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Taking the Third Side

February 21, 2005 By Uncategorized

Eighteen months ago, my friend Avner Haramati and his family came to visit Bowen Island. Avner is a remarkable facilitator of dialogue working in Israel and elsewhere.

He travels a lot around the world, but his daughters were in North America for the first or second time in 2003. For his 18 year old daughter Michal, being in North America was a surprise. She had no idea that so many people had an opinion on Israel.

One evening while we were eating she flat out asked me why North Americans should care about Israel. I have to admit I was stuck for words. Michal is a bright woman who understands at a gut level the complexities of the situation in Israel. She lives in the middle of it and she struggles with what is going on. She found it unimaginable that people who had never been to her country were so certain about their positions on the conflict.

Michal challenged me to find another way to relate to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Since then I have been trying hard to practice a form of witnessing which means giving considerate and dispassionate attention to a situation and holding a belief in its resolution. As a facilitator this is exactly what I do with groups. To do something different with respect to the wider world seems inauthentic.

Today Nancy McPhee, a hosting colleague pointed me to The Third Side a website from “Getting to Yes” co-author William Ury. It describes these practices and the need for a “third side” in complex situations in order to hold open the complexity that both creates difficulties and holds the promise of their resolution.

Here is what Ury distills the practice to:

The Third Side offers a promising new way to look at the conflicts around us. The Third Side is the community – us – in action protecting our most precious interests in safety and well-being. It suggests ten practical roles any of us can play on a daily basis to stop destructive fighting in our families, at work, in our schools, and in the world. Each of our individual actions is like a single spider web, fragile perhaps but, when united with others, capable of halting the lion of war. Although the Third Side is in its infancy in our modern-day societies, it has been used effectively by simpler cultures for millennia to reduce violence and promote dialogue.

The site is still in development and some of the tools are forthcoming, but keep an eye on it. The resources and question sheets look promising.