Storytelling as a way to work-through intractable conflicts:
The German-Jewish experience and its relevance to the Palestinian – Israeli context

Dan Bar-On
Fatma Kassem

Department of Behavioral Sciences
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Israel

Abstract
This paper demonstrates how the method of storytelling can be used to work through intractable conflicts in inter-group activities. The original Freudian concept of working through was widened to apply to socially traumatic experiences arising from inter-group conflict situations, emphasizing the ability of the person to learn to live with the painful events of one's past while developing an ability to listen to the pain of the "other." After exploring the concept of working through, we define the storytelling approach and compare it to other approaches used in small group interventions.  We then discuss the use of the storytelling approach in the TRT (To Reflect and Trust), a dialogue group that began its work in 1992 The TRT, which was initially composed of German descendants of Nazi perpetrators and Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors, is now comprised of practitioners working in current conflicts  We then describe how the storytelling method was applied in a year-long Jewish-Palestinian student workshop held at Ben Gurion University in 2000/1. The discussion focuses on the way personal storytelling facilitates working through processes in intractable conflicts.

Introduction
This paper has a number of aims. Its major aim is to demonstrate how storytelling can be used to work through intractable conflicts in inter-group activities. We begin by defining the concept of working through, then widening it to apply to social traumatic events. Then, the storytelling approach, used in our work, is defined and compared to other approaches often used in small group interventions.  Next, the TRT (To Reflect and Trust) group, the group in which the storytelling technique was first used, is discussed and we show how it was later applied in a year-long Jewish-Palestinian student workshop held at Ben Gurion University in 2000/1. We end our paper with a discussion on the ways personal storytelling can facilitate working through processes in intractable conflicts.

1. Working through collective historical traumatic events 
The assumption, upon which our work is based, is that if groups in intractable conflicts are to reach some degree of reconciliation, they must work through their unresolved pain and anger related to the past through inter-group encounters. In the context of intractable conflicts, we define working through as learning to 'live with' the painful past better than one has up to now. The concept of working through was initially developed in individual therapy and has been used to explain the laborious psychological process, as opposed to a one-time insight, that an individual must undergo in order to confront repressed childhood experiences. In absence of this process, the repressed content may continue to interfere with one's feelings, attitudes and behavior to his/her changing reality (Novey, 1962). 
The definition of working through has undergone changes over the years. When it was first introduced by Freud, he used it to describe the process between patient and therapist. Later on, the concept was widened to apply to social traumatic experiences and PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) (Danieli, 1988). The goals of the working through process have also changed; if the original goal of the working through process was the letting-go of the influence of the repressed content, the later goal was more modest in that it aimed for the individual to learn to 'live with' the painful traumatic event better than s/he had done before (Lehman et al., 1987).
After the Second World War, therapists ‘borrowed’ the concept of working through to describe how survivors coped with the traumas originating from the Holocaust and the intergenerational after-effects of this trauma on the children of the survivors. Later, the concept was used to understand the ways in which Holocaust survivors processed their  distress, seeing this processing as 'normal' delayed reactions to the terrible persecution and losses they had suffered both during and after the Holocaust (Danieli, 1988). Working through also served those researchers and clinicians who attempted to understand how survivors of social trauma continued to live with their losses and feelings of helplessness, in ever-changing realities. Finally, the concept helped explain the paradox of how survivors often succeeded in normalizing their lives, not showing pathological signs for many years, and then would suddenly become overwhelmed by the surfacing of the repressed contents of the trauma that threatened this functioning (Davidson, 1980).
Working through the consequences of social trauma has been found to have intergenerational aspects. For example, research has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors were often sensitive to their parents' silencing, and a sort of 'double wall' was erected between the two generations (Bar-On, 1995b). Parents did not talk about their experiences and their children did not ask. Even when one side wished to open up a ‘window’ in their wall, they were usually confronted with the other's wall. In our work, we have found very few spontaneous incidences in which both parties simultaneously opened up windows in their walls, making the sharing of feelings a possibility.
To date there is very little psychological literature on the working through process and the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust on the descendants of the Nazi perpetrators. The literature that does exist has explored a number of issues: the ways in which descendants of perpetrators  work through their parents’ dark past (Bar-On, 1990), the extent to which the atrocities, committed by the descendants’ fathers, have been transmitted to their children through a 'conspiracy of silence' (developed for very different reasons than that of the survivors' silencing), and how the children have begun confronting and working through this silence (Hardtmann, 1991; Rosenthal, 1992). One reason why there has been so little inquiry into the working through processes of the second generation of Nazi perpetrators can be attributed to the fact that health professionals have tended to suppress this inquiry, sensing that  such research might point to psychological symmetry between children of survivors and children of perpetrators. That is, if both sides were presented as being psychologically burdened by the Nazi era, this thinking might interfere with the moral superiority that the victim had over their victimizer (Bar-On, 1992). To date, almost no attempt has been made to discuss these issues or to try and bring children of survivors and childrens of perpetrators of the Holocaust together into a dialogical, semi-therapeutic context. Later in this paper, we will describe one such attempt, showing how the working through concept was used in a group setting that brought together descendants of Holocaust survivors and descendants of Nazi perpetrators.
As a final note on working through, we would like to draw the readers’ attention to work that has related to the ways in which personal working through both differs from and is similar to the working through processes in groups (Bar-On, 1990; 1995a) and to the ways in which the concept of working through differs from the concept of reconciliation (Bar-On, in press).

2. Small group interventions for the working through of intractable conflicts – a typology
Small group interventions, whose purpose is to attempt a resolution of ethnic conflicts, can be classified into three main approaches: 
(1)	 The human relations approach, based primarily on Contact Hypothesis (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998). Groups that are exposed to this kind of intervention work at creating personal relationships between the participants from the two sides. The basic assumption of this approach is that getting to know each other contributes to changes in stereotypic perceptions, attitudes and relationships with the other. This approach, however, has two main problems: it tends to disregard the historical roots of the conflict and it tends to ignore the fact that there is an asymmetry in the power relations between the two groups, due to the political reality in which they live. Furthermore, while this approach may appear to work in the short run, it usually has little long-term impact. This is because the external power relations between the groups and the hostile environment, in which the groups continue to live, may erase the positive effect created by the small group process. (For further discussion of the Contact Hypothesis, see Ben Ari in this issue). 
(2)	 The confrontational model: This model was developed at Neve Shalom and Givat Havivah in Israel as a critical response to the human relations model (see Maoz; and Halabi & Sonnenschein, both in this issue). This approach focuses on the emphasis of collective identities and the asymmetric power relations that exist between the parties (Maoz; Suleiman, both in this issue). 
	Over the years, researchers have studied the issue of identity and power relations. For example, Janet Helms (1990) viewed the problem that arose between members of the majority and members of the minority as one of vagueness in the definition of self among members of the majority (the White majority in the case of the USA). This vagueness stands out in the face of a clearly strengthening identity among the oppressed minority (the Black minority, in the case of the USA). Moscovici (1976) and Mugny & Perez (1991) similarly maintain that in encounters between majority and minority groups, the minority group is at an advantage due to its ability to form clear representations of the social self. That is, minority groups know how to differentiate between their self- representation and that of the majority, with whom they are often in disaccord, while the majority group usually has no similar clear representation, but merely a vague self-representation. The reason for this vague representation is that members of the majority group do not need such a clear representation of the minority group for their own survival. 
	When these conceptualizations are examined in group encounters between Jews and Palestinans using the confrontational model, it has been found that during the first stages of the encounters, the minority group (the Palestinians)  strives to use its relative advantage, concerning its ability to clearly define its self and the other, to gain power within the group setting. This puts the majority group (the Jews) at a disadvantage as it struggles to re-examine the vagueness and marked internal contradictions in its self-definition (Maoz, Bar-On, Steinberg  Frakhadeen, in press; Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). This group interaction can be analyzed in the following way: the Jews try to preserve the status quo and, therefore, approach members of the Palestinian group on an individual basis, while the Palestinians try to change the status quo and, therefore, approach the Jews on a collective level (Suleiman, Halabi & Sonnenschein, both in this issue). 
	The advantage of using the confrontational method is twofold: it helps empower members of the minority group while encouraging members of the dominant group to gain new insights both into their own ambivalence concerning their identity and into their attitudes toward power (Maoz, 2000a; 2000b; Sulieman, 1997). These advantages, however, are achieved at the expense of an atmosphere of trust and personal friendships, that are often gained between members of groups that employ the human relations model in their work. The problem that exists with the confrontational model is that the confrontation, together with lack of trust that remains characteristic of these groups, do not enable group members to develop more complex perspectives of the self and of the other (Bar-On 1999). 
(3) A third option: Inter-group encounters focusing on family stories. When we began our work with groups in conflict, we felt that a different method of group work was needed. The new design was developed in order to address some of the shortcomings of the previous noted intrevention models. In the new model, members of both groups are asked to share their personal and family stories with one another during the inter-group encounters (Zehavi-Verete, 2000). The family stories represent the emotional and personal history of the participant as well as the collective history of the conflict, from the perspective of each side. As a result, this model enables the development of emotional ties between members of the group and allows more complex representations of the self and other to emerge. The storytelling model was developed by the first author in his work with a group comprised of children of Holocaust survivors and children of Nazi perpetrators (Bar-On, 1995a). This group was later expanded to include practitioners who live and work in the conflict areas of Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel/Palestine (Bar-On, 2000). The storytelling approach used in this group was then further applied to a group work with Jewish and Palestinian students in Israel. 

3. Developing the method: Storytelling as an inter-group method for working through the Holocaust
In this section, we will describe encounters that attempted to address and work through various levels of inter-group conflicts. The first attempt took place between Germans and Jews and the second attempt took place between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. 
The TRT (To Reflect and Trust) group, which began its work in 1992, initially brought together descendants of Holocaust survivors from the USA and from Israel and descendants of Nazi perpetrators from Germany (Bar-On, 1993). The group process that evolved was based on the participants sharing of personal stories. This process helped group members work through the abyss that still appeared to exist between Germans and Jews so many years after the Holocaust. The TRT group process will be described, as it evolved from 1992 to 1998. The criteria used for choosing ways the TRT members is described elsewhere (Bar-On, 1995a).

Developing a common emotional and conceptual language across the abyss
After years of intensive work with descendants of survivors in Israel (Bar-On, 1995b), and after interviewing descendants of Nazi perpetrators in Germany (Bar-On, 1989), the first author initiated the formation of a setting in which members from both of these groups could come together and enter into an open dialogue. The questions that concerned him were as follows: Could the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators speak openly with one another? Would this encounter help each party work through aspects of their families’ traumatic pasts that they had been unable to work through in their separate 'tribal ego' setting? Finally, by engaging in such a group process, would a common agenda emerge that could go beyond the separate agendas of each side (Time Watch, 1993)?
Six encounters between a group of eight descendants of Holocaust perpetrators and a group of five American and four Israeli descendants of Holocaust survivors, took place between 1992-1997. The meetings rotated between Germany, Israel and the USA with each meeting usually lasting between four to five days. Except for the first meeting, which was planned by the first author and which was solely devoted to getting acquainted mainly by listening to each other's personal accounts and stories (Bar-On, 1993), successive scheduling was done by the group itself. However, the meetings continued to focus on reflection on these personal and family stories. 
During this joint working through process, the group developed a common emotional and conceptual language that differed from the separate languages that characterized the communities from which the people came. However, the development of this language created a dilemma for the groups of descendants; members began to struggle with the question: "Shall we become an isolated sect, since the communities to which we belong are not yet able to cope with the new understandings that we have gained from our group experiences, or will we have to end this common work in order to remain active members in our communities?" Interestingly, this group chose to go in neither of these directions. Instead, the group chose to contain the tension between these options; they used the group for support and hoped that their communities would slowly move toward one another arriving at the new “space” that had been created by the group. This decision may help explain why the TRT process was a relatively slow process, one that was only partly acknowledged by their German and Jewish communities several years after the group began its work.
How did the process unfold? It was the role of the first author (as an initiator of the group, even though he was clearly a member of the Jewish group) to present the group with issues to be addressed and to suggest conceptualizations about the direction in which the group was heading. He tried to offer questions, concepts or ideas that members of both groups could identify with and around which they could clarify the construction of their personal and collective experiences. As the work proceeded, everyone did not always agree with the first author's formulations, and so the ideas were reformulated. In the following paragraphs, some of these ideas will be discussed.
In the beginning, the TRT members shared their stories with the entire group. They spoke about how, when and in what ways they could trace the after-effects of the Holocaust in their own lives. We learned that, for some of the members, this confrontation with their family’s past was a daily struggle that was accompanied by sleeplessness, fears and uncontrollable reactions. This struggle also often met with silence, repression or other difficult reactions from their parents and social networks. In many cases, acknowledging that one was personally connected to the Holocaust was accompanied by feelings of estrangement - internal (from oneself) as well as external (from one's social surroundings). Members of the group spoke about how it had taken them years to comprehend how this dual estrangement connected to the ways they confronted their personal relationship to the Holocaust. 
The Jewish members of the group talked about how they suffered from a sense of physical uprootedness, as their parents had immigrated to the USA or to Israel after the Holocaust. This physical uprootedness was usually accompanied by a sense of psychological uprootedness since the children of the survivors understood the difficulties that their parents had  in overcoming the loss of so many family members and with integrating themselves into their new societies. In contrast, the German members of the group did not experience physical uprootedness since their families usually continued to live in their original communities. However, the German participants, like the Jewish participants, felt a sense of psychological uprootedness, albeit for other reasons: the German members felt, that due to the atrocities that had been committed by their parents, their roots had been “poisoned” and, therefore, they could no longer use them as a base upon which they could construct their own sense of identity. Thus, the descendants of the perpetrators also had to develop new roots.
Struggling with the feelings of estrangement and uprootedness brought up new questions for group discussion. One major issue that concerned both the Jews and the Germans was to what degree the participants felt they could  allow themselves to live their own lives, neither dependent nor independent of their parents. We learned that the Jewish descendants’ separation from their parents was more difficult than it was for the German descendants, due to the tendency of the survivors to emotionally lean on their children, especially as the survivors aged. The descendants of Nazi perpetrators reacted differently to their parents; they tended to have counter-reactions to their parents behavior and so they would distance themselves from them, leading to an emotional void (Berger & Berger, 2001). This problem became more severe over time; as the parents of the German participants aged, the children found themselves faced with the reality of having to care for them. 
Through the group process, we learned, that members of both groups struggle daily with dreams about death, with the fact that they bear the names of dead people (especially among the Jewish descendants of survivors), and that they have fantasies of sacrificing themselves for a greater human cause (especially among the descendants of Nazi perpetrators). As one member of the group mentioned: "We talk about our feelings, emotions and ideas, but they all concern the dead people who are in the back of our minds." Perhaps, it is not a coincidence that a number of  group members belong to the helping professions. Perhaps this is one way in which they can give their lives, lived under the shadow of death, a special meaning . 
Both the Jewish and the German group members, could, quite easily, establish an open dialogue with the victim within themselves. However, we found that it was much more difficult for group members to identify with and to enter into an open dialogue with the victimizer within themselves and to let the two 'figures' talk with one another. Our group discussion on this issue taught us that the only way one can reduce the potential for uncontrollable victimization is by acknowledging and entering into a dialogue with the victimizer in oneself. After the group reached this realization, a new issue was defined: once we accept and let go of these roles of victim and victimizers within ourselves - what is left? Who are we if we are not defined through these roles? This understanding led to the beginnings of a new process of identity construction, one that was neither based on negation of the "other," nor on the role of the victim within oneself (Krondorfer, 1995; Bar-On, 1999).
The issues associated with identity construction brought up the question of "who suffered more?" This issue included the “scaling” of suffering. In the group context, it became evident that we tended to create a subjective scale of suffering. We were told that there are families of survivors in which only the members who had been in Auschwitz were “allowed” to talk about their suffering in family gatherings. This issue also came up when we discussed the BBC film that had been made of the group. We asked ourselves if some German participants were “more important” than others due to the fact that their fathers had been prominent figures in the Nazi regime? Or, perhaps this scaling was associated with the fact that these members had to work harder in order to work through the meaning that their fathers’ roles had for their own lives (Bar-On, 1995a). We came to understand that extreme suffering may cause us to feel helpless, and so we scale it in order to gain some sense of control. Since some people cannot grasp the experiences their parents had during the Holocaust, the scaling also helps us make sense of it. We found that it is much more difficult for people to relate to the experiences of the other as just being different, than it is for them to relate to them as being more or less difficult. In sum, as we confronted the central issue of scaling we had to learn how to acknowledge the differences without scaling them, as we saw that this in itself led to the creation of additional pain and humiliation.
As the group work proceeded, members developed a feeling of mutual trust and respect for one another and this led to a new symmetry between the parties. However, this by no means erased the asymmetry that still existed in people's minds concerning their parents  – there were victimizers and there were victims. Although it was difficult for group members to simultaneously maintain these two frames of mind, it was very important to find a way to navigate between them. This process of navigation led to discussions about the relationship between the past and the present and about ways to manage this relationship
 The group experience taught us that we should not try to forget the past, or to rid ourselves of it, once and for all, but that we should look for new ways to live with it – ways that were more conscious, less threatening and self-destructive than our previous attempts. This suggests that by working through massive trauma, one does not let it go, but one finds new ways to live with it. As one German member said: “The day we will feel that it is done with will mean that we went off our course.” While the Holocaust cannot be undone, the negative impact that it has had on the  lives of the descendants can be reduced through conscious working through processes on a  group or on an individual level. Perhaps confrontation with these issues was the TRT's main "product" as it was through this confrontation that the group worked through their joint traumatic past by becoming forgiving and by  reconciliating with one another, rather than by only talking about it. 

Hamburg 1998: Bringing in practitioners from current conflicts 
In 1998 the TRT decided to invite practitioners who work with victims and victimizers of atrocities in current conflicts (South Africa, Northern Ireland and Palestine/Israel) to participate in a joint meeting. The purpose was to see whether the TRT group process of storytelling and reflections on the stories in an atmosphere characterized by trust would also be relevant for these other settings. A full analysis of the Hamburg conference undertaken by Maoz (2000c) suggested that working through past conflicts in one context (the Holocaust) can assist in working through current conflicts (for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bar-On, 2000).
It was clear to the organizers of the TRT encounters that followed the 1998 meeting, that each conflict setting had its own 'biography' that had to be carefully studied and taken into consideration. It also became clear that the new group work had to be approached differently than the work that had taken place previously between descendants of survivors and descendants of perpetrators. These insights were gained in the meetings  that took place in Bethlehem, PNA, in October 1999 (Adwan & Bar-On, 2001), at Stockton College of New Jersey, in July 2000 and in Northern Ireland, in August 2002. 
The original TRT had been dealing with the Holocaust, an event that had happened many years ago and that had a clear-cut division between victims and victimizers. While the descendants of the Holocaust were dealing with what still burdened their minds and hearts, they were not involved in a current conflict with one another. In spite of these differences between the Holocaust and the current conflicts chosen for our focus, we found that the TRT story-telling approach had relevance for the practitioners who were struggling with the processes of peace building. Employing the storytelling method in encounters between members of the opposing sides helped the participants reach deeper underlying issues of their conflicts which political, legal, or financial steps, or time, had not succeeded in healing. The expanded TRT experience also showed us that the process of working through the past into the present is an intergenerational process. 
Based on our experiences with the expanded TRT group, we decided to employ the method of storytelling in a university workshop that took place between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. We will now describe that workshop that we facilitated in 2000/1.

4. Dialogue under fire: Israeli Jewish and Palestinian students encounter their families stories 
The authors developed a workshop entitled “Life stories in the service of coexistence” for Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students, based on the TRT approach of storytelling. Students were asked to interview members of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations and to present some of these interviews in the classroom. Using theoretical materials, the students analyzed their respective interviews in mixed Jewish and Palestinian couples and wrote a final joint paper based on their analysis. 
Where did the idea for this particular seminar come from? For four years, the first author observed Jewish and Palestinian students encounters that had been held at Ben Gurion University in Israel. These encounters had been facilitated by practitioners from Neve Shalom who employed the confrontational model (Halabi & Sonnenschein, in this issue). The second author had participated in and had facilitated a number of educational programs for Israeli Jews and Arabs that tried to promote coexistence and dialogue. Both authors felt somewhat frustrated with these experiences and believed that a new attempt was needed for work with such groups. The workshop presented here describes this new attempt to work though the painful past and to confront each other’s reality in a constructive way (Cohen, 1994; 1997).

Method
Thirteen Jewish students (nine undergraduates, four graduates; nine females, four males) were recruited from twenty-four Jewish students who had applied for the workshop and twelve Palestinian students (ten undergraduates, two graduates; seven females, five males) were recruited from the Palestinians who had applied for the program. Before the meetings began, there was a real threat (and a lot of talking among the students) that the Palestinian students would not show up for the workshop due to the events of October 2000 in which thirteen Israeli-Palestinians were killed by the police (see introduction to this issue). Therefore, the authors decided to start the group process with a few separate uni-national meetings. In these meetings, the Palestinian group met with the second author and spoke in Arabic and the Jewish group met with the first author and spoke in Hebrew. The authors decided not to audio or tape record the sessions (in such workshops, there is often audio/visual recording of the group process)  since they assumed that this might cause apprehension, mainly on the Palestinian side. However, the students were told that they should keep a personal log in which they would describe, on one page, what had happened in the group process in each meeting. On the second page, they were asked to write down their own reactions to these events.
The students were instructed to conduct tape-recorded interviews with members of their parents’ or grandparents’ generations using Rosenthal’s (1992) biographical method of interviewing. The students were requested to encourage their interviewees to tell their life stories with as little interference as possible and to ask the biographers questions only after the main narration had been completed. The students underwent a short training period in which they interviewed each other in triads, rotating the roles of interviewee, interviewer and observer and reflecting on aspects of these different roles. Students were instructed to transcribe their interviews and bring them to the workshop. They were also given two additional assignments that were to be conducted in mixed Jewish-Palestinian couples: (1) to read and summarize one article from the course syllabus and to give a joint presentation during the last part of the second semester and (2) to jointly write a final paper comparing their interviews. For this paper, they were asked to incorporate materials from their personal logs and to use these and theoretical materials to compare and anaylze their interviews.
In the following section, we present an initial description of the group process, including representative quotations from the participants. A more rigourous analysis is currently in process (Litvak-Hirsch, in preparation).

Results
During the initial two uni-national sessions, group members were asked to share some of their family background with the other participants, before conducting any interviews. In these meetings, the Jewish students expressed the tension they felt and their concern regarding the events that had happened outside the classroom. They were especially worried that the fatal shootings that had occurred in October would limit the willingness of the Palestinians to meet with the Jewish participants ("Will they be willing to listen to my family story?” asked a Jewish student). In the Palestinian group, students stated that they were afraid to express their (negative) feelings within a Jewish dominated university setting, and that such expressions might jeoperdize their future studies. 
The bi-national encounters started during the third week. Twelve sessions were held during the first semester, four of which were uni-national, and twelve sessions were held during the second semester, one of which was uni-national. In the bi-national meetings, seven Jewish and seven Palestinian students shared with the entire group their interviews that they had conducted with a member of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. 
As the workshop progressed, it became clear that the students' perceptions of themselves and of each other were being mediated through the family stories. The sharing of stories contributed to the students’ ability to listen to one another and to construct a more complex image of the “other” than the one usually convyed through the media. To some extent, the students, especially the Jewish ones, developed an a-historical perception of themselves in relation to the other (Adwan & Bar-On, 2001). The Jewish students learned for the first time some of what had happened to Palestinians in Israel since the creation of the Israeli state. Some of the Palestinians told stories of family members who were refugees during the 1948 war. Some participants described the period under the military regime in the 1950’s and 1960’s; others emphasized what current daily life was like for members of an underprivileged minority in Israeli society. Jewish stories were told of grandparents who lived through the Holocaust, of others who had immigrated to Israel, some based on their Zionist ideology, others out of necessity and hardship. The students talked about the difficulties that these family members had in adjusting to a new society, and of wars and heroism of other family members. 
The Palestinian students began by criticizing some of the Jewish stories as being "biased"; in their perception, the Jewish students were emphasizing their family’s suffering or heroism, excluding the Palestinians' perceptions of the past from their stories. “We have heard so much about your Holocaust, but where are our grandparents' stories of suffering caused by some Israeli-Jews? Why do these aspects of the past not appear in your stories?" But the Palestinian participants listened closely to the Jewish stories with which they could identify and toward which they felt empathetic. For example, they could identify with the story, told by a Jewish participant, about her father, who had immigrated from France, and who still does not feel at home in Israel. A Palestinian student reacted by saying that she too does not feel at home here in Israel. Though the background was different for the two participants (immigration versus persecution), the common image of rootlessness elicited feelings of empathy and openness on both sides (as it had in the German-Jewish TRT group described above). 
When a Palestinian student described how her family avoided evacuation from their hometown and then were later forced to live in a “Ghetto”, a Jewish participant responded with the comment that her father had grown up near that “Ghetto” and that he used to describe it very vividly in a positive way. After hearing the Palestinian’s story, the Jewish participant was forced to reexamine the stories that she heard from her father and the reasons for the discrepancies that existed in the ways both fathers constructed their past.  
The inter-group process did not happen in a vacuum: there was a war outside and, at times, external violent events disrupted the workshop processes and made it quite impossible for the two sides to listen to one another’s stories. Therefore, storytelling was only part of the process. Several meetings were actually devoted to political clashes of an ethnocentric nature (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002), during which each group tried to obtain control over what could be claimed to be “just”, “true” and “relevant.” As a rule, the facilitators tried to bring the group back to the storytelling mode, but several students felt that by doing so, the facilitators were trying to stop the "real thing" from happening. That is, they felt that the facilitators were trying to prohibit one group from “winning” this power struggle. In a way, the ethnocentric discourse had a positive function for the group: it clarified for them how far apart the positions were and that there can be no “winner.” The participants also learned that this power struggle only brings about a kind of group fatigue. This discovery may have led these students to search for other ways to continue their group work. 
In the workshop, the search led to the listening and discussion of a new family story. However, we also used other techniques: we invited guest lecturers and, when the students presented their papers, this had their own impact on the progress of the group. Marc Ross of Bryn Mawr College (Ross, 2000) talked about his research and observations of ethnic conflicts in France and Northern Ireland. Shoshana Steinberg presented a typology of group dialogue that she developed while analyzing the Jewish-Palestinian workshops that had been facilitated by facilitators from Neve Shalom. She showed the participants how these previous workshops had moved back and forth between ethnocentric discourse and other  categories of group dialogue, every now and then touching on “dialogical moments” (Steinberg & Bar-On, 2002). These intellectual interventions were useful to the participants in that they provided them with concepts that they could use in their reflection of what had happened earlier in the group and what was  happening in the “here and now.”
When the Jewish and Palestinian Memorial Days arrived in April-May, new difficulties arose. The difficulties reached a peak when the Palestinian group asked the Jewish group to stand with them for a moment of silence as part of their new Al-Naqba ritual (thereby adopting Jewish ritual that is used on Holocaust Memorial Day). The Jews did not join in and this created a traumatic experience for the Palestinians in the group. Questions such as the following arose: Can the Jewish participants only talk about what they learned from the Palestinians’ stories, but not implement behavioral changes? Had we only imagined that we were becoming closer to one another through our storytelling? Some of the Jewish members felt a severe inner conflict. On the one hand, dominant collective Zionist values, which they held, made it impossible for them to accept Al-Naqba as a day of mourning. On the other hand, the new inter-group solidarity that had begun to develop as a result of the group process made them feel guilty for not being able to commemorate Al Naqba with their Palestinian coparts. The students did not find a way to resolve the conflict at that meeting. However, the two groups managed to work through this crisis during the following joint sessions. A few Palestinian participants voiced their anger, an anger that had never before been verbalized so clearly in the group. Some of the members of the Jewish group apologized for their reaction and said that they believed that in the future they would join the Palestinians in their mourning.
At other times, external events and internal voices became interwoven with one another and interrupted the communication that had evolved in the group (Zupnik, 2000). When a Palestinian participant made his initial declaration, "I do not believe in coexistence", this declaration frightened some of the Jewish group members, since it mirrored what they felt was taking place outside the group, in their daily lives. They saw this declaration as reflecting the stance of  other Palestinians, in Israel and in the PNA, that the Palestinians were totally rejecting the idea of the Jewish State. There were other moments of fear and despair. Some Palestinian participants expressed fear of what might happen to them when they heard Jews shouting, in news broadcasts “death to Arabs” after a suicide bombing killed twenty three teenagers at the Dolphinarium discoteque in Tel Aviv . A Jewish student spoke about what this bombing had done to her; she felt that she had totally regressed "back to where I was at the first encounter." 
But there were also encouraging expressions. Some Jewish participants said that the group meetings encouraged them to read more about the roots of the conflict and to listen more intensively to the news. Some of the members also stated that they tended to present more "dovish" views outside the group, in contrast to the more "hawkish" views they expressed in the group discussions.
 
Discussion: Storytelling as a group process that can enhance working through  
In comparing the results of the two inter-group processes presented in this paper, we will focus on the following issues: the relevant contexts and goals of the TRT group encounters, the challanges faced by the participants, indicators of success and limitations of the group process, the role of the facilitators and the meaning of 'working through' for each group.

The context and the goals
This paper looked at two very different group processes that were based on a storytelling method of work with groups in conflict. The storytelling method was first developed with the TRT group. This group dealt with the long-term effects of a man-made catastrophe that took place over 60 years ago. While the Holocaust continued to vibrate in the souls of the descendants of the survivors and the perpetrators who participated in these meetings, the Holocaust itself was no longer a current conflict. In this context, the differentiation between victims and victimizers was clear cut and undisputed. The storytelling enabled members of the Jewish and German groups to come closer to each other, and to work through the abyss that has existed between their communities since the Holocaust began. Members of the group saw themselves as forging a new way to work through the past and they were able to confront the present in new, less burdensome ways (Maoz & Bar-On, 2002). 
When the TRT invited practitioners from current conflicts to join their work, the expanded group had to learn how to deal with issues that were relevant for these conflicts. This was because these conflicts not only differed from that of the original TRT context, but because they also differed  from one another (Bar-On, 2000). The practitioners came from societies in which the conflict was still ongoing or from socieities that were still dealing with important unresolved social issues. Furthermore, the differentiation between victims and victimizer was often blurred; the new members lived and worked in regions in which people from both sides of the conflict often felt that they were victimized by the other, and in which people were unable to take responsibility for their hand in the victimization. In addition, in the current conflict regions, an asymmetry in power existed between the sides in conflict. This asymmetry created different agendas concerning the way to achieve coexistence between the parties: there were those who wished to maintain the status quo while there were those who wanted to change it (Maoz, 2000b; Halabi & Sonnenschein in this issue). Finally, questions of justice – how/should the perpetrators be punished – and how should the victims of the violence be compensated for their losses – were further issues that were partially unresolved. 
In spite of  these differences, we found that the storytelling approach used by the TRT had relevance for the members of the current conflict groups. Participants were able to learn from the TRT experience how to bring in the past without disrupting the present. They also learned how it was possible to create a sense of trust that enabled them to listen to the others and, in some cases, even to identify with them. The storytelling approach also highlighted the intergenerational aspect of the conflict and the tension that existed between the micro process that was taking place in a “sheltered” group atmosphere and the processes taking place on the macro, societal level . 
 The challanges faced by the participants of the two workshops
Adapting the TRT process to an educational program designed for Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students can be seen as an additional outcome of the original TRT group process. In this workshop, young adult students were involved, not practitioners or middle-aged descendants of the Holocaust. Although the students, like TRT members, had volunteered to participate in the group process, many of them had no previous experience in trying to work through the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with people from the “other side.” These young adults were at the developmental stage in which they were still constucting their individual and collective identities (Litvak-Hirsch, in preparation). Perhaps for that reason, in comparison to the older members of the TRT, they were less able to reflect on the group process and its relation to the external conflict and to understand the processes that the other group was undergoing (Bar-On, 1999).
The Jewish-Palestinian workshop also posed different technical problems than those faced by the TRT group, and these technical considerations impacted the group process. The workshop took place in a different time span than that of the TRT encounters; the group work was adjusted to fit into one academic year, with no further obligation or commitment on the part of the participants to continue on with their joint work after the year ended. This seminar also included academic requirements; since the participants were graded for their work, the facilitators had to insure that the students demonstrated an understanding of the concepts they were taught in the formal learning sessions, that they knew how to write academic papers and that they were capable of  understanding and presenting theoretical material to their classmates. We translated the TRT process into this context by creating additional opportunities for the participants to analyze their interviews and stories and to have encounters with one another by giving them the task of having to learn “how to write a paper together about our interviews.”

Indicators of success and limitations 
The Jewish-Palestinian workshop that took place at Ben Gurion University enabled students to learn about their own family’s history and about the origins of their own identity construction. Most of the Jewish students emphasized that the group process was important in that in enabled them to learn about the Palestinian “other,” about whom they had been ignorant. Through this group process, the Jewish students began clarifying for themselves some of the aspects of their construction of identity that had previously been ambiguous (Helmes, 1990; Bar-On, 1999). Some of the Palestinian students described another process: by interviewing family members, they learned more about their own families and this knowledge strengthened their ties and identification with their collective. The storytelling approach used in the workshop made it possible for them to contain aspects of the Jewish stories, that up until the workshop, had been unknown to them or difficult for them to acknowledge.
Negotiation around what is a “good story to tell” became an important issue in this process, probably relevant also to other similar learning situations (Cohen, 1997). Only certain stories opened up an emotional and empathic dialogue. In the case of the Jews, these stories tended to present recognition of shortcomings or internal human dilemmas (for example, the issue of rootlessness). In the Palestinian case, these stories highlighted  experiences of  personal oppression (for example, the experiences of being a refugee since the 1948 war). 
One of the successes of the storytelling method was that it brought together aspects of the human relations and confrontational intervention methods; the storytelling approach created emotional ties among participants, as in the human relations model, and addressed issues connected to the external conflict and political asymmetry in the micro-group process, as in the confrontational model. Internal group differences, which surfaced in both the Jewish and the Palestinian groups, was also a positive outcome, one usually difficult to achieve in encounter groups. The uni-national meetings that we held in the Jewish-Palestinian workshop also contributed to this aspect. These meetings gave the Palestinian group opportunities to discuss internal differences and to decide whether or not to voice them in front of the Jewish group. Since the storytelling process allows for the development of deep emotional involvement and a level of mutual trust, using this approach probably made it more difficult for group members to only to talk about their collective group identities, thus making it possible for more complex internal group differences to surface. 
One limitation of the storytelling approach is that it is time and energy consuming. According to the Jewish and Palestinian participants’ summaries of the workshop, they mentioned also that a longer time span was needed in order to work through the issues and to bring about a long-lasting effect of the group process. Another limitation of the storytelling approach is that it is sensitive to severe external violent events.  When there are new outbreaks of violence, it becomes extremely difficult for group participants to try to work through the past and to develop trustful intergroup relations.

The Role of the Facilitators. 
The facilitators of the students' workshop used their TRT experiences to help them foresee and manage situations, especially during critical moments, such as in the Al Naqba crisis described above. We assume that facilitators without such experiences would be less prepared for such crises. The TRT experience helped us demonstrate to the participants how stories from both sides could be acknowledged, and in doing so, we helped create an atmosphere of trust and acceptance that made reflection on and acceptance of the stories possible. However, we also had to undergo some “unlearning”; we had to teach ourselves not to expect the students to follow in the footsteps of the TRT group. 
The TRT experience also helped the facilitators take into account emotional needs of their students in this delicate process of storytelling. For example, both facilitators felt a great responsibility to care for the participants of the other group. Therefore, at times, the Palestinian facilitator supported a Jewish participant who felt under attack, and the Israeli facilitator tried to legitimize the feelings that were behind radical anti-Jewish statements made by a Palestinian student, even when these postions were hard for certain Palestinian students to accept. 
A comparison of the learning process that took place in the original TRT group and in the Jewish-Palestinian students’ group shows that many of the issues were context-related and could not be transferred from one context to the other. However, issues such as rootlessness, the difficulty to confront the victimizer within oneself, the acceptance of kinds of suffering as different, and not something to be scaled, and the tension that exists between group processes and the external hostile reality, seemed to be universal. These issues surfaced through the telling of family stories in almost every conflict setting. However, the Jewish-Palestinian students’ group had its own characteristics: it needed time to warm-up, to delve into political discussions, to develop crisis situations and to find ways to work through these crises. It is important to remember that this workshop took place during a special time in Israeli-Palestinian history; it began during a time of extreme violence, in which it was difficult for the participants to put that aside and just talk about and listen to family stories. But the timing of this workshop also motivated the members of both groups to look for and find ways to work through the threatening external reality. The violent events taking place outside the seminar were also difficult for the facilitators to deal with. At times, they began their weekly pre-seminar planning by sharing feelings of anger and frustration about the daily violence. 

The meaning of working through for both inter-group processes
The Germans who chose to participate in the TRT group were a highly self-selected group (only 10% of the individuals that the first author originally interviewed in Germany joined the TRT group). In that sense, these individuals had already advanced to some degree in the working through process related to their parents’ Nazi past (Bar-On, 1990). However, there is a firm basis to claim that the TRT group process assisted them, and helped them support one another in their continued working through, a process which appears to be endless (as one of the German members of the group noted). Though some of this working through had already taken place in the German self help group, before the TRT group was established, the encounters with the Jewish members added new dimensions to the inter-group working through process, especially in terms of acknowledgement and legitimation of the other. The Jewish members of the group expressed their own gains from the group process. They developed the ability to move away from the dichotomous belief that "we are the victims and they the perpetrators." The group process helped them come to the understanding that the world is complex and that some of the descendants of the victimizers suffer from the atrocities their parents had committed (Adwan & Bar-On, 2001).
For the Jewish and Palestinian students, working through the past meant, first of all, to acknowledge and listen to stories of the other side and to develop an ability to tie them into their own narratives. The Jews learned not to focus solely on their own pain (for example, during Holocaust Memorial Day); they learned to address some of the pain that the Palestinian students expressed on Al Naqba Memorial Day. Confronting the mutual painful history also helped the students address the present conflict. The group developed its own "collective memory" out of the "good stories" that should be told and reflected on. This led to the development of a joint space through which the participants’ narratives could be accepted. This space also helped filter out some of the frustration and helplessness that accompanied the external violent outbreaks taking place.
In summary, we see the storytelling intervention for groups engaged in working through intractable conflicts as a transformative process that has the potential for leading to relationship-building between the groups. Since this method is relatively new, and we are just beginning to understand its advantages and limitations, it should be tested further in other groups and contexts than those described here. Clearly, our work constitutes first steps, because in order for reconciliation to take place on a wider level, more extensive micro-level acts of inter-group recognition will have to follow, such as the symbolic acts of taking responsibility and forgiveness (Bar-On, in press). In spite of the limitations of the micro-level approach, the wide applicability of the storytelling method is promising, if the original German-Jewish TRT, its inclusion of current conflict groups from South Africa, Northern Ireland and Palestinians and Israelis and the application to a Jewish - Palestinian students’ workshop are considered. 

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Fatma Kassem

2001		PHD Student in Sociology., Department of Behavioral Sciences, 
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 
1994-1997	Research assistant to Health Promotion Research for Bedouin Women & Children (EC funded study) (Principal investigators: Prof. Gillian Lewando Hundt, Dr. Susan Beckerieg & I. Belmaker, MD)

1998-2000	Facilitator in the Project “Two Conflicts, Four Countries”  The participant were history teachers from Turkey, Greek, Palestine and Israel. Supervised by Ben-Gurion university and Bet Lahem university. By the end of the Project was held all Participants teachers a seminar of four days (6th – 9th of July In Talita Kumi, Bit Gala: Two Conflicts-Four Partners.

Conferences & Seminars

1998- 2000	   To Reflect and Trust Seminars, Hamburg, Bethlehem, and New Jersey

2000	Cooperation and Public Policy in the Mediterranean Basis, Al Azhar University Gaza, Ben-Gurion University & University of Aix Marseiies. Education in Transition in Bedouin Communities and lessons for Tribal Communities in the Mediterranean: The Case of  Fducation of Bedouin Women in the Negev.  

2000	International Conference “Women, Equality & Democracy”, Gender Studies at Ben-Gurion University: “Women, Family and Society in national conflict” 

2001	Hamphry Institute, Behavior science Department, BGU: Arab Education Problems between fiscal allocation or pollicies of aims and content of the all governments of Israel.

Refereed Articles

Lesando Hundt, G., Beckerleg, S., Kassem, F., Abu Jafar, Belmaker, I., Abu Saad, K. & Shosham-Vardi, I. (2000). Women’s health custom made: Building on the 40 days postpartum for Arab women. Health Care for Women International, 21: 529-542.

Lewando-Hundt, G., Shoham-Vardi, I., Beckerleg, S., Belmaker, I., Kassem, F. & Abu Jaafar, A. (2001). Knowledge, action and resistance: the selective use of pre-natal screening among Bedouin women of the Negev, Israel. Social Science and Medicine, 52: 561-569.

Chapters in Books

Kassem, F. (2000). One Step to Making my Dream Come True. In Bar-On, D. (ed.) Bridging the Gap, Hamburg, Germany.

Dan Bar-On					
DAN BAR-ON was born in 1938 in Haifa to parents of German descent. He a member of Kibbutz Revivim for 25 years where he served as a farmer, educator and Secretary of the Kibbutz. After completing his M.A. in psychology in 1975, he worked in the Kibbutz Clinic, specializing in therapy and research with families of Holocaust survivors. In 1981 he received his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1985 he launched a pioneering field research in Germany, studying the psychological and moral after-effects of the Holocaust on the children of the perpetrators. His book Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich  was published in 1989 by Harvard University Press and has since been translated and published in French, German, Japanese and Hebrew. Since then, Bar-On has brought together descendants of survivors and perpetrators for five intensive encounters (the TRT group, shown by the BBC on TimeWatch, October, 1993), as well as students from the third generation of both sides. His book Fear and Hope: Three Generations of Holocaust Survivors' Families was published in Hebrew, English, German and Chinese .His last book The Indescribable and the Undiscussabe  was published in 1999 by Central European University Press. In 1998, Bar-On was the Ida E. King Chair for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton College of New Jersey from where he also received an Honorary Doctorate in 1999. He is permanently a Professor of Psychology at the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University, where he served as Chair of the Department between 1993-1995. In 1996 he was awarded the David Lopatie Chair for Post-Holocaust Psychological Studies and is currently the Director of a new Center for Dialogue Between Populations in Conflict and as such is the co-director of PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East) near Beit Jala, PNA, together with Professor Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University. Together they received in June 2001 the Alexander Langer Prize in Bolzano Italy for their efforts in Peace Building between Palestinians and Israelis.