This year, the Lausanne association Coexistences deviates from its usual practice and renounces its big Little New Year’s Ball at the Montbenon Casino, intended to raise funds for the organization of its mixed stays offered to Israelis and Palestinians. With the tragic events currently unfolding in the Middle East, the mood is not celebratory. However, the hope of seeing dialogue resume between Jews and Arabs has not left the association’s volunteers nor its participants. Interview with its president, Fiuna Seylan-Ongen.
As president of Coexistences, what have you learned about living together?
I realized to what extent living together, in certain situations, requires conscious and deliberate work. Reestablishing dialogue, when it is broken, takes time. The work of our association is only one of the links in the projects carried out by different organizations, on the Israeli-Palestinian territory, with the aim of creating spaces for meetings and dialogue with others.
In what way?
We offer the possibility of experiencing intense coexistence for ten days, but these stays are a continuation of work that has already begun, four to six months previously, for three to four hours per week. After these ten days, shared between a stay in the mountains and host families, these tandems return home. We always try to ensure that the programs continue for a few months in any case, so that what has been experienced can then be reflected on, so that the change takes lasting root in each of the participants.
What effects of this work have you observed?
We are witnessing extremely moving developments, particularly in a true consideration of others and their existence. To mark the association’s 10th anniversary in 2016, we made a short film and asked several participants what their participation in such a program had brought them. Complexity has introduced itself into their vision of the other. They now realize that there are different ways of understanding and analyzing a situation. Their positions have become much more nuanced, where there were often only clear-cut opinions.
What is the biggest difficulty in this process?
These participants are incredibly brave. Very often, they must go through a revisitation and deepening of their identity and the conception they have of themselves. They start from their own experience, but also from what their family has experienced in the past, and more broadly from their national narrative, with all that this may involve in terms of prejudices and preconceived ideas around their differences.
2023-12-31 01:03:43
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