Where Understanding Ends, Boundaries Shift, and Dialogue Loses Its Innocence

For more than thirty years, I have worked in civic education with a particular focus on Israeli-European dialogue. This work has always been more than a profession to me; it has been an essential expression of how I engage with the world. I have devoted much of my life to building bridges, creating spaces where people who might otherwise know each other only through media reports, flat stereotypes, or historically inherited prejudices can meet.

For decades, this work rested on a fundamental conviction: dialogue is almost always possible, provided both sides are willing to listen and acknowledge that another perspective exists.

I saw my primary task as making complexity both accessible and bearable. Reality rarely fits neatly into simple categories or convenient truths. I wanted Israel to be understood as more than just the Middle East conflict, just as I resisted reducing Europe strictly to the history of the Shoah and antisemitism.

In countless seminars, workshops, and panel discussions across Israel and Europe, I watched prejudices crumble when abstract images of the “other” encountered real human beings. That experience gave me confidence grounded in daily practice, sustaining me even through difficult periods.

My work was never about providing ready-made answers; it was about opening spaces for thought and debate. If participants left with more questions than they arrived with, I considered it a success. But this approach depends on something fundamental: a willingness to accept that one’s own perspective may be incomplete.

Today, I look back on some of those experiences with greater disillusionment. I see more clearly than ever how fragile these spaces of encounter have always been.

I never imagined I would say to a group dealing with strategies against antisemitism: “Before we talk about arguments and communication techniques, you need to ask yourselves a more fundamental question: Who do you still want to talk to—and who do you no longer want to talk to?” The participants fell silent.

It was neither a deliberate provocation nor a spontaneous outburst. It was the sober culmination of what I have experienced over the past few years. Because not every conversation deserves to be called a dialogue.

October 7, 2023, was a catastrophe for Israel and, for me personally, a shock that shattered many assumptions I had taken for granted. Yet what disturbed me almost as deeply was the reaction among segments of the Western public—at universities, in cultural institutions, and across social media. Instead of prompting empathy and solidarity, the deliberate violence against civilians was rapidly met with a swift reversal of the roles of victim and perpetrator. Even before the........

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