This man knows how you can talk to your children about Israel

When Israel’s former ambassador to the UK, Daniel Taub, gives talks abroad, he is sometimes approached afterwards by parents who tell him: “We can’t speak to our children about Israel.”

The ex-diplomat who lectures on negotiation theory and conflict resolution knows a thing or two about “difficult conversations”. They form the backdrop to his new book Beyond Dispute – Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement, which draws on the wisdom of the Talmud and its culture of argument to suggest how we might handle broiges better.

Queen Elizabeth II shakes hands with the Ambassador of Israel Daniel Taub (Getty)Getty Images

In response to those troubled or perplexed parents, he says, “Like many difficult conversations, often the conversation is not about the things it says it is about. If it’s to do with something else that’s going on in the family, no amount of talking points about Israel is going to resolve it. The second thing that I do suggest is that rather than trading talking points it maybe more effective to trade stories, to talk about what were the formative experiences that have led you to the place that you are.

“I can imagine a conversation where a member of the young generation might get a little bit of insight from their parents what it is to grow up in a home where maybe there was always a packed suitcase under one of the beds. And the parent might get a little bit of an insight what it is to share a dorm in university with a Lebanese student who is always on the phone to their parents to find out what has been happening to their home.

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“You might not reach agreement on the policy issues but you might find a way of enlarging your hearts a little bit.”

He also recommends trying to think about what a “learning conversation” would look like, starting from the view that “our opinions are a work in progress. What are the things that we could be doing almost as a joint expedition, that would actually enrich both of us?”

The cut and thrust of talmudic debate is, he explains, not about trying to defeat your opponent at all costs but to reach the truth through the joint enterprise of testing point and counterpoint. The Israeli Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman described chavruta, the tried-and-tested method of studying the text with a partner, as “adversarial collaboration”, Taub says.

Not only did the rabbis respect the arguments of their colleagues but they were supposed to help improve them. In one delightful quote from the rabbinic text cited in the book, “If prostitutes help each other out with their make-up, shouldn’t scholars do the same [and help make each other’s argument stronger]?”

But while the Talmud can be dense and labyrinthine, that is not the style of Taub’s book, which adroitly deploys well-chosen anecdotes from the sages to illustrate his points as well as from his experience as a diplomat and a negotiator in the heyday of Israel-Palestinian peace talks in the 1990s. He was also sent on a secret mission at that time to try to open relations with the Gulf states.

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While he speaks about conflict resolution, he also tries to practise it as a voluntary mediator in Jerusalem. In fact, it was witnessing how his Arab co-mediator defused a potentially explosive situation one day that helped him on the path to writing the book. “He channelled a Muslim tradition of sulha [conflict resolution] – that was an example of how those traditions that you normally think are going to drive us apart can actually bring us together.”

He had also been set thinking by his experience of being asked to settle a dispute between “two significant Jewish organisations. I found myself saying, ‘You both claim to be committed to Jewish values. Isn’t there something in our tradition that could help us navigate this?’”

And as he thought more, he was struck by “how many of the insights from what you might call the rabbinic approach to argument are now being reflected in contemporary conflict resolution.

“I found that fascinating. As I suggest in the prologue, maybe that approach, which was a sort of revolution in Jewish thinking at the time, 2,000 years ago, arose against the background of a social crisis that has a lot of similarities to the social crises that Western societies are facing today.

The causes may be different – the destruction of the Temple, the loss of the priesthood and prophecy – but the social implications, which is that we have a sense of lack of trust in authority, lack of trust in information and lack of shared spaces and increased factionalism and tribalism and echo chambers, I think those are things that were very true then and are very true now.”

The message of the book is both “sobering” and “optimistic”, he says. Sobering because in the turbulent post-Temple period 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people confronted an existential challenge.

“Many of the Jewish sects at the time disappeared into the mists of Jewish history – the Sadducees, the Essenes and so on,” he says. “And those are the ones who were most confident in their belief, [who felt] they were the ‘Sons of Light’.

“The optimism is that there was one small group that managed to rethink its approach to argument, and its approach to difference, that actually didn’t just ensure the survival of the Jewish people, it ensured its survival in a way that was extraordinarily productive and creative. I hope we can draw some positive experience.”

Haberdashers’ and Oxford-educated, he spend a year studying in Israeli yeshivot, but considers his work the product of “a layman’s curiosity – I don’t hold myself up as a great Jewish scholar”.

He began to test his ideas in practice, bringing diverse groups of Israelis together in “difficult conversations laboratories”. It was a period of great ferment within Israel with waves of protest against the government’s planned judicial reform. Then October 7 happened and war broke out. He would like to revisit the programme, but he believes things may be different now.

“We have a younger generation who see things very differently,” he says. “You cannot be in a tank together and then come back and engage in this largely theoretical debate with the same intensity that you could before, It is one of the things we see from our young people and I think we need to learn from it.

“The second thing I think is also happening in Israeli society is that even though the issues that we have to grapple with are so painful and so much closer to home than the judicial review in many ways, I think there is a growing understanding that not only that we need to listen but we need to be sensitive to the inner worlds of the people we are speaking to.

“You can be involved in a debate but in the back of your mind will be ‘I don’t know if this person is related to one of the hostages, or has kids on the frontline’. I think that affects the tenor of your conversation. You are more ready to hold judgment than might have been the case before October 7.”
If the rifts over judicial reform in Israel prompted him to think how arguments could be conducted better, he also had in mind campuses abroad. He has been asked if he could turn the type of thinking elaborated in the book into a curriculum. “I would be thrilled to partner with anybody that thinks it would be helpful for students.”

But he sounds a note of caution. He does not believe his approach is one to “take you into the heart of the most toxic environments and turn them into something very different

“One of the things I do hope it could do is to try and help you identify at a relatively early stage whether it is worth making the efforts to engage with the other side and when what might present itself as an argument really isn’t an argument at all.

“And then maybe you save an awful lot of energy and direct it to places where there is more potential for having a valuable conversation.”

As well as speaking and mediating, Taub, who is 63, does some consultancy for Yad Hanadiv projects, the Rothschild Foundation in Israel where he was director of strategy and planning for a number of years after returning to Israel when his ambassadorship in London ended in 2015.

A man of many parts, he chairs the Rabbi Sacks Legacy in Israel and has penned a couple of plays. His comedy on international negotiations, Winner’s Curse, written with the TV producer Dan Patterson, was staged here two years ago. And he is doing some “TV stuff” too – long before Shtisel, he brought the strictly Orthodox world to the screen with a series called The Rebbe’s Court.

Beyond Dispute, he stresses, is “not a book about negotiations, it’s not a book about how we get to peace. I hope it is a book that is actually much more relevant to individuals that read it than what will get us to the White House Lawn.”

What has touched him most is a screenshot forwarded by his publisher of a social media post by a Palestinian blogger who had got hold of a copy of the book and reacted positively to it.

“That gives me an enormous amount of hope,” he says. “Here is somebody who is reading these sources and this approach and identifying with it. Maybe there is something to take a little bit of strength from that.”

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Beyond Dispute – Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement is published by Hodder & Stoughton. Daniel Taub will be speaking at a JC event in north-west London on June 17 go.thejc.com/dtbook