The late Edward Said described his experience in dialogue groups in these terms:

"Through the period from 1969 to 1991, I and many other Palestinians had had private, even secret, meetings and peace discussions with Israelis, American Jews, and others who were concerned about the issue. By the period of the intifadah I had lost interest in the encounter groups principally because they were often manipulated by professional 'conflict resolution' technicians, and also because they were now being used by the PLO not to argue the Palestinian case but, in my opinion, to try to prove to Israelis how many concessions the PLO was prepared to make.

"I also found that most members of the Israeli Left (including Peace Now) were focused on asking for more Palestinian concessions…without offering anything in return. In other words, these private attempts at reconciliation-with some notable exceptions-reflected the exact balance of power between us, a very weak partner and a very strong one, some of whose advocates shamelessly kept asking the victims of military occupation and dispossession for various moral acknowledgements from their victims."

At the same time that Said dropped out, in 1991, Jewish religious writer Marc Ellis criticized the progressive Jewish dialoguers:

"What if the essence of the Israeli state is expansion rather than democracy, and that the Jewish character of the state makes expendable, in a terrifying sense makes logical the end of indigenous Palestinian culture and community in historic Palestine? What if one believes that what we are witnessing today is the culmination of a sixty-year process in which Palestinian culture and peoplehood are destroyed in historic Palestine?

"Then we can draw the following conclusions: That the survival of the Palestinian people, while dependent on many factors, is also partially dependent on progressive Jews moving beyond the acceptable levels of Jewish dissent; that the Jewish progressive consensus position is a form of oppression vis-a-vis the Palestinian people."

Ellis called for a "movement beyond victimization and oppression" to "solidarity with those whom we as Jews have oppressed as a people."

With the inevitable failure of the Oslo agreements and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada, some Jewish activists echoed Said and Ellis, such as Esther Kaplan. Writing in 2003, Kaplan described her background in "the old school of Jewish activism on Palestine," groups such as Breira, New Jewish Agenda, International Jewish Peace Union, and Women in Black, which sought "to educate and mobilize the American Jewish community against the occupation," and to "bring Israelis and Palestinians into dialogue."

"Much of this movement navigated under the star of identity politics, the idea that American Palestinians and Jews had a special stake in the conflict and were uniquely situated to intervene." Kaplan found that in "the past few years, these assumptions and strategies, even this emotional tone, have begun to seem anachronistic."

She cited the International Solidarity Movement, the divestment movement, and the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation, which were all founded after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000. They reflect heightened concern at Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, and have a general membership. Some Jews have not been affected by these new currents, but have "retreated into traditional formations, such as the Zionist anti-occupation group Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, which seeks to balance 'car[ing] deeply about Israel' with 'the achievement of a negotiated settlement.'" Their program does not even mention U.S. funding and support of Israel.

Kaplan thus bade farewell to "those difficult, agonizing conversations within Jewish spaces, those carefully planned Palestinian-Jewish dialogues. This work… no longer truly serve[s] the Palestinian cause. It has become a project, rather, of saving the Jewish soul.

"Israel has proven its intransigence. And no effort tough enough to overpower that government's belligerence will ever emerge from the American Jewish community. But new activists can and will throw down the gauntlet. We Jews can join in-many of us will-but we don't own this movement any more."

At least that was Kaplan's view from New York. News of the de-acquisition has been slow to reach the provinces, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, where one of the Jewish founders of the Arab-Jewish women's dialogue group Zeitouna (Arabic for olive) helped prevent a general peace group she also helped found from addressing Palestine. She then made a documentary film, Zeitouna: Refusing to Be Enemies.

The filmmaker was one of three women who founded a group called Ann Arbor Area Committee for Peace, in the wake of 9/11, to defend civil liberties and protest the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. AAACP was effective in defending a local Muslim leader who was imprisoned by the INS and eventually deported, turning out crowds for demonstrations and getting resolutions defending civil liberties and opposing the Iraq war through city council. The Palestine question naturally arose, and a committee was formed to write a statement, three drafts of which were rejected before the Steering Committee (SC) reluctantly submitted it to the membership. At a meeting attended by about 50 people, the filmmaker, who was on the SC, opposed the statement because it hadn't been "approved by the Jewish community." The statement was approved by 64-14, and rejected by the SC by about the same margin, 6-3 against. Two of the three SC members supportive of Palestine resigned, and the general members most interested withdrew.

AAACP (now "Michigan Peaceworks") is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation with a staff, a six-figure budget, and no membership meetings. The group has said virtually nothing on Palestine and the US-Israel relationship in its entire existence. The city's Human Rights Commission crafted a mild but constructive resolution about ending arms sales to Israel, which Peaceworks did not support. Peaceworks opposed divestment from Israel-related investments when it came up on campus, but did endorse the program of Brit Tzedek, and presented a program on the Geneva Accords, an unofficial peace proposal by compromised Israeli and Palestinian figures, as if the problem is "over there," rather than in U.S. economic and political support for Israel.

The Zeitouna dialogue group started in summer, 2002. While Ariel Sharon's army reconquered the West Bank, while Rachel Corrie was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver, while Israel built the monstrous Wall around the Palestine ghetto, the Zeitounas dialogued. The Jewish Zeitounas struggled over merely signing their names on a letter to the local newspaper. When the HRC resolution opposing arms sales to Israel arose, the Jewish Zeitounas argued that it didn't address Israel's concerns, and proposed a new draft.

After two years, one experienced Palestinian organizer dropped out, referring in her farewell email to "the worsening situation in Palestine and the occupied territories. Perhaps it was too optimistic a wish on my part, but my hope was always focused on transforming our group into an action group that can truly educate and increase awareness in the community at large. We have learned how to dialogue, but now we must find ways to break the silence."

This woman was not featured in the film made about the group, which her husband dismissed as "dancing, sisterhood and story telling. As usual, the Zionists did their best to keep it sterile."

The film's premiere took place recently at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, the town's leading arts venue off the University of Michigan campus. There was a lavish reception, with live music from the band that composed and performed the film's soundtrack. The evening was introduced by the theater's executive director, who announced that the 1700-seat house was sold out, and that there would be five additional showings in the spring.

The emcee for the evening was the president of the University Musical Society, which brings stellar programming to a city of 125,000, including a rich Arab music program in recent years. People came from New Jersey and California. There was a handsome program book, with biographies and photographs of the dozen beaming Zeitounas, six each Arab and Jewish (the dropout was replaced), and sponsorship from all of liberal polite society. Brit Tzedek brochures were available, but no Palestinian literature. Relatively few Arabs attended.

The film began by establishing moral equivalence. Each individual had her personal history; each side had its ceremonies and rituals and society. And each side had its tragic history of persecution. One of the senior Jewish women was born in Berlin, and she and her family, save for her father, survived interment in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her account, and its acknowledgement by a Palestinian, opened the victimhood discussion. The Palestinian gave an account of the Nabka in Haifa, which she had survived; there were montages of the Holocaust and the Nakba. When they discussed their experiences in the U.S., one Arab woman recounted feeling stigmatized as a "terrorist", especially after 9/11, and the Arab-American experience of INS raids and police harassment. A Jewish woman responded that she felt Jews weren't really accepted in America, since she had heard "remarks" as one of a few Jews in grade school, and in college. The filmmaker explained that Jews felt they had to stick up for each other, since no one else would.

Marc Ellis stated in 1990 that the alleged "symmetry of suffering and rights between Jews and Palestinians over the last forty years, is a false symmetry." The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans, not by Arabs, and cannot excuse what Zionism has done to the Palestinian Arabs. It has been recognized and compensated by practically every means imaginable. Nothing can restore the Jewish life which was destroyed, or replace what it would have become, but to the extent amends can be made they have been. The Nakba, which occurred 59 years ago, has not been addressed but compounded. It is the center of an antagonism between Israel and the US on one hand and the Arab/Muslim world on the other, which may end in many Holocausts if Israel uses its arsenal of nuclear weapons as freely as it has used lesser ones. This disparity was never addressed in the film.

The Holocaust narrative in the US derives its power not only from intrinsic merit, but from its assiduous development by the Jewish community, which has made this European event somehow as central to US history as the Civil War. There is no comparison between being stigmatized as a "terrorist" and subjected to INS roundups and police persecution, and being the subject of "remarks." This inversion reached its height in the film's account of the visit of six of the group to Israel/Palestine in the summer of 2006. Israel's oppression was not presented as a mortal threat to the Palestinians; rather, the oppression was a threat to the group. Occupation scenes such as checkpoints were described as "activities not in our spirit of togetherness," or words to that effect. The ghastly Wall was shown defiling the landscape, but not even named; it might have been some new Christo project, "Running Ghetto Fence." Israel's assault on Lebanon that summer was yet another obstacle to group feeling, which they thankfully survived.

Two of the Palestinian women had doubts about the value of dialogue. Yet overall, there was a marked lack of tension, no emphatic statements or arguments or even mild disagreements. The group is by definition a joint effort, but it's not clear that the film is. Editing clearly made the film, and one wonders if the group decided what picture the film would present, or whether the filmmaker made that decision herself. One also wonders who holds the rights to the film, who will decide on its distribution, and what will become of any revenue. Queries to the filmmaker on these and other points were not answered.

After the film the Zeitounas took a curtain call. One of the Palestinian women who had had doubts made a general statement about the horrible situation in occupied Palestine and the need to do something; she said privately later that she wanted to give a speech. Then the Zeitounas filed out to the lobby to receive their admirers. In nearly five years of dialogue, the attitudes of some Jewish members toward the Palestine question may have advanced, to their credit. Yet, to judge from the film, five years of dialogue have never discussed power—the colossal flow of U.S. funds and material and political support to Israel, the resulting apocalypse which Israel wreaks on the Arabs, and the relative pinpricks it suffers; or the force which is primarily responsible, the Israel lobby, which academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt dragged into mainstream debate a year ago.

Some may see the group as somehow unconnected with such questions, or even as a way of avoiding them. Yet they are unavoidable, if Zeitouna is not to be a complete failure, even by the most charitable standard. The plight of Palestine urgently demands every day, not dialogue, but decisive action in solidarity with the oppressed.