Israel and Palestine to be discussed

Israel and Palestine: A multi-perspective discussion format on how to deal with the Middle East conflict for dance mediation actors.

With Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voss. Using methods from the educational material Israel-Palestine educational videos (www.israelpalästinavideos.org).

A cooperation between Access Point Tanz, Offensive Tanz für junges Audience, Tanz Zeit e.V. The workshop was organised as a “Relaxte Event”.

Not only since 7 October 2023, many have felt a great need to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is also a particular challenge for actors within the dance mediation. In this practice-oriented workshop, the participants learned how to talk openly and respectfully to colleagues or students on this highly complex topic. Led by Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voß, the participants reflected on their own perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict and analyzed the field of discourse in Germany. The initial questions were: Against what social and historical background do we talk about Palestine and Israel, and what dynamics shape this discourse? Which symbols, terms and slogans frequently appear in this debate?

The aim of the workshop was to create a space for actors of dance education who jointly seek orientation in this discourse and want to develop a human rights-oriented attitude with which they feel pedagogically safe. The aim was also to provide greater certainty in dealing with complex and emotionally charged discussions and to convey practical approaches to promoting an open and respectful culture of conversation.

This documentation collects the contributions and perspectives of various actors who participated in the workshop in different roles/functions:

Agnieszka Habraschka, Access Consultant, describes the requirements implemented to design the workshop as a “Relaxed Event”.

Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voß, workshop leaders, answer some questions about the specific experience of this workshop and the knowledge it conveyed.

Martina Maria Helmke, Community Dance Practitioner, Educational Officer and participant of the workshop, as well as another participant who wants to remain anonymous, tell in a mini interview what the workshop has brought them and how they will possibly integrate this knowledge into their practice as mediators. 
 

1. Evaluation "Make Israel and Palestine negotiable" as a relaxed event by Agnieszka Habraschka

The event “Making Israel and Palestine negotiable” was implemented as a “Relaxed Event”. Relaxed events are based on the Relaxed Performance format and aim to provide accessibility for neurodivergent people, people with chronic diseases/pain and people with invisible disabilities. Relaxed events also offer access to politically and emotionally charged topics for all (even non-disabled) participants.

The event offered various seating options, which were used individually or changed/adapted during the current event. A retreat was available and was actively used. At the beginning of the event, trauma-sensitive physical exercises were presented, which could be repeated during the workshop at the request of the participants. Stimtoys and blankets were laid out in different places. Stimtoys are small, soothing objects such as stress balls, clay or pressure rings that help especially neurodivergent people to regulate their nervous system. In addition, the breaks were deliberately designed to provide sufficient recovery periods. Participants were advised that they can take breaks independently. Snacks and refreshments were provided. Clearly communicated content notes ensured that participants were prepared for potentially difficult content. This is especially important for emotionally charged topics, so as not to unintentionally overwhelm or re-traumatize anyone.

Physical interventions such as stimtoys and trauma-sensitive exercises (e.g. tapping or breathing techniques) can play a crucial role in promoting physical and emotional regulation in conflict-laden conversations, as well as regulating the nervous system. Not only can they help reduce individual tension, but they can also relax the collective atmosphere, opening the space for productive and respectful discussions. Trauma is stored in the body and yet there is often a negation of the body or feelings during conversations on politically grueling topics. Relaxed events and the introduction of trauma-sensitive exercises and stimtoys start right here and place the body not in an outside but in the center. The totality of these approaches creates the feeling that emotions and physical reactions are not disturbing or undesirable, but must be a natural part of difficult conversations.

Overall, it turned out that all elements of the relaxed event were positively received and used by the participants.

In the following, the above-mentioned approaches and methods, as well as their positive effects, are deepened:

Approaches and methods:

Stimtoys allow for calming, repetitive movements that stabilize the nervous system and provide a sense of security. They help to reduce stress without people having to ‘react’ verbally or visibly.

Tapping techniques and cross-arm exercises calm the vagus nerve and activate the parasympathetic state (‘rest mode’), allowing participants to remain present even when faced with difficult or stressful topics.

Breathing exercises act directly on the physiological stress response by slowing the heartbeat, improving oxygenation, and returning a sense of control.

● Joint exercises at the beginning of the event and on request in between promote solidarity and show that self-regulation does not have to take place in isolation, but can be embedded in a supportive social framework.

Positive effects:

● Interruption of escalations: When people have the opportunity to relieve stress through simple techniques, the likelihood of an emotional or aggressive escalation is reduced.

● Promoting mindfulness and strengthening empathy: The openness and sensitivity conveyed during relaxed events promote an attitude of mindfulness, care and mutual respect. This reduces pressure and helps to experience/shape the situations more respectfully and less conflictually. Physical calming exercises bring people back to the present moment, making it easier to focus on the subject rather than being overwhelmed by old injuries or fears. As emotional tension decreases, people are better able to listen and move into other perspectives.

● Reduction of stress and tension: The ability to move freely, take breaks or enter a retreat space also reduces stress and tension.

● Inclusiveness: Relaxed events are explicitly aimed at people with different needs, such as neurodivergent people or people with chronic diseases, as well as people with experience of trauma. This means that even those who would not normally participate due to the often intense dynamics of such discussions can be involved.

Many people deal with complex (political) issues in different ways – be it through movement, enquiries or periods of rest. Relaxed events provide the space for this diversity without evaluating it. As a result, a more constructive and diverse examination of difficult topics can take place.

Awareness of power dynamics: By focusing on accessibility, sensitive communication and flexibility, participants can develop attention and awareness about hierarchical structures that often occur in discussions about political topics.

2. Three questions to Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voß

The very first exercise of the workshop My Glasses - Your Glasses combines many central aspects of your work and plays a central, supporting role in the daily workshop. The exercise is also intended as a tool for participants to apply in their work contexts. How does the exercise work and what is particularly important to you?

With the exercise My Glasses - Your Glasses we very often open our workshops, as it allows the participants to get to know themselves and the others a little better and thus contributes to a benevolent and empathic atmosphere. During the exercise, the participants reflect on why they look like Israel and Palestine. They consider what personal events and experiences shaped and shaped their perspective and feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The exercise takes place in three phases:

[1] Self-reflection: At the beginning, the key question “What personal experiences and experiences have shaped my perspective on and feelings about the Palestine-Israel conflict?” is presented visibly to all. Participants are invited to paint symbolic glasses on a sheet of paper and answer the question for themselves.

[2] Small group work (groups of 3-4): In small groups, the participants talk about the creation of their own ‘glasses’ and get to know the perspectives and experience spaces of the others. The focus is on value-free listening. Together, we consider whether the group notices similarities and differences and what kind of experiences and experiences were particularly formative. It is important to emphasize here that each person only communicates what they want to communicate.

[3] In a third step, everyone comes together to the plenary and reports on the small group work. This is about evaluating and reflecting on the method. Key questions could be: How was it for you to think about the creation of your own glasses, to tell about it and to hear about the glasses of others? Were there similarities or differences?

The exercise is particularly suitable as an introduction to the workshop, as it offers the opportunity to reflect and share different perspectives, even those that may be very dissimilar to one's own. Central in this context is the realization that especially experiences and experiences that are associated with strong emotions can significantly shape and change one's own perspective. Reflecting on this creates a basis for mutual understanding among the participants. The exercise also helps to distinguish between positioning (active positioning, possibly reflection of one's own position in social conditions) and positioning (the assignment of a person to a certain position due to external characteristics).

Important to note when performing:

· Voluntary and sensitive handling of identities: Voluntary action must be explicitly emphasised. TN must not be pressured to share personal experiences or aspects of their identity.

· Calculate emotional reactions, as it is about personal experiences and experiences

· allow intervention only in case of discrimination, otherwise an open and value-free space. The workshop was aimed at dance mediators inside and dance educators inside, i.e. professionals who work and communicate with and through the body. In your experience so far, what role can the body play when we deal with the aim of making “Israel and Palestine negotiable” in the German discourse? Can you share your observations with us, also for a concrete example?

Talking about Palestine and Israel is not easy for many people for different reasons – we also feel this in our workshops. We meet people who are in unimaginable concern for their family members or friends, who are fighting for survival in the Gaza Strip, and people who have felt alienated from local society since October 7 because of their lack of empathy and solidarity, and because anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Semitism are becoming more and more normalized. But even people who are familially or collectively biographically involved in National Socialist crimes often have inhibitions when speaking. So there are an incredible number of emotions in the room – anger, fear, grief, shame, despair or insecurity. These emotions show up in our bodies, e.g. in which we freeze, the breath stops, we get a lump in the throat or suddenly become very hot.

In our educational work, we encourage the participants to perceive their feelings, to express them and to reflect them against the background of social dynamics, because often emotions are not as individual as we think, but socially shaped. We do this, for example, by working with photos of faces, creative methods or with small physical exercises – but unfortunately we are not trained bodyworkers in the team – here it would be nice to continue training and to let these impulses flow more into our work.

The fact that emotions (and bodies) are considered in political education is a rather new development. For a long time, emotions were perceived as disturbing and excluded. This also had to do with the widespread idea that body and mind, emotions and reason are separate spheres. Politics is in the sphere of

The Spirit is located. This location was also a sexist, racist and classicist tool to expel women, racialised people and workers from the political sphere by labelling them ‘too emotional’ and ‘not reasonable’. But there has been a rethink in recent years and it has come to the conclusion that emotions are very much political. They influence how we perceive the world, what values we represent and thus also what political beliefs we carry within us and what decisions we make. This ‘emotional turn’ has led to the search in civic education for ways to include emotions in learning or to make them explicitly the subject of civic education. What do you take from our joint experience in the workshop in the field of dance education? What role do the small somatic exercises that we introduced and that accompanied us through the day have for you?

We got to know the concept of the “Relaxed Event” from you, which was very inspiring for us. The concept is about making events as barrier-free and inclusive as possible so that, for example, neurodivergente people can participate without any problems. For this purpose, Agnieszka has offered various seating options, designed a room for retreat and agreed with us in advance that we plan many and long breaks. In addition, there were many small toys in the middle of the room that could be pressed, kneaded or jumped to reduce tension. At the beginning of the workshop, Agnieszka showed us three physical exercises that accompanied us through the day and were repeated whenever there was tension in the room, heaviness widened or we had to “breathe”. It would be very exciting for us to integrate more such elements into our educational work in the future and to plan and design our events even more “relaxed” overall.

3. Perspectives of two participants

What inspired you to participate in the workshop?

Martina Maria Helmke: For a long time, I have come to the point with friends, especially from creative and body work, of recognizing speechlessness in relation to Israel and Palestine as a verbal one and of activating the understanding of the need for other forms of expression and perception in order to …? Yeah, what exactly? In order to pursue a diffuse pressure of responsibility that I feel as a German dance and education facilitator. To perhaps also create less burned, hurtful, possibly more humane and emotional, less rational ways of encounter and confrontation. The spaces that we create in community dance or in the therapeutic context for dance work, among other things, due to a central message: There is no right and no wrong. This is a premise that is difficult to bear in the face of countless deaths and acute suffering. And I'm not sure if it's the right one right now. Does it have an activating or debilitating effect? What do I need to know, what perspectives do I need to be aware of in order to be able to contribute politically through, with, from my work and experience in the field of dance? And – who actually gives me this mandate?

The workshop appealed to me due to the specific target group of participants and the explicitly multi-perspective approach. When I read the offer, I was just grateful for this opportunity. Thankful for the concrete address of a politically-acute topic, which we may not yet be able to address in our body-focused, sensual contexts, but which in truth shakes us all to the core and literally screams for physical-emotional expression. The experience of this war already has an immense, destructive physical and mental level. How can we, as body and creative practitioners, meet them sooner or later?

Anonymous participant: I'm interested in the workshop because, on one hand, I have a personal connection to the conflict between Israel and Palestine and seek spaces where I can discuss it beyond my immediate personal context. On the other hand, I am particularly interested at the moment in exploring and learning mediation and conflict resolution strategies as well as non-violent forms of communication. (Original)

I took part in the workshop because, on the one hand, I have a personal connection to the conflict between Israel and Palestine and I am looking for spaces in which I can discuss beyond my immediate personal context. On the other hand, I am currently particularly interested in researching and learning mediation and conflict resolution strategies as well as nonviolent forms of communication. (Translated from English by the documentation team)

What moved you the most during the workshop and occupied you sustainably?

Martina Maria Helmke: On the one hand, the framework, the “relaxed workshop” format surprised and thrilled me, and some things have flowed directly back into my own practical work in Hamburg – thank you very much for that! I was also impressed by the understanding, the attention, the openness, the curiosity and the desire of all participants for confrontation and understanding.

My defining term for the experience of this workshop is probably “multi-perspective triangle constellations”. The idea of a triangle through which we leave the bipolarity of perspectives and create space for a third. Three perspectives that together form a center, create a space that I can look at. I find this idea everywhere – in my notes and in the meetings on the ground. The tripartite discussion about our (biographical) glasses on the topic of Israel-Palestine was eye-opening and world-opening for me. How diverse and complex and yet so obvious and understandable are the stories behind our attitudes and reactions! And how unifying it can be to simply be able to tell them and let them stand together as a simultaneity. Another triangle was that of the social perspectives in the German-language discourse on Israel-Palestine: post-national socialist, post-migrant and post-colonial. I also found this very conclusive and am grateful to the speakers for this analysis. Although I could clearly see the different hierarchization in the German political discourse, I did not feel pressured to give one or the other a greater or lesser weight. It was enough to see them at first. I have been invited and encouraged to take these different perspectives in a self-determined manner and to derive consequences and attitudes from them, both in connection with and independently of myself.

Anonymous participant: After the workshop, I had a critical reflection with the moderators, which I wasn’t able to share with the other participants, and I feel this might be an appropriate space to do so. I noticed that some participants (though not the moderators) drew on U.S. American discourses on race to discuss the Palestinian struggle, for example mentioning “Black Life Matters” and “White Supremacy”. While I understand the intention to draw parallels with discourses that play a big role in how we view and understand the world today in Europe, I believe that conversations around systemic racism are deeply tied to specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. Applying the U.S. framework to completely different situations can obscure the unique complexities at hand, making it even harder to meaningfully address and unpack the realities we are discussing. (Original)

After the workshop, I had a critical reflection with the moderators, which I could not share with the other participants, and I think this could be a suitable place for it. I noticed that some participants (but not the moderators) used US discourses on ethnicity to discuss the Palestinian struggle, for example by mentioning ‘Black Life Matters’ and ‘White Supremacy’. While I understand the intention to draw parallels to discourses that play a major role in how we see and understand the world today in Europe, I believe that conversations about systemic racism are deeply connected to specific historical, cultural and political contexts. Applying the U.S. framework to completely different situations can obscure the unique complex interrelationships, making it even more difficult to meaningfully decipher the realities we are discussing. (Translated from English by the documentation team)

Have you thought about how you can apply the experience and knowledge of the workshop in your mediation work and dance practice?

Martina Maria Helmke: Yes :-) I would find it exciting to physically bring this idea of a multi-perspective triangle into space, to find out what connects the poles as lines and to emotionally charge an interior on which I can look from all three points. Which experiences and biographies, which images and stories, which current and old traumas manifest themselves in the respective poles? How do I connect, what does that require of me, how narrow or wide is the path, is the tape? And to what extent can the interior, as a space for emotional expression, become a place of encounter. How does looking at anger affect me from one perspective or another? How sad and despair? And how important is it to know which pole this feeling has just sprung from? Can I recognize myself? These are the first ideas for an experiment, but for which I am currently lacking the capacities. For the moment, I would like to continue to work on the topics of contradiction and empathy as well as fault-friendliness and courage as part of dance experience. This includes healing through encounter and embodiment. After the workshop it became clear to me again that I really know little about what the participants of my courses think and feel about politically upsetting topics. So far, I have not dared to “open barrels” myself for fear of not being able to hold the frame – perhaps that would be the next step. The workshop helped me at least for the first time to have more courage, clarity and honesty in myself and I think that should be the basis of the work in this field anyway.

Anonymous participant: One of the most significant frameworks introduced by the workshop leaders was: “You can say the wrong thing.” Within a workshop, I found this to be a critical tool for fostering a space where different opinions can coexist, and where participants can trust that any difficult or uncomfortable moments will be addressed in a constructive, non-violent way.

Another key takeaway for me was the first exercise we did in small groups. This exercise provided a structure for self-reflection and encouraged us to examine our own personal histories and how they shaped our current opinions and beliefs. It also created an opportunity to listen to others’ perspectives without judgment. (Original)

One of the most important framework terms introduced by the workshop leaders was: “You can say the wrong thing.” I found that this is an important tool in a workshop to create a space where different opinions can coexist and where participants can trust that difficult or unpleasant moments are addressed in a constructive, non-violent way.

Another important finding for me was the first exercise we did in small groups: “My glasses/your glasses”. This exercise provided a structure for self-reflection and encouraged us to examine our own personal history and find out how it shaped our current opinions and beliefs. It also provided an opportunity to listen to others' perspectives without evaluating them. (Translated from English by the documentation team)

biographies

Agnieszka Habraschka is a consultant, dramaturge and production manager with a focus on barrier-free and anti-ableistic cultural work/performance art, aesthetics of access and intersectional anti-discrimination. Until March 2024, Agnieszka worked as production manager for the network project Making a Difference. Agnieszka is neurodivergent, has invisible disabilities and has experiences of migration and poverty.

Ahmad Dakhnous is a speaker on political education with a focus on criticism of racism and anti-Semitism, flight and migration, arrival processes and Israel/Palestine. He studied education, economics and political science with a special focus on the Middle East conflict. Raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, he has been living in Germany since 2016.

Johanna Voß has been active for many years as an education officer in political education with a focus on criticism of anti-Semitism, racism and discrimination. She studied Public History, European Studies and the Honors Program for Peace and Conflict Studies in Haifa, Israel.

Martina Maria Helmke has been working for several years in Hamburg in the areas of education and project management as well as as a community dance practitioner (AdkB Remscheid) and including dance facilitator (Lola-Rogge-Schule, DanceAbility®). She is particularly interested in the connection between collectivity, empathy and dance. Since June 2024, she has been training as a dance and movement therapist.