Few conflicts have had more immediate and polarizing effects in Canada than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What happens thousands of kilometres away has a direct emotional, political, and social impact on communities here. With every escalation in Gaza, the West Bank, or Israel, fear, anger, and grief spill into our streets, campuses, places of worship, and digital platforms. Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, Arab, and allied communities are all impacted and often pitted against each other.
In these difficult times, many of us are seeking spaces where we can speak honestly, be heard with dignity, and explore how to work together toward a society that feels safe, compassionate, and just. Digital Public Square carried out a project to enable meaningful conversations about the impact of these tragic events and encourage honest, brave, and transformational dialogues. This project offers a foundation for such engagement, one that begins by strengthening trust within and between communities, and evolves into a truly inclusive, representative space where diverse voices and narratives are centred.
As part of this project, C-Space Group and Digital Public Square developed Listening and Dialogue for Countering Polarization: A Toolkit for Facilitators and Practitioners. The toolkit provides best practices on how to design and implement dialogue-centred approaches to address division and polarization. It is informed by experiences of peacebuilding work between Palestinians and Israelis – efforts that sought to build trust, humanize the “other,” and resist the narrative of inevitable enmity. We believe these approaches offer valuable tools for dealing with the fallout of polarization here in Canada, where the conflict is often imported in a way that reproduces trauma and hostility, rather than reflection and engagement.
Confronting Palestine-Israel Polarization Through Brave Spaces: Lessons from Listening and Dialogue in Canada is a case study that highlights how the concepts from the toolkit were leveraged in the context of our project to facilitate listening and dialogue sessions between Palestinians and Jews living in Canada. The case study provides an overview of the different sessions and formats hosted, and features key outcomes and learnings from these sessions.
For guidance on how to implement a listening and dialogue session, refer to Listening and Dialogue for Countering Polarization: A Toolkit for Facilitators and Practitioners.