Episode 9: حلقة خاصة: الفلسفة في السياق الفلسطيني (باللغة الإنجليزية)

In this cross-posted episode of Jerusalem Talks and The Scout, we are joined by hosts Avraham Burg, Sari Nusseibeh, and Daniel Schwake as they delve into Sari’s new book, The Scout, or Philosophy and Us. The book is one of the first ever philosophy books written in Palestinian Arabic and explores the application of the philosophical method, particularly in the context of Palestinians. Recorded in front of a live audience during a workshop on the language of conflict, the group’s conversation asks not only how the book came to be but also why Daniel and Sari felt it was so important to convert it into an Arabic-language podcast series. Along the way, hear from Sari as he discusses his own philosophical journey and the benefits philosophy provides to each of us and, specifically, to the Palestinian community.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

In this cross-posted episode of Jerusalem Talks and the Scout, we are joined by hosts Avram Borgh, Sari Nuseba, and Daniel Schwake as they delve into Sari's new book titled The Scout, or Philosophy and Us. The book is one of the first ever philosophy books written in Palestinian Arabic and explores the application of the philosophical method, particularly in the context of Palestinian society. Recorded in front of a live audience during a workshop on the language of conflict, the conversation addresses both how the book came to be but also why Daniel and Sari felt it was so important to convert it into an Arabic language podcast series. Along the way, Sari details his own philosophical journey and the benefits philosophy provides to each of us, and specifically to the Palestinian community.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

This is about a very special project that it has two layers to the project. First is the writing itself, a new book uh by Sari. And the second is a podcast that not just follow the footsteps of the book, but tries even to can I say translate it somehow? Translate it. Translate it from Arabic to Arabic. And question it. Question you, not question it. We'll go with it one by one. In the sense that Sarre wrote a book which is called The Scout.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:31

Who is the Scout? We shall try to find out. Is it the one who stands at the top of the mountain and observes and looks at the horizon and try to discover new roads and paths? Is it the Boy Scout who still believes in the youth movement activities? Or is it the Bedouin who is following the footsteps of the camel to see where the camel got lost in the desert? So who is the scout, Seri? All three. And you are chasing a camel?

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Yes, chasing the camel, looking at things from a distance, sometimes looking at things from a neutral point of view, sometimes being down there in the middle of a thicket and also trying to find answers, but asking questions all the time. By the way, I first wrote it under the title What Need Do We Have for Philosophy? And I addressed myself specifically to the Palestinian community. That was the idea. So it was in Arabic. It was the third book only that I'd written in Arabic. It was specifically addressed to the Arabic community in Palestine.

SPEAKER_03 2:39

So it's actually both asking the general question, what philosophy for? And particularly in the Palestinian context. Absolutely. Primarily, yeah. And did you find an answer for this question?

SPEAKER_02 2:53

No, I'm asking people to think about an answer in writing a book. I'm encouraging them to ask themselves questions and question their own answers if they have any.

SPEAKER_03 3:06

Daniel. Yeah. Okay. You are the one who read the book and said, I'm being asked. But then, in a way, I have a feeling you find the question that's not necessarily expected you to ask. And this is, is the language of the book is the right language? Right? You ask yourself the question and you gave a different answer than the book itself.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

I think it was um almost two years ago. Sari gave me a uh draft of his book in Arabic called Nahna al-Falsafi. So Us and Philosophy or Philosophy on Us. And I read it. You know, felt very privileged to have this honor to read the draft of Sarin Sebi, you know, the person you've read books of in the past. And the first thing that I thought is so who's gonna read this book? You know, it is uh an Arabic Fustha, MSA.

SPEAKER_03 4:05

Fustha, for the sake of our audiences, this is the the Arabic, the literature Arabic, the literate Arabic.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Literature Arabic, yeah. It's the Arabic that you also find in like uh the newspapers, the one you write and not the one you speak, unless you are a news moderator in El Jazeera or something. Otherwise, everybody speaks Ami, obviously. So when I read the book, Sarah and I started to talk about the option, the opportunity of how to, you know, if he's interested in engaging with the Palestinian audience, how about trying to share it in a different medium and maybe even in a different language, i.e., in uh Ami, in the language that people actually speak. So that was the idea. And I have to say that there's a previous book that Sari wrote Tabor. Mount Tabor. And it ends in a dialogue, it's also in Arabic, it ends in a dialogue between these two people, and it is an ami. And back then I told Sari, well, actually, you know, the way that book ended, that's when it becomes really easy to read because it's an ami. So, how about doing it with this other book? Uh so we did it. We translated a philosophy book into ami. Now, the problem with Ami is it's very hard to read because people, when they read it, they are automatically thinking in fusha. So that's why the medium of audio was actually the the one we also thought would work best. So we uh we recorded sections of the book, but then we also took it to the next level, which was okay, that was also the condition you put. You said, Oh, we can do it, but then we will have uh uh a conversation about these sections in the book.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

If you like to call it a condition, I'm fine with that. I don't remember putting conditions.

SPEAKER_03 5:53

Sorry, what is lost between the two languages? You write philosophically, which is a high echelon profession, high echelon expression, and then you go down to earth to the people you really want it to impact. Is something lost between the two lingual levels? First of all, I think let me say this.

SPEAKER_02 6:12

I think uneducated or illiterate people would probably in my community would probably anyway not read it either in Kosha or in Amiya. Wouldn't. Most likely they will try to listen in to the podcast and perhaps hopefully they will get something out of it. But is there something lost? I think it depends. I don't think it necessarily gets lost. Especially when you have a good interlocutor. I think the points that are raised in the official text get to be uh transmitted into the Ami spoken. So I think, you know, looking back on what happened, quite uh usefully, quite positively. So not much is lost, not maybe anything is lost. The only thing that's lost perhaps is that people who will listen to it or look at it, look at Amiya, will think to themselves, well, that's not respectable Arabic.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

We all know that there are certain languages or certain music that is sung in a specific language, it it really grabs us by the heart and then we really listen to it. And my hypothesis has always been that Arabic speakers like fusha, they listen to it, but what really grabs them by the heart is the mother tongue. That's their ami. And that's why also political leaders choose to speak ami when they give long speeches. That's why priests speak an ami when they do the homilies. They start with fusha, but then they flow usually into ami. Because they also want people to listen to them.

SPEAKER_02 7:53

May I just also add, my experience in teaching has been, and not only mine probably, other others back home, it has been to look at texts in the fusha, but then to discuss it in the ammiyya. But that's what normally happens. You sort of read a text, but then you discuss it in the Amiye. You go down to Earth. You come down to you sort of bring people closer to one another.

SPEAKER_03 8:18

Let's jump into it. Okay. You try to offer an approach to daily life through philosophy. Is there any society around the world, forget about a Palestinian one, who lives according to your vision or to your this approach? Do you know any society who lives a philosophical life nowadays?

SPEAKER_02 8:37

What do you mean by philosophical life? I don't know. What do you mean? You wrote the book. Yeah, sorry, but you asked the question. You know, there is an ambiguity in the expression the philosophical life. I will not go into it. It will take us very far from our purpose here. But let me tell you what happened with me. Maybe that will explain things. So I came back home in 1978-9, started teaching at Bearsate University, and I immediately found myself in an environment, intellectual, lingual, social, what have you, in which I felt there's a lot of misunderstanding, uh lack of certainties, lack of definitions, uh specifics that sort of basically uh controlled how people spoke with one another, what people thought, how they exchanged ideas. And I thought to myself, maybe one of the problems is that uh people are not thinking enough about what they're saying. For instance, that a particular noun, uh a sort of general term, is not really they use it, but it's not really clear in their heads necessarily, or it's not exactly like other people use it. The other thing I also felt was a lack of connections made in the methodology of putting these thoughts together. So the first thing that struck me that was needed among the student community and in the wider community was that one needs to encourage people to give more thought to thinking. Ask themselves questions, ask others questions, try to be sure that what they agree upon or they disagree about are things that are clear in their heads. And so that was the first time I actually tried my hand at uh writing something which I which was actually informal logic, which I discovered many, many years later wasn't really what was needed. And why at the end of my teaching career I decided what was needed really was something totally different and to try and get people themselves to discuss things amongst themselves, to try amongst themselves to see if they're thinking clearly, if it is clear to them what they want, what they're agreeing upon, what they're disagreeing upon. And just to connect it with the modern situation, in the past two years, I think most people in in the West Bank, Gaza, at least in the West Bank where I live, have actually been scattered in their thinking. And I felt that the need is even more important for people to come to terms with clarifying their thoughts to themselves to see exactly what they're agreeing about and what they're disagreeing about. And as you know, our community is divided. Today, you know, Hamas, Fateh, this, that, and the other, and people are either sort of attacking this side or being attacked by that side. You know, what we really need in our community is to get together. Getting together means people to start thinking, talking to one another, explaining to each other what they what it is they want. And that's what encouraged me to write this particular book in the form of examples. So I pick up examples like school scenes or talks between uh scientists or uh a discussion about AI or uh a scene from the from the primary school or secondary school where people start shouting at each other, disagreeing with one another. And I try to show this as part of a larger situation we're living under that actually requires all of us, right from the beginning, to do the things that we were talking about here. To listen, to learn how to listen, to learn to appreciate what the other person is saying, to learn to actually, as I said earlier, question oneself about the views that one holds, and trying to be as clear as possible in explaining them to others.

SPEAKER_03 12:47

Daniel, the offering that Sari is doing in the book and doing in his teaching is to try somehow to live simultaneously yourself and the world, not to ignore what happens to the world and at the same time being sensitive to yourself, and vice versa, which is living within and containing it. Now, when you look at East Jerusalem and West Bank, the Sari said is the launching pad of the thoughts and the events and the anecdotes that he describes in the book. When you listen to the world around you, it's a world of roadblocks, insult, humiliation, pain. I wonder, is it possible, either through the book or through reading the book, okay, to take this kind of awareness to the one and to the one's world and make it a source of a movement onwards? Because what Sari had in mind, I take it in writing the book, is to help the society to move out of the limbo, out of the catches that traps it. Is it possible to do it according to your experience?

SPEAKER_01 13:57

So I I think I'll try to answer it through the analogy that Sari uses in the book and that we talked uh quite about in the in the podcast, which is the analogy of the escape room. Sari speaks about the situation of the Palestinians uh being uh trapped in an escape room and it is about exiting the escape room. You know, what what is the best way to do it in a way that you have, you know, the time is ticking and and there's this pressure, and but what is it that you need in order to to get out of it? And I think that if there is anything in the book that convinced me that there is an a value add in this is this approach that Sari calls in Arabic uh Hasn't Hulk, in English good character, right? So the the the need of having a good character or or this this um respectful behavior or I I don't have a better translation to it. It's basically being good human beings to one another. Because if you are trapped in that room and you want to convince the others, it's not about beating them so that because everybody the clock is ticking and you want to convince the others to split the work so that you you have to, you know, if you you know an escape room, you have to split the work. There are too many uh enigmas. Uh somebody has to kind of think about this uh quiz, somebody else has to think about the quiz from a different angle. And the way to convince each other is actually by being also nice to each other, kind of thinking about the need of the collective, and also realizing that it's you're not going to be able to force yourself on the others, but also to listen to their perspective. And it's obviously like there's a trap in it. You have to have everybody think in that way. That is obviously the challenge. But yeah, I think that that's the most important value add that I see from that, that if people will understand that it's about this dialogue where you come in um wanting to learn and wanting to listen, obviously with your own views and perspectives. But if you come like that, seemingly unarmed, then you're also more able to convince the other of your own position, and if it holds the arguments of the other. And the best personification of this is actually, I think, the discussion that Sari and I have about the sections, where I honestly come in asking Sari a lot of questions, thinking, you know, I prepared myself very well. I'm gonna put some challenges here and there for him. But he comes in, you know, super calm and never takes on the challenge. And uh I avoided challenges. And is there a saber you're talking about and is able to disarm disarm anything? Something in a minute. And and is able to disarm uh the challenges. And I have to uh uh really say that they're really um uh thought-provoking and convincing arguments that come back. Give one very clear example, right? The first thing that I thought as somebody who thinks he's a universal person was how come somebody like Seri, who is cosmopolitan, cares about the exit room and sees himself in the exit room with other Palestinians? How come he's not in the exit room with all these other universals, uh cosmopolitans uh who want to solve the problem? And the way that Seri answers that is so just so grounded and so so honest that at the end of the day, this is my reality. This is the people that I live with, and I want to uh solve that problem with them, and I'm here on the ground and so on. So it's that discussion I think that convinces.

SPEAKER_03 17:37

Sorry, I want to take it from here. You write in the book where you make the distinction that Danny alluded to between winning against somebody, defeating, or I don't know how to call it, and winning over, which is persuasion, much more the side of persuasion, right? You make this distinction. If I can use other terms, you made a distinction between winner takes all or zero-sum game to win-win. Let's depart for a second from the Palestinian scenery and ask ourselves in a world in which every argument in the social media is a world war and everything is absolute, total, complete, this way, that way. Is it possible at all at our era to persuade the public that there is any value to win the heart of the other?

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Let me once again go into personal experiences. Many, many, many, many, many years ago, I used to favor what I call combative arguments with people. And I would go for basically, if I could bash somebody else's argument, I would, you know, go straight for it. And I thought, you know, doing this and being like that was exactly what being clever is. And, you know, there were scenes, for instance, in Hyde Park Corner, where pro-Jews and pro-Palestinians would fight with one another and you know, all of that. Which is to some extent what I also see happening today in the media and international media. And then one day, early 90s, we in the occupied territories wanted to uh develop for ourselves a governing system for a future state. So I was charged with putting together some what we call technical committees at the time. There were about 30 or 40 of them. 400, 500 people or technocrats were involved. But I wanted to learn what governing is. So I wrote out to institutes that actually provide people with training. And uh one such institute sent Harvard, actually, sent uh a group of people. We were gathered in one of the hotels in East Jerusalem called the Watani. And we only were the uh coordinators of the of the whole uh troop or group, and we were looking forward to sort of understanding how you do governance. And then these people said, okay, what we'll start with is the following. We are going to pair you together. Pick a choice, I think, and we will photo you and see you how you do, how you do things. And I was paired with a woman, a person I respect, who was in favor at the time the conversation was do we want in the future government a women's ministry? So I took the position, no. And Zahira, Zahira Kamal, who was the woman, of course, wanted a ministry and said, No, we want a ministry. I I wasn't against it, but you know, I took the position, no, we don't want it. And we started arguing. Then we went through this training program for a week or two weeks, in which most of what we did was to discuss things with each other. And at the end of the week, they came and paired us again, the same, the same pairs, and they videoed us doing the same, you know, over the same subject. And that was the last day. And I took the film, all of us did, to go home. I went home, my wife and the kids were sitting around the table in the kitchen, beginning to eat. I put it the what's it in in the machine to listen to the last conversation. And, you know, the kids were asking me, calling out, you know, Daddy, come on, we want to eat, you know, it's dinner time. No, no, I'm listening to this, very important. And they tell me, who are you listening to? And I was shocked to realize they didn't realize it was me speaking. Now, what was the difference? The difference was that in the first argument I had with Zahira, I used a combative approach. But in the final discussion with her, I used a totally different approach. I tried not to antagonize her. I tried not to show her that I'm clever. For instance, even though I may not have been, I tried to give her all the space she needed to say everything that she wants. But all the time I was hoping to get her to come to my point of view. Whether I did or not is is another thing. And then it sort of, you know, I I discovered, if you like, that uh there's a difference between scoring points, which is what you do in Hyde Park, or what you do. I mean, I did fencing, I did sabering when I was young, which is all sort of scoring points, that's the main point. You score fantastic. And later sort of discussion with uh students, for instance, to try and get them to take up ideas that I have in my mind. That's the difference, maybe that I discovered in the end between sort of going into an argument in order to score points against the other, or going into an argument in order, in fact, to get them to see your point of view. And in order for you to be able to do that, you have, as you were saying today earlier, in fact, in this discussion in this room, that you have to go into the other person, find out exactly what it is they have on their minds, what concerns them, what is the problem. And you have to find ways as you do this. You have to find ways, you have to find terms, right attitudes, in order to slowly go in, win them over, make them feel that you're not their enemy, although you may disagree with them, but you're not their enemy, and slowly that way to try and bring them over to your point of view. And that's, I think, a winning argument. And it can be uh, as you say, uh a game in which both sides don't lose.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

One of the most the the only prime minister ever appreciated in the history of Israel was Levi Eshkol. He was a smart cookie, and he used to say, according to your philosophy, I compromise and compromise and compromise till they accept my position. Okay, so I understand this approach, but I put it, I like to push a little bit. You in the book, you ask for, I don't know what is the exact term, but I will say thinking flexibility or being flexible in order to absorb opposition till you make your point. Is it possible for a society or both societies that are living in a permanent conflict that perceive flexibility as a weakness? As if, ah, you compromise with them, you are defeated, you give up, you are softy, you're no good, sometimes even as a treism to the to the hard line of the camps.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

So there is first the character, of course, and the behavior and the words that you use, but there's the flexibility, and this is something to do really with something I started out talking about, which is the meaning of terms. And what we are talking here about is that the way of having an open mind is a way of actually increasing your knowledge of what it is that you're talking about. To go back to Zionism, for instance. What exactly are you talking about? What do you mean? Is it this? Is it this? This is what I mean by flexibility in that sense. You are actually expanding everything that is possible that you can know about this thing that is Zionism. And flexibility is simply to try and find ways, if you like, outside the box that can actually solve a question or a problem that you cannot by using your given parameters to solve it if those are in the box. I mean, that's that's all it means. Does it mean compromise? In one place in the uh book, I ask the students in uh in a context of a classroom to think about whether, for instance, Zionism is something that's inherently one thing or the other. Is it something that's inherited? You take it and that's what it is, therefore it is bound to go south, or is it something that Israelis have power over, for instance, can go it uh or channel it in a different way. I ask my students this, or I ask people this, because I want them to think about Zionism, you know, not only what Israelis think, but what they think, and to see if what they think about Zionism is the same as what they think about other anyway. This is what I think. Daniel, I understand the abstract.

SPEAKER_03 26:38

Okay, I understand the philosophy, I see how it works on theory, but real life, a real youngster who goes out of the class and comes to you and tells you in a spoken language, do you really want me to compromise my my values, my nation, my community, in order to understand Seri's philosophies or whatever, to persuade the Israelis via softness, via flexibility? Is it really possible, this theory?

SPEAKER_01 27:06

I'm not sure that I am able to answer that practical, so I will apologize in advance. But I I think that this is, you know, from my perspective, I will say one of the core issues that we have is this humanization point. And people don't listen to the other and don't want to listen to the other because they have a perceived dehumanized image of the other. And when we call upon people to encounter the other, we are basically calling them upon them to humanize them too. Does that mean that they become weak because they humanize them? I don't know. I actually don't think so. But at the core of this interaction of trying to listen to the other and learning about the other or meeting the other, at the core of it is this notion of understanding that that other is also human. And by that, I think you solve a lot of problems that we have, of kind of, you know, this essentialist view of the other, that they're completely evil, that they will always want to kill us all, and all of these things, I think, dismantle once you humanize them and understand that they too are motivated by very similar fears and uh emotions like you are. Yes, they might kill you, but they also might not. And they might forget and they might forgive and they might uh just move on to other topics. So, in terms of trying with this approach to solve concrete problems, I think that you definitely can. Uh definitely can, but it is you need the shared space to do it. And we don't have that shared space to do it. We don't have a place where people actually encounter one another and where you're able to um to really humanize the other by just seeing them as a human being.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

I just want to add to uh what Daniel said the following, that uh I mean, we must remember that this is a book that I'm writing in Arabic, and I'm addressing not the Israelis, I'm addressing us, and I'm trying to get us amongst ourselves to treat each other in a way that may be uh more beneficial collectively to us. So for instance The inner conversation. Yes, I mean the entire thing is focused on the inner conversation. I I brought up the idea, the question of Zionism as a term, but in a little paragraph at the end of a chapter in which, you know, we're discussing other things. The discussion is between Palestinians, and what I'm pushing for in this book is to try and get them to have more and more discussions, public discussions, close discussions if they need. This is the whole point of questioning yourself, questioning the other. But you have to do it in a way that keeps you together. I can question your attitude or your, but if I do it in a in an aggressive way, I lose you. So I need, you know, and we have people in the same family sometimes, uh, one member being Hamas and the other popular front, and the third, I don't know what. Uh so you need the family to stay together. But you need them, therefore, to question what it is that they want, who they are, and very importantly, so why are we doing or what can we do, as as Daniel was saying earlier, in order together to move ourselves forward or get ourselves out of the. So I call for public discussions in the end. You know, as many discussions as possible. Open, not not by uh held by certain organizations, but by the people themselves. In universities, in villages, in towns, you know, sit together, let's discuss what it is that we want. Let's be clear about it to ourselves first.

SPEAKER_03 31:00

A question for both of you. You offer a kind of a Karl Popper openness, maybe not an open society, but openness within the society for this kind of conversation. Fine.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Which will have its effect on who we then move towards the Israelis, yes.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Fine. But shouldn't there be a prerequisite or precondition of some basic confidence in the being before I'm open up like that? And if I'm fighting for my survival, be the individual survival, the family survival, or the collective survival, I don't have the luxury for this kind of openness.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

Maybe I don't have any options. Maybe I'm actually overconfident. Anyway, maybe what I want is to actually question this overconfidence.

SPEAKER_03 31:48

Danny, are you overconfident?

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Uh definitely not.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

Would you like to talk about it?

SPEAKER_01 31:56

I think that's maybe where Sadie and I differ a little bit, and that I see the commonalities, the strength of groups like this, where it is not an ethnic-based group uh that comes with the same problem, but people that are mixed from different um ethnicities that end up being in the same uh escape room, so to say, and that potentially from groups like this, maybe more wisdom will come out than trying to, you know, make uh the same discussions within the same ethnic groups. Just because people share language and same uh share religion doesn't necessarily always mean that they share uh values and uh perspectives on the world. That's uh how I agree with you. Um I agree with you. So I I think that um at the same time I was convinced by what I, as I said uh earlier, that for many people there there isn't that privilege. You know, if you're a Palestinian from Bethlehem, you don't get to meet any Israelis. So it's really about how you're gonna be solving your problem and and how you have to engage. And those who you engage with are are obviously only other Palestinians. So coming back, I I I think that that's where kind of groups like this have have a very important, significant role, and that you kind of break the dynamic of these eco chambers that are all over the place, of only people who basically are within the same like me people. Like me people who are just basically saying the same thing, and we all disagree, and then we leave the room, you know, patting ourselves, saying, you know, we did a great job and comfort zones and all of that. So um, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:34

If we take this approach as a paradigm, educational, political, public, okay, it's changing, let's say, the landscape of public discourse, right? So somehow you have to educate people towards it. So let's assume that we have one Palestinian education system with one education ministry, with one pedagogical approach. What should be the component of this paradigm to be introduced that you want every Palestinian student to acquire in school in order to be able to communicate internally the way you are teaching?

SPEAKER_02 34:14

You know, the book in the introduction says it is addressing itself to educators, but also to parents of children, of kids, and more widely to the interested or the whatever public. And the whole idea is to try and uh introduce the need to see the value of, in fact, what one can call not vertical, but uh horizontal? Yes, horizontal education. So you separate between the kind of education you get vertically from the teacher and the kind of education you get horizontally by cooperating and opening up to your own group of students, other students, your peers. And the idea is to encourage right from the beginning people to think that it is better, in fact, to encourage interaction between the students in the process of learning anything, and to escape, therefore, from the idea of just pushing down the knowledge that sometimes is pushed down on us. And I believe that this is very important right from the beginning. I mean, I'm not a philosophy of education, but I've read enough to realize that it's necessary right from the beginning to encourage cooperation, to encourage people to listen to one another, to behave well with one another in order to come up with a better judgment of uh what it is people claim collectively or individually to know. That is what I would actually push for. And I think you know, discussions in classrooms are just you know the best way to actually forward, to go forward in determining what it is one thinks one knows.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

Yeah, I think that education is obviously uh the the best, the only or the main way to um to influence society in an institutional way in the long term. And you know, kind of in this forum, we can also link it, I think, to uh the Christian schools, for example, uh both in Israel and Palestine, that are very numerous and have a very huge impact, especially on the Arab-speaking uh communities, both in Israel and West Bank, in Gaza less, but maybe there were a couple couple of schools there as well. And you can see that these institutions are basically the only or one of the main ways, the sustainable institutional ways to influence society. So definitely very, very critical. And I think that's where we can speak as a university, you know, the the the opportunity that you have is also comes with a lot of responsibility of what is it that you actually want to influence and what are the values you want to instill in your students. And at Notre Dame, we obviously are never or try not to basically be shy of the fact that we're a Catholic university and there's formation and there is kind of a clear North Star in terms of values and and uh virtues that we want the students to take away when they when they come out of it, the class. When it comes to our local context, the way we try to do it is is very, very challenging. Um we have students come to Jerusalem, they all come thinking they know exactly what what the solution is. They actually want to tell us how to solve the problems.

SPEAKER_03 37:37

Isn't it a Palestinian conflict, you mean?

SPEAKER_01 37:39

At least. At least, to begin with. Yeah. Okay. And you know, our main, you know, we we jokingly say that our objective is that when they leave Jerusalem, they actually have some doubts. Not some doubts, like they actually think they they're not gonna be able to solve the problem. Because it is the this overconfidence that they come in with is also based on superficial knowledge and and lack of understanding and a lot of hubris uh that they might have inherited from others about kind of this situation we live in. So it is in it's also kind of inviting them to doubt and to listen kind of carefully to the different perspectives.

SPEAKER_03 38:17

I'd like to wrap this part with going back to two points of the earlier in the conversation. Sorry, you said all of the above, and one of the above was a Boy Scout. And Dani, you said you spoke about the good nature, the good character. Okay, I'm a Boy Scout who or Girl Scout who listened to this uh philosophy and listened to this episode of the podcast or whatever, and I ask, what is this little thing, mental, intellectual, or moral, that I can do because Boy Scouts are all about good deeds, right? Did you do good something good today? What is the one thing I can do tomorrow morning or this afternoon in order to be a little bit more like Museiba's scout?

SPEAKER_02 39:01

Kinder to your wife.

SPEAKER_03 39:03

Can you go into details, please? No, because I have no I have no knowledge, but I'm joking.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

But I mean, you know, it's there. It's what I hope people will uh learn from this: to be open, to be kind, to be helpful to others, to be forgiving, to be merciful, to be everything. But you know, not to distract this from being clever. Because I think at the end of the day, the one actually leads to the other. As Daniel said, it's not a necessary condition, but it is a sufficient one. Opening minds up. My question, you know, this was uh an addition I want to add here. Uh the the the the that that I ask myself is whether in fact, which comes first? Do you win hearts in order to win minds, or do you go the other direction, or do you do both, or do you do one in some contexts, another in the other context it's not clear? Everything is probably open.

SPEAKER_03 40:04

Daniel, one good deed.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

I think uh in this context, uh from my perspective, is all it's it's about caring how you come across. I think that today we live in a world where people have stopped caring how they come across. Some because we learn it from the superpower, super powerful people that have stopped caring about how they come across. They use whatever word they want, knowing that it will incite, knowing that it will be problematic. But if it fits their base, then it's good enough. So I think if more people care how they come across, that will be a way to change the world to a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

Is that a reintroduction of shame into human relations? Looks like disappeared recently.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

No, it's it's about it's about empathy. Empathy with the other. Maybe that's something that being a minority within a minority, I would say people have to think more about how they come across. And we've talked about this in in in in different setups because your your collective, so to say, is so small, so most of your neighbors are not within that collective. So if you choose certain words and certain terminologies, you will have way too many problems that you will be able to solve. So you have to think implicitly about how you come across. And that on the one hand might show that how did you call it, guilt or uh shame or shame? I don't think so. I I think it just means that you have skin in the game and you have a lot to lose by making mistakes. But that gives you kind of a some kind of an authority, moral authority, because uh people will listen to you honestly, because they know that what you said at the end is uh something you actually really mean.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Jerusalem Talks is brought to you by the University of Notre Dame's Academic Center in Jerusalem and was made possible by the efforts of Avraham Burg, Daniel Schwacke, Gabriel Mitchell, David Turgman, Ben Wallach, and Nathan Steinmeier. Learn more about us at jerusalem.nd.edu.