The Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group is a non-violent conflict resolution group established in 1992 in San Mateo, California. Its first meeting was held in a local neighborhood residence. As of September 2019, the group remained active and continued to meet monthly in members' homes. The one-to-one, face-to-face method of conflict resolution, modeled by this dialogue group, was increasingly looked to globally by educators, researchers, journalists, activists, trainers, and strategists including the U.S. Department of State, which distributes the dialogue group's instructive films in Africa.
Members of the group have initiated and provided facilitation support at seminars, conferences and youth gatherings, created both printed and video facilitation guidelines, and responded to requests for media interviews. Interest in their work increased in national media during the 2000 Intifada. The group co-founders gave the 2017 Commencement Address at Notre Dame de Namur University,"STORIES OF CHANGE: Creating a Culture of Connection in The Citizens’ Century".
Beginnings
Initial incentive to form the dialogue group came from coexistence models of the 1980s in the Middle East and Africa. Examples are: Neve Shalom ~ Wahat as-Salam (Oasis of Peace), a village where Jewish and Palestinian Israeli families live and learn together, and Koinonia Southern Africa, founded by Reverend Nico Smith during apartheid years, which gathered thousands of Blacks and Whites together to share meals and stories, sometimes in public at risk to their lives. Both initiatives were honored together during the San Francisco 1989 Beyond War Award Ceremony. The word Koinonia means "belonging together" or "communion by intimate participation"
Several members of this dialogue group have deep roots in the principles and educational tradition of the Beyond War movement of the 1980s, which was succeeded by the Foundation for Global Community, the group's first fiscal sponsor. Fiscal oversight support was later provided by the Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center.
In 1991, several of the dialogue group founders, who had worked with the Beyond War Foundation and the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, brought together Palestinian and Israeli citizen leaders who forged and signed the "Framework for a Public Peace Process" .
The Living Room Dialogue model
Engaging in peacebuilding, the early Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women and men participants in the dialogue group were determined to export solutions, rather than import problems. They intended to create a people-intensive—not money-intensive—easily reproducible, in-home model to parallel and complement the government peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as in other regions of the world. By 1993, government negotiators were clarifying their own plea for mandatory citizen participation and the need for the creativity of People-to-People Programs, as found in Annex VI of the 1993 Oslo Accords.
As designed, the living room dialogue group format gives dynamic form to the emerging paradigm of people-centered human security that challenges traditional notions of government-centered national security and is focused on sustained state, regional, and global stability.
Means of change
Change is viewed by the dialogue group in binary terms—a "no" component and a "yes" component. While defining the "no" component—what is wrong, disintegrating, and in need of correction—the dialogue's larger intention is to embody and paint a picture of the "yes," The intent is to focus less on the old and the obsolete—what does not work—and more on modeling the new, the "yes" component that works for the good of all. The dialogue group's ongoing experience is that change begins in small circles of local innovators and Culture Creatives.