The Cherry Orchard

Last night I met six friends for dinner and debate in the West Village. We had all agreed beforehand to spend an entire dinner discussing future Middle East policy in a structured format. This group was largely made up of software developers, and had an interesting makeup:

• three Christians and four Jews

• two born in Lebanon, one born in Israel, four born in U.S.A.

• five men, two women

This was the second time we arranged a dinner debate, a practice occasioned by the fact that our friend Fadi tends to express himself a bit loudly when possessed of an opinion (and, to tell the truth, some have said the same about me, and I have an opinion or two myself).

Previous social get-togethers had devolved into anarchic yellfests, so this time we agreed to take turns speaking, 90 seconds at a time, with interruptions forbidden. 15 second rebuttals were also available, but everybody had to wait their turn to speak, and each person was assured equal time. We appointed Yaniv as moderator and Dave as time-keeper, and managed to make this format work for an hour and a half.

We learned something amazing during this conversation: when you take the time to structure a discussion and direct it towards a single topic, highly intelligent ideas and solutions can emerge. We listened hard to each other, we tried to understand each other’s viewpoints, and by the end of the dinner we were doing nothing but laughing, high-fiving and tossing around side arguments such as which web development platform is better, PHP/Javascript or Java/Struts (the answer, of course, is PHP/Javascript) just for fun.

If you tend to have loud political arguments that lead nowhere with your family or friends, I suggest you try a structured approach. Why are unstructured arguments always so bad? Well, people like to talk more than they like to listen. Do the math — if you put five or more people who want to talk together, you get a mash of half-finished thoughts, and it doesn’t matter what you say anyway, since everybody is too busy thinking about what they want to say to listen to what you’re saying.

A structured argument can have very unexpected positive results. Now that I see that Evan, Fadi, Sabine, Dave, Amy, Yaniv, Carl and I can survive an hour and a half of this and end up smiling, I wonder how many other problems can also be solved in this way.

It’s Monday morning, and a fragile cease-fire is in place between Israel and Hizbollah. Few expert commentators expect the cease-fire to last, but maybe it will last long enough for the dialogue between the warring sides to improve. As I’ve noted here before, there currently exists no significant dialogue at all between the various sides in this battle, and linguistic barriers are the least of the problems. Each side clings to different histories, different basic premises, which makes rational discussion impossible.

For perhaps only a few days — maybe more, maybe less, who knows? — the rockets and jet fighters are silenced. Please, let a war of words begin, because that is our best chance for an end to this misery.

Some news items:

1. The son of Israeli novelist David Grossman was killed Saturday on the ground in Lebanon, where he was fighting with a tank unit. David Grossman has represented Israel’s troubled but stubborn anti-war movement with books like The Yellow Wind. Earlier this year, Grossman participated in the PEN World Voices festival in New York City, where he attempted to participate in a one-on-one conersation with Palestinian/Lebanese author Elias Khoury that was sadly cancelled due to political considerations.

2. The great research journalist Seymour Hersh, who’s been raking muck since the Vietnam War, has written a New Yorker article exposing the American-Israeli agreements that led to Israel’s aggressive response to Hizbollah’s incursions.

3. Peace — hah! The regular retinue of war, deprivation, provocation and ridiculous propaganda continues unabated today in Gaza, Iraq, Sri Lanka, The Congo and Sudan. Some world we live in!

Please, let the war of words begin …