Alan Slifka has seen it happen time and time again.
“If we can get an Arab kid and a Jewish kid who fear each other, maybe even hate each other, to go through a series of encounters,” he said, “they come out of it and can see the humanity in the other.”
Slifka is president of the Abraham Fund, which awards grants to grassroots projects and activities promoting Arab-Jewish co-existence in Israel. After nearly a decade with the fund, Slifka has reached the unshakable conclusion that even the smallest threads of reconciliation between conflicting parties strengthen and beautify the larger tapestry of peaceful coexistence.
At the State of the World Forum in San Francisco earlier this month, Slifka shared his optimism as part of a panel titled “Democracy and its Discontents: The Breakdown in Civic Discourse and the Revitalization of Civil Society.”
Moderated by Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, the panel of eight included such figures as feminist Betty Friedan and Bernard Kinsey, co-chair of Rebuild Los Angeles, which procured millions of dollars to help repair L.A.’s fractured inner city after the 1992 riots.
Though panelists brought a range of perspectives to the discussion, talking about everything from the war on drugs to racial discord to women’s rights, many ultimately returned to the same thesis: Democracy, in order to work, must represent all of its constituents.
“Part of the problem in this country and around the world is that not all citizens matter,” Kinsey asserted.
In Slifka’s eyes, all citizens can matter only when they stop demonizing one another and regard each other as humans.
“What I want to tell you is that coexistence enhancement is a legitimate activity that can be done,” he said. “If it’s nurtured, whether in Israel or elsewhere, it can make an enormous difference in advancing the values that all of us have been talking about in this forum.”
Slifka, managing partner of an equity asset management firm in New York, presented his Wall Street credentials in an attempt to counteract the perception that his work with the Abraham Fund is in any way “squishy.”
Far from it, he said.
“I believe that coexistence is both an art and a science,” he said, “a science in that you have to teach young people about the details of democracy, and an art in that you have to take people of difference and bring them together. The problem is that most of us live in majority and minority divided societies [where] we rarely meet the other.”
A dramatic example of that division is South Africa, which until recently maintained one of the most blatant state-sanctioned systems of segregation in the world.
Panelist Susan Collins-Marks, a white South African educator involved in anti-apartheid negotiations several years ago, shared with an audience of hundreds some of the things she learned while participating in that historic process.
“We learned that atonement for injustice is a prerequisite for creating wholeness and we learned that reconciliation is a healing notion,” she said.
“We learned that we couldn’t do this stuff out there,” she said, pointing away from herself, “if we weren’t doing it in here,” she said, pointing to her heart.
Collins-Marks, who now lives and works in the United States, ended her comments with a poignant story of one person who was able to transcend his own suffering in the quest for a national good.
In 1992, as part of a series of conciliatory meetings Collins-Marks organized in South Africa, she convened a group of police officers and about 20 civil and human rights activists involved in the anti-apartheid movement.
Participants entered the room, generally dividing into separate factions: officers and activists. Among the activists was “Stewart,” then 32 years old, who had been arrested and tortured by police.
“He walked in the door, looked around, sat down by a white colonel in the police and shook his hand,” Collins-Marks recalled.
She paused: “A few of us in the room knew that he had sat beside his former torturer.”