Open Jerusalem: Cornerstone for World Peace - My / Our contribution

[Michael M Pannwitz]

Dear Filiz and you others,
I was involved in it as the facilitator together with Yaari, 
Anna,Dominik and Vera (essentially the same team we had at the meeting 
of 200+ Imams and Rabbis earlier this year in Sevilla, you can see all 
of them in the open space world map).
The conference started Sunday July 2nd and closed on Thursday morning, 
July 6. The open space part began on Monday afternoon and closed on 
Wednesday evening.
There were 8 breakout sessions (which made it the longest os I ever 
facilitated), 40 issues, 34 reports and 30 action proposals with 
concrete steps...all in all a normal os-event.
There were about 20 Israelis and 20 Palestinians and 60+ people from 
other places interested in Peace in that region.
People in attendance from the region like Avner Haramati from Israel and 
Carol Daniel-Kasbari from Palestine could tell you more about what 
happened there and what it means...I just experienced the normal 
peaceful process of open space with lots of excited people.
The call for someone to coordinate all of this is both common and at the 
same time an issue that the person feeling this call can follow through 
on. In fact, some got together and had a pretty well worked out plan 
including the financing to create an internet platform to do just that.

One participant summed it up in the Closing Circle (similarly to what ho 
observed and recorded in "The Practice of Peace" at the gathering in 
Rome a couple of years ago)with the words:
"Everyday looking at the reports on television, listening to the radio, 
reading the newspapers windows to hell open up for me. Here a window to 
heaven opened."
The productive, peaceful quality of this event in the face of what 
happens in the war zones many participants came from is a miracle.

Since there was an agreement not to take pictures and not to produce a 
book of proceedings and not to copy the action proposals participants 
now will rely on their ingenuity and their selforganized very detailed 
contact list to continue the work.

Greetings from Berlin getting ready to fire up the barbecue for 3 of my 
grandchildren visiting ....
See you in Moscow in 3 weeks
mmp

Filiz Telek wrote:
> Apparently there was another “open space” for middle east peace..anyone 
> was involved in it?
> 
>  
> 
> Monday, 10 July 2006
> 
> To all Peace Workers;
> 
> the  conference at the Lasalle-Institute "Jerusalem, City of Peace" has 
> finished. For three long days about 120 people met, guided and 
> accompanied by the method of "open space" in order to communicate about 
> visions, possible projects, and new possibilities of cooperation. 
> Considering the urgency of the current situation it is debatable whether 
> the methods of „open space“ can achieve satisfactory result. “Open 
> space” is able to start the activity and the dialogue among the 
> participants, but then I was missing the coordinating, co-guiding 
> element, the person who keeps the overview and participates form there 
> in a guiding way. For me the extraordinary quality of the conference 
> consisted in the fact that people gathered  who won’t meet normally. It 
> belongs to the consistent method of the representatives of the 
> Lasalle-Institute that they want to initiate the change on government 
> level as well as on the level of projects which are working at the very 
> basis. A big thanks goes to Pater Niklaus Brantschen, Anna Gamma and Pia 
> Gyger for their tireless and unconditional commitment for peace in the 
> Middle East.
> Results of the conference: new contacts were made, architectural models 
> for Jerusalem as a world city of peace were presented. The film “We 
> Refuse to be Enemies” was presented and found good resonance. Letters to 
> decisive representatives of governments and religions were worded in 
> order to declare Jerusalem a weapon-free zone. My impression is that 
> many peace workers do not yet see how much we must change structures and 
> systems and to what extend we are challenged to develop new functioning 
> models. Would the world evolve as much about peace as it just evolved 
> about football, we were for sure on the winners’ side. This is the focus 
> for which we from the Healing
> Biotope I participated. With patience and persistence we direct our 
> perseverance and our continual work to this point again and again. In me 
> it causes the radicalisation to reinforce my commitment for the 
> humanization of money and to set off for my way to motivate business 
> people to invest their
> money in the development of models for peace villages. With the amount 
> of money that one tank costs we could do powerful steps of manifestation 
> in the global peace movement. The developing peace villages would be 
> something like the points of crystallization and energy accelerators to 
> make one perspective of the peace movement visible. I phrased a new 
> pilgrim-text that I want to send out in the Ring of Power this time. May 
> it be heard by the relevant forces.
--




Michael M Pannwitz, boscop eg
Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany
++49-30-772 8000
www.boscop.de   www.michaelmpannwitz.de


Check out the new Open Space World Map now with 406 resident Open Space 
Workers in 67 countries (working in a total of 122 countries worldwide)
www.openspaceworldmap.org

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist