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Nadia Ramzy welcomed the audience and began the discussion group by stressing how, in the past four years, after the beginning of the second intifada, the tense situation in the Middle East had deteriorated and was worse than at any prior point in our lifetime. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the major problems contributing to the deepening tensions in the world. Ramzy postulated that peace would not be possible, nor the threat of terrorist attacks stop, until a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is found. She recalled that as an Egyptian, Coptic, Anglo-American psychoanalyst, she had grown up in a different world, one in which the people of the book- Muslims, Jews, and Christians - lived in relative harmony and that the profound changes that have occurred since then were the background of the evening's discussion. Ramzy stressed that although people are tense and the dialogue is now very difficult, the objective for the workshop was to talk together with a psychoanalytic attitude, listening to one another with respect and empathy. She expressed her gratitude for the willingness of participants George Awad, a Palestinian psychoanalyst, and Carlo Strenger, an Israeli psychoanalyst to talk to one another “from their heads and their hearts in the best of the psychoanalytic tradition.”
Ramzy then introduced George Awad, who has lived and practiced in Toronto for 28 years. Awad is a training and supervising analyst at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and has worked with troubled adolescents and families negotiating their way through the legal system. Since having become politically involved in the Middle Eastern conflict, his paper, “The Others,” has appeared in Violence or Dialogue, published by the IPA.
Awad began by explaining how he had become politically active around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He described how, after 9/11, he joined a discussion group of therapists composed of two Palestinians and six Jews, and pointed out that althoug