The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of Conflicting Identities

Abstract

Attempts to establish dialogue between conflicting identities usually focus on mutual understanding and the common, while downplaying the elements of the conflict and ignoring the element of otherness, which is especially important for conflicts in which the other is the opposite of the self. This article suggests real dialogue requires that the parties first acknowledge this otherness as the distance between them. Thus, the ability to not understand, rather than the ability to understand the other, is posited as crucial to the dialogic process. The author argues that only when the parties relinquish their previous understanding can dialogue address the nucleus of the opposition and conflict, and mobilize relations between the parties within the dialogic framework. Examples are given of attempts at dialogue, one by a group representing the religious and secular Israeli populations and one by a group representing Jews and Arabs in Israel, with their encounters described and analyzed in terms of the possibilities of understanding.