Interreligious Dialogue and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: An Empirical View · 293the type that Lavie and I used in earlier research, both prior to and at the
conclusion of the planned two-month cycle.
We believed it was important to commence and conclude the e-mail
cycle, involving eight participants on each side, with face-to-face work-
shops in contrast to the first virtual dialogue in which there was no actual
contact between the participants.
During the two-month e-mail cycle, sixty-five messages were ex-
changed between the eight pairs of dialogue participants, which was
considerably more than the number of messages exchanged in the 1998 e-
mail dialogue. The organizers, who monitored the exchanges, were par-
ticularly impressed by the richness of the message content and the clear
evidence of both the Social Information being conveyed and the Content
Information, two categories delineated in the developing literature on
computer mediated communications.^13
Furthermore, as in the Israeli-Palestinian interreligious dialogue held
in Gaza, questionnaires evaluating the mutual perceptions of the Israeli
and Palestinian participants were distributed both before and after the
two-month e-mail dialogue. While a complete description of empirical
data gathered from this effort has been presented elsewhere,^14 the data
indicated that perceptions began and essentially remained positive. We
presume, therefore, that students willing to participate in such an ongo-
ing effort represented a select group whose predisposition for contact
was already high.
The Concluding Workshop: Intercultural Dialogue Evaluated
The best corroboration of the potential of the Israeli-Palestinian intercul-
tural dialogue, rooted in religion and facilitated by e-mail, came from the
participants themselves at the concluding workshop held on 3 April 2000
at a Palestinian school at the edge of Bethlehem, which was also accessible
to the Bar-Ilan students. In that gathering the Palestinians evaluated the
dialogue favorably, with one comparing it with a dialogue he had once
participated in with a more general secular/political orientation that had
been less positive. He remarked that concentrating on religion “is the best
way to enter into many things.” Another of the Palestinians suggested
that religion brings you nearer to creation, which, in fact, makes “you
think about the creator.”
One of the three visiting American Jewish students (who participated