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Besod Siach, an Organization for the Promotion of Dialogue Between Conflict Groups in Israeli Society, was established by Israeli Group Psychologists, religious and secular, from the political right and the political left, in 1991.
Theoretical background for our methods has some of its sources in Martin Buber's work on dialogue (1947), Carl Rogers' Conversation with Buber on Dialogue (Buber and Rogers, 1969), David Bohm's methods for work with dialogue groups (Bohm, Factor and Garret, 1991), Jewish traditional writings and systems theory as related by Sullivan (1953), Roberts (1983), Pines (1982, 1990), Zinkin (1983).
In this paper I present some of the theoretical background for our work and also some of the methodological tools that have been developed in the process of yearly conferences, long-term dialogue groups, and national forums for conciliation. These include the concept of ‘we’ and ‘them’ as a universal dynamic (Berman, Berger and Gutman, 2000), the use of intra-personal conflicts in relating to interpersonal and intergroup conflicts (Berman, 1993) and the model of up-the-ladder-of-dialogue (Farago-Gofer, 1996.)