other with action. The transition by which the observation group went to the fore and the dynamic group went beyond the looking glass evoked a strong emotional response, somewhat reminiscent of the experience of having a second child. Still, unlike the second child, who cannot witness what is going on in her family before she is born, the observation group was present behind the mirror from the moment the “elder group” was born, joining it in its various processes and observing the emergence of the “mother–baby” unit. Sitting in the dark room and watching the lit one was reminiscent of a baby in its mother’s womb, waiting to be born and listening to the voices and sounds of the outside world and the interaction between its mother and its older sibling.

In her book From Fetus to Child, Italian psychoanalyst Alessandra Piontelli (1992) presented her unique longitudinal study in which she monitored the behavior of fetuses in their mothers’ wombs, comparing their behavior to her observations of their behavior in infancy. What made this study so unique, in the context of the present discussion, is that it treated the fetus as a human entity that has its own characteristics and needs and that is affected by and responds to stimuli coming from outside the womb.

Foulkes (1977) offered the term resonance for describing unconscious and spontaneous interactions, either verbal or nonverbal, between group members, which resemble the striking of a similar emotional chord by virtue of their shared presence. Resonance highlights the fact that this happens instinctively, inevitably, and unintentionally to a single member, to the facilitator, and to the group as a whole (Foulkes, 1977). We assume that this process of resonance occurred between our two groups, although it was mostly the observation group that resonated with what was happening in the dynamic group. It appears that after the first observation, when the groups switched roles, the second group exhibited two parallel movements: continuity resulting from the resonance process and newness in the group’s increased cohesion, together with the two facilitators. Thus the dynamic sessions of the second group were both a fresh start and a continuation of the existing process.

After 10 sessions, the groups exchanged roles: The dynamic group began observing, and vice versa. The consequences of this exchange evoked in us, the facilitators, personal associations related to the experience of having a second child:

ella: When I was pregnant with my second child, I wondered whether I would be able to love him as much as I love my firstborn son; I was afraid that a heart so full of love for the firstborn could not contain love that was equally powerful for another child.

efrat: When my sister was born, I was only 14 months old. My family tells me that I expressed my protest by harshly ignoring my mother and baby sister. I refused to look at them, and I wouldn’t even let my mother feed me. The only person I agreed to communicate with was my father.5

5. All group member names used in this article are pseudonyms.

As facilitators, this class marked the beginning of our joint work in facilitation so that our primary experience of motherhood involved the dynamic group; the observation group was our “joint second child.” When it came time to make the transition, we were afraid that we would not be able to fall in love with the second group and that our facilitation would be blemished by an endless longing for the first group, much like the fear Ella expressed in the preceding dialogue.

In reality, the first sessions after the switch already saw us, the two facilitators, embracing the new group and allowing the presence of the first group to slip our minds. The figures that, only a week before, were the center of our life in the group circle faded away, making room in our minds for the newborn group. We found this sharp turn and our forgetfulness highly surprising in light of our previous fears, and we reacted with mixed feelings. We were aware of the presence of the group behind the mirror, and we even worked with the current members about the meaning of being observed, but we could not recall any of the particular figures who were sitting on the other side. Furthermore, we both suffered from “amnesia” regarding the events of the previous week, even though these involved a powerful and especially moving goodbye. We left the room feeling that we had fully dedicated ourselves to the new group, that we even had a kind of crush on our new members, and that the session was successful and pleasant.

We were struck by just how powerfully our emotional container was emptied in preparation for the new group. The association this evoked in us was of the birth of a younger sibling and the mother’s primary symbiosis with the newborn child. We believe that our powerful experience, as facilitators, of fully devoting ourselves to our “second child” and forgetting the first also had to do with our fear of meeting our internalized “big brother,” as in the experience described by Efrat.

Winnicott (1956) called the mother’s initial devotion to her baby primary maternal preoccupation—a condition that is comparable to a state of regression, dissociation, or memory loss. According to Winnicott,

one cannot understand how the mother functions at the beginning of the baby’s life without noting that she must reach this heightened level of sensitivity, which is virtually pathological, and then recover from it. This maternal state provides the baby with the first developmental framework in which it can grow. (p. 145)

This association grew even stronger when we met the facilitator of the observation group at the end of the first session and realized that she had undergone a very different experience. Exhausted and upset, she reported having a particularly difficult session with her new group. She said that in contrast to the observation group (the “second” group), which started out by watching and immersed itself in the process, exhibiting much interest in what was happening in the room, the dynamic group (the “first” group), which left action in favor of observation, reacted with a restlessness that manifested in members being late or absent, eating and drinking during the session, being preoccupied with their phones, coming and going, and constantly talking. One of the first sessions of the dynamic group in its role as observer began with a single member in attendance, although the agreement stated that members were to arrive 15 minutes before the session in the dynamic room was to begin. Another symptom was a regular “forgetfulness”: At the beginning of each session, the members of the current observation group “forgot” to turn off the lights in the observation room—a precondition for observation.

Besides the objective difficulties involved in moving to the observation room— such as the need to sit silently in the dark for 90 minutes, the physical difficulty of witnessing what is going on in the dynamic room without responding, and becoming accustomed to a new facilitator—we interpreted these reactions on the part of the dynamic group as expressing its experience of having been dethroned as the “firstborn” group, which resulted from watching the two facilitators bond with the other group. This kind of exclusion was sometimes understood as a manifestation of the trauma experienced by the firstborn child when the second child is born (Adler, 1929). We perceived their “forgetting” to turn off the lights on time as asking to stay in the spotlight and not to be forgotten and as an attempt to interrupt any potential for intimate work in our rapport with the other group.

In addition, the observation facilitator reported not only the physical and behavioral expressions of a difficult transition but also explicit rivalry, manifest in sayings like “we were so much better,” “we reached far greater depths,” and “everything is so superficial with them,” alongside sayings such as “this room is really uncomfortable.”

The observation group, having commenced the dynamic process, also reacted by competing with its predecessor and comparing our relationship to it with our relationship to the previous group, which they had watched so far. For example, in one of the sessions, a member commented on our silence: “There’s no way you’d have stayed silent for so long with the previous group. We had the kind of situations here that, if we were them, you would have already gone to town.” These words expressed the voice of the second child in the family, who is angry at his parents for “growing tired” and demanding that they put in the same amount of effort. In contrast, one of the members of this group made a competitive remark: “You’ve got to admit it, you’ve never had a group like us before.”

The intermission offered an interesting experience of connection between the two groups. Albeit only 15 minutes long, the intermission became a regular culinary experience, a veritable feast in which members of both groups would serve their finest dishes and come together in a joint, filling, and diverse meal. The intermission brought the two groups together, dissolving the barrier created by the mirror that separated them. These were brief stolen moments in which the “siblings” could bond and have fun together with no parental involvement, where they could talk about their parents rather than to them or in their presence.

The intermission also served as a kind of transitional space that brought two worlds together: the lit room and the dark room. The encounter between the two groups, taking place between the two parts of the session, posited itself in the intermediary area between the interior and the exterior of the group as a whole, offering an experience of playing in which each member brought dishes representing her ethnic heritage for the other members to taste. The hot homemade food and our absence as facilitators allowed the two groups to establish a playful and colorful intermediary space, which strengthened the bond between the two groups, much like two siblings playing together, and created a separateness between them and us, as facilitators.

In his book Playing and Reality, Winnicott (1971) described this kind of intermediary space:

The third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (p. 2)

THE EXPERIENCE OF SIBLINGHOOD IN THE INTERCULTURAL LAYER

The tension between these two rooms, the lit room, where things were taking place, and the dark and quiet room, which was confined to observation, brought the dialectics of belonging and exclusion in Israeli society to the surface. This sibling rivalry was not confined to the intergroup layer but was also potently manifest in the figures of the two metaphorical brothers: the patriarch of the Jewish nation and the patriarch of the Arab nation. The conflictual material separating these two peoples who live side by side, under a Jewish government, was reenacted in a group whose members were both Jews and Arabs but whose facilitation unit was purely Jewish. This created a parallel space where one could explore the relations between these metaphorical siblings.

The first session was held on the day after Israel’s 19th national elections, with the bitter taste left by the prime minister imploring Jewish citizens to vote, claiming that “the Arabs are coming to the polling stations in droves.” “How can we feel that we are equals, if the prime minister—who is supposed to be our prime minister, too—is using such a claim to scare people into action before the election?” Nawal posed at the beginning of the session. Throughout the following sessions, the Arab members shared with the group many personal stories about how they were made to feel second class. They told about being humiliated by security guards when entering shopping malls or at the airport, especially when wearing traditional clothes. Some pointed out the limitations on their social mobility, and others talked about what little chance their children had of fulfilling their dreams—such as being a pilot—in Israel. These stories were sometimes shared intentionally and sometimes arose unintentionally through other stories, as when one member told an “innocent” story about two schoolchildren, one of whom received special treatment while the other was neglected. According to Goldsobel-Mashiach (2008), exclusion stems from an unequal social structure that expels certain group members, directly or indirectly positioning them at the periphery of the social order. This structure is responsible for the discrimination these members experience as well as for their inability to become integrated into society. Although it seems that this is an active process, it is in fact utterly passive: An excluded group is required to steer clear of certain public or private spaces. This avoidance is not a matter of choice but a compliance with the demands of others who bar the group from certain spaces, leaving it with no say on the matter.

One of the manifestations of this tension between lit and dark, chosen and excluded, was the way in which the group commemorated historic events that emphasized sibling rivalry and, in the Israeli case, the concrete victory of one sibling over the other.

The establishment of the state of Israel is commemorated in diametrically opposed ways by each of the two peoples living in Israel. The official holiday is Independence Day, a festive and ceremonial occasion marking the independence of the Jewish people and their return to their homeland after two millennia in exile. However, this day of celebration for the Jewish people is a day of mourning for the Arab people, who have begun commemorating this day as Naqba Day, though it is not officially observed on a national level.

One of the group’s sessions happened to be on Naqba Day, and we wondered if and how this material would be introduced into the group. As it turned out, the group chose to devote that session to a movement therapy activity, which was a novel and unique excursion from our regular setting—and it took us a while to understand its meaning. One of the Jewish members, a movement therapist, demonstrated one of the exercises she uses with her clients, asking the group to stand silently for one minute and to make a group-hug circle. After the silent hug, she suggested that each member in turn mention one positive quality in her neighbor to the left. In offering these compliments, group members expressed their admiration of how close they felt to each other. The joint hug and the moment of silence, alongside inviting “our neighbors to the left,” gave rise to the assumption that the group was communicating through its shared social unconscious things that may have been too dangerous to express consciously and openly.

In fact, the implicit moment of silence that took place in our group indicated the existence of an enclave within society—a national trauma that is not socially acknowledged or observed and is excluded from the discourse and from official ceremonies. The absence of such acknowledgment, known in professional literature as unsanctioned and unrecognized grief (Doka, 1989), is a phenomenon by which a certain population is not perceived by its social environment as grieving and is granted no social recognition of its unique status, its loss, and the personal pain of each of its members, who are not given sufficient opportunities for public mourning (Itskowitz & Globman, 1992).

Benjamin (1990) claimed that the self can fully experience its subjectivity only in the presence of an other who is also acknowledged as a subject. This means that the need for acknowledgment is crucial for human development. Transposing this notion onto the national level, we believe that acknowledging a people’s suffering and its collective narrative is a crucial and vital step in its development as a people.

Social psychology studies have shown that acknowledging the suffering of the other is a way of attaining reconciliation in conflict situations (Ben David et al., 2017). Several studies conducted in recent years have proven that this is indeed the case in the Israeli–Palestinian context. In their study, Sagy, Kaplan, and Adwan (2002) have demonstrated that there is a positive correlation between the extent to which Israelis acknowledge Palestinian suffering—and vice versa—and positive notions about future relations between the two peoples. A recent study conducted by Hameiri and Nadler (2017) showed that Israelis who believed that Palestinians acknowledge the Holocaust were more willing to assume responsibility for Palestinian suffering and offer apologies, while Palestinians who believed that Israelis acknowledge the Naqba were more inclined to believe that a future reconciliation with the Israelis was possible.

In our group, subjecting the “implicit moment of silence” to an open discourse in which members shared their feelings about the lack of social acknowledgment of the Arab population’s narrative gave a tangible presence to these implicit and socially invisible aspects, thus, in our opinion, contributing to the potential for coexistence. The exploration that ensued in the group exposed the profound position of its members regarding the Jewish–Palestinian conflict, allowing them to enliven areas that were silenced and consciously examine Israel’s social unconscious. According to Weinberg’s (2007) definition,

the social unconscious is the co-constructed shared unconscious of members of a certain social system such as community, society, nation or culture. It includes shared anxieties, fantasies, defenses, myths and memories. Its building bricks are made of chosen traumas and chosen glories. (p. 307)

In the group, Sarit (Jewish) said that her nine-year-old son asked her before the session, “Mommy, is there going to be a war again this summer?” and Abir (Arab) answered, “My son asked me if there was going to be another war during Ramadan.” Talking about the fears shared by mothers on both sides created intimacy and gave rise to hope for a genuine and fruitful dialogue that could bring about an acknowledgment of wrongdoings and a change in our reality.

Yet another interesting phenomenon that emerged in our group was the “displacement” of the minority position to another dimension in the group—political views. Thus, in fact, in addition to the existence of the Jewish majority group and the Arab minority group, our group also entailed another level of majority–minority relations: right wing versus left wing. Owing to the college’s outspoken left-wing agenda, we felt that the “chosen child” was the one with leftist views, while those with rightist views took up the role of the minority. In our supposedly open and progressive discourse about Jews and Arabs in Israeli society, members who were more right wing were marginalized, becoming a silent subgroup, while the majority hinted that they were “second class” and that their voices were not a legitimate part of the group discourse. Although the difficulty in conversing about difference and otherness between Jews and Arabs in the group was displaced to a different area, it still manifested the same marginalization of the minority.

We invited the group to encounter our differences and to speak out the otherness inherent in each of us: “If you knew what my opinions are, you’d never want to be my friends,” said Mirit (Jewish), and she retreated behind the walls of her silence for several sessions. In one of the last sessions, she decided to let her voice be heard about national matters. As she anticipated, her words led to an argument and resulted in a heated conflict with Fatma (Arab), who told the group about being humiliated and discriminated against by airport security. Although the entire group identified with Fatma, expressing anger at the airport security guards, Mirit told her, “Still, with terror attacks being part of our reality, I can see where they’re coming from.” This comment sparked a severe conflict between Mirit and the rest of the group, and Mirit, who had become a scapegoat, left the room and slammed the door several minutes before the end of the session.

Mirit’s choice to storm out led to a brave and personal discussion about the Jewish–Arab conflict. The door that was opened let in painful personal stories that betrayed terror and vulnerability as well as direct confrontations; nevertheless, the group space no longer had any numb or silenced areas. At some point, we were not sure if we were going to survive this confrontation. It was clear to us that we were facing a considerable challenge, looking for a way to embrace both siblings to allow each to express her unique nature without creating any kind of hierarchy. Paradoxically, we realized that accepting Mirit despite her opinions was the equivalent of accepting our Arab members as equals. We presented the group with our assumption that Mirit was in fact the minority in the room and that admitting her into the discourse would allow us all to come in contact with our own hidden aspects, enabling us to accept the other in ourselves, our group, and perhaps even our society. This interpretation extricated Mirit from her isolation, and other voices soon joined hers. Eventually, the Arab subgroup and the Jewish subgroup were able to engage in a sincere and genuine discourse, during which each member revealed her hidden views and thoughts.

This course of action turned the subjective experience of being different into a shared experience, while the threat of otherness and difference created an opportunity for meeting the different and excluded parts of the self as these are reflected by the other. The assumption that people are essentially different and that the encounter with the difference of the other is potentially curative is the foundation of the intersubjective approach and of our personal and professional creed. Mermelstein (2000) argued that otherness and imagination are simultaneously and inseparably present in the therapeutic session and that these two affinities involve issues of empathy and are vital for promoting intimacy and maintaining distance.

As facilitators, we went to great lengths to find room for each of the “children” in the group: the Jewish and Arab members, the right-wing and left-wing members. Nevertheless, we often erred by favoring one side over another. In the final session, held in the presence of the big group, the concluding activity had a more artistic nature: Each member was asked to sum up her experiences in the class by picking a card that featured a drawing from well-known children’s stories. Alongside the classic, universal children’s tales, these cards also referenced several contemporary Hebrew stories. The Arab members were not familiar with them and criticized our choice of material as exclusionary and inconsiderate. In a certain sense, this criticism brought us full circle, as the first session began by discussing the prime minister’s attempt to exclude Arab citizens from the national elections and the biblical theme of Abraham, who cast Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness. This “incident” made us realize just how complicated our intercultural reality is, reminding us that as Jewish facilitators in a mixed Jewish–Arab group, we function as an inseparable part of our society’s collective unconscious and are thus prone to reenacting such exclusionary acts. In addition, this incident emphasized the limitations of the present group in dealing with the Jewish–Arab conflict, both because of the inherent constraints of encounter groups, as mentioned at the outset, and because this was not the group’s primary mission.

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