The School of Life's recreation of Plato's Symposium at the Latitude festival

I don’t wear a mauve toga very often. But it was my fashion item of choice at this year’s Latitude Festival, the annual extravaganza of music, theatre, comedy and literature held deep in the Suffolk countryside. On behalf of The School of Life, I hosted one of the more unusual events on the programme – a recreation of Plato’s Symposium, the first great conversation in the history of the art of living.

In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote a dialogue recording the conversation that was alleged to have taken place at a famous banquet attended by the philosopher Socrates and a smattering of ancient Greek playwrights, playboys and aristocrats. The subject of their discussion was nothing less than love, but it also strayed into ambition, truth, friendship and other potential ingredients of what the Greeks called ‘the good life’. There was plenty of booze to accompany the fine words – ‘symposium’ was their term for a drinking party – and Socrates managed to out-drink and out-talk the lot of them.

The forty honoured guests at our re-enactment of Plato’s Symposium were naturally greeted by slave attendants wearing white togas who, in typical ancient Greek style, helped them remove their shoes, anointed their hands with perfumed oils, and placed garlands of ivy on their heads. They were seated at long tables in a beautiful wood, surrounded by towering trees and enclosed by a forest of ferns, far away from the blaring speakers of the main festival arena. Ancient Greek flute music wafted around them.

My official title was ‘symposiarchos’, the King of the Feast, which gave me the right to determine the mixture of wine and water in the ‘krate’, the communal bowl. It also permitted me to impose forfeits on anybody who didn’t obey my instructions, although I refrained from inflicting the favourite penalty at ancient Greek banquets, which was to make the person strip naked and run around the other guests three times. Following ceremonial rules, everyone was asked to stand, sprinkle a libation of wine on the ground, and then chant a hymn to Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. And at that moment, the feasting began.

Chanting a hymn to Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, at the Latitude Festival

As well as a feast of food, there was a feast of conversation. The guests were seated with strangers, and between them lay a conversational menu to simulate their discussions. There were quotes from the Symposium to chew over, like this comment from the playwright Aristophanes:

‘Each of us is a mere fragment of a man; we’ve been split in two, like filleted plaice. We’re all looking for our other halves.’

The guests were also offered other conversational questions that helped them delve into the dilemmas of the art of living, such as: Do you live more in the past or in the future? Has money expanded or diminished your sense of personal freedom? What do you think is the best approach to growing old?

What was the point of all this conversational adventuring? It was more than an excuse to wear a bunch of leaves in your hair and be served wine by slaves. Modern society is suffering from a plague of superficial talk. Not only do we trot out the same old clichéd questions – How was your weekend? What was the weather like? – but new technologies are failing the improve the quality of our conversations. How many of the 100 billion text messages sent last year involved profound discussions? And what about all those one-line emails?

We need to find ways of creating conversations that allow us to take off our masks and talk openly about the issues that really matter in life. We also need to break out of the straitjacket of our own worldviews, and enter the minds of people who have different backgrounds, experiences and beliefs than our own. It is time we all learned from the ancient Greeks, and made the conversational symposium a part of everyday life.

Yes, I really did wear a mauve toga in my role as symposiarchos, King of the Feast

Jamaican immigrants to Britain in 1948 arriving off the ship Empire Windrush, which carried the first large group of West Indian immigrants following World War Two.

The upcoming British general election on May 6 raises the possibility for a new dawn in empathy-based politics. Or not. My review of the election manifestos of the major parties – Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green – reveals that the word ‘empathy’ is not mentioned a single time in any of them (out of a total 356 pages of text). This is rather different from the last US presidential election, when Barack Obama mentioned ‘empathy’ in almost every speech he made.

Of course, you can’t judge politicians or parties on the basis of how often they use a particular word. So let’s turn to a concrete policy area and see what the parties have to say. The one I’m choosing is immigration. This is because it is a litmus test of an empathetic approach to politics. National borders are dangerous because they frequently act as the boundaries of our moral universes; it is easy to care more about our fellow citizens than about people who live in far away places of which we know little (which is why we sometimes drop bombs on them or let them starve to death). But empathy is not a matter of what passport you hold; it must extend beyond borders to all human beings. A compassionate immigration policy demonstrates empathetic values in political practice.

Unsurprisingly, the two major parties reproduce the clichéd and scare-mongering image of immigrants stealing local jobs, bleeding the welfare system dry and causing crime. The Labour party doesn’t start well by combining ‘Crime and Immigration’ together in a single section in their manifesto. They then say they will adopt a new points-based system to control the menace of ‘rising immigration’. The Conservatives take a similar line, stating ‘immigration is too high and needs to be reduced’, and that ‘we do not need to attract people to do jobs that could be carried out by British citizens’.

Both the Liberal Democrats and Greens have a more empathetic position. They say they will end the detention of children in immigration detention centres, and will offer an amnesty for immigrants who have been living illegally in Britain for several years with a clean record, with the prospect of gaining the legal right of citizenship. The Greens also note that 5 million British people live abroad, so it would be hypocritical to make the country a complete fortress.

Nick Griffin, leader of the neo-fascist British National Party: 'I want to help stop the immigration which is destroying this and every other white nation in the world'.

The neo-fascist British National Party has the most extreme policy position, calling for ‘a halt to the immigration invasion’. Immigrants, they believe, ‘totally swamp the existing people…destroying their communities.’ This is consistent their wider stance on international development issues: ‘Let them sort it out for themselves, it’s got nothing to do with us’. The BNP claim that the major reason people support them is due to their vociferous opposition to immigration. But a recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Exploring the Roots of BNP Support,  shows this to be a falsehood:

‘The British National Party (BNP) frequently suggests that it attracts support because it is the only party to take into account communities’ ‘real’ experiences of immigration. IPPR has explored whether or not this is the case by looking at the roots of BNP support across 149 local authorities. We conducted regression-based analysis to see whether or not high levels of immigration do raise communities’ support for the BNP, or if other variables – such as political disengagement – are important.

Our findings suggest that areas that have higher levels of recent immigration than others are not more likely to vote for the BNP. In fact, the more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right. It seems that direct contact with migrants dissuades people from supporting the BNP. For example, of the 10 local authorities in which the BNP gained most support in the 2009 European elections, nine had lower than average immigration.’

This tells us something important about empathy. The report suggests, in effect, that having ‘direct contact’ with immigrants makes us more empathetic towards them. This contact might come through talking to them at the local shops, discovering that your six-year-old’s best friend is an asylum seeker, or simply seeing new immigrants trying to get on with their lives just as you are doing. The broad political implication may be that banging the anti-immigration drum is not as much of a vote winner as the political parties think.

Even an empathetic immigration policy is not, however, enough for any party to win my vote. Empathetic politics requires a radical decentralisation of power to close the gap between governors and governed, creating a level of citizen participation in decision-making that no mainstream party is ready to contemplate.

For some of my more general thinking on what is wrong with modern democracy, see my essay Mortgaged Democracy, originally published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought.

Like all ranking charts, the choices are bound to be controversial. But I can assure you that a very careful formula has been used to make the selection. To find themselves on this exclusive list, a person has to display a unique combination of traits: they must have a highly developed capacity to step into the shoes of other people; their empathising must have had a major social impact; it should have required acts of personal courage; and finally, it must provide inspiration for others.

So, let’s meet our empathetic wunderkids, in reverse order:

#5. Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank playing Brandon Teena in the 1999 film Boys Don't Cry.

Coming in at number five is Hollywood actress Hilary Swank. She gains her coveted place for her Oscar-winning role in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, which is based on the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered man who was raped and murdered by his male friends after they found out that he had female genitalia. In preparing for the part, Swank cut off her hair, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, put on a cowboy hat, and ventured out onto the streets of New York for a month to see if she could pass for a young man, just as Brandon Teena had done. Describing her adventure, she said, ‘I got to see what it’s like for a transgender person, or a person with a sexual identity crisis, or a lesbian or a gay person, and the daily harassment you can get…it’s a scary place to be, to feel not understood’. Swank’s brilliant portrayal of Brandon Teena helped raise the political profile of the struggles faced by transgendered people, and also inspired her to become a campaigner on gay, lesbian and transgender issues, and a spokesperson for the Harvey Milk School in New York.

Find out more: Watch the film Boys Don’t Cry and visit the website of the Harvey Milk School.

#4. George Orwell

George Orwell in 1946, pushing his adopted son Richard through the streets of Islington, North London.

How could you have an Empathy Top Five without putting George Orwell on the list? He earned his empathy spurs in the 1920s while working as a colonial police officer in Burma. Orwell was disgusted at the brutality of colonialism which he witnessed first-hand, and vowed on his return to Britain to step into the shoes of everyday working people and discover what their lives were really like. ‘I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over other man’, he said. ‘I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.’ That’s when he decided to dress up as a tramp and live amongst beggars and vagabonds on the streets of East London, a time of his life described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). With this book, together with his political reportage, Orwell shone the spotlight on neglected and marginalised communities in British society like almost no other writer in the twentieth century.

Find out more: Read Down and Out in Paris and London, and Orwell’s short essay ‘Down the Mine’.

#3. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Charley, killed by cholera in 1849.

The American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe may be history’s most forgotten empathist. The great issue of her age was slavery, and the brutal treatment of slaves on the cotton plantations in the south of the United States. In 1852 she published her story Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was effectively a political tract against slavery. It was a publishing sensation, selling four million copies within a decade. The book helped transform the worldview of a whole generation, showing them the horrors of slavery up close, and thereby encouraging the rebellion against slavery and its proponents that eventually played itself out in the American Civil War. Beecher Stowe was inspired to write the book following the tragic death of her eighteen-month-old son Charley in the Cincinnati cholera epidemic of 1849. This event ripped her open into empathy for black women whose children were being sold into slavery: ‘It was at his bed, and at his grave, that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.’

Find out more: Read the fascinating biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick.

#2. Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi taking a rest from spinning cloth in 1946. He is one of the few political figures in history able to make his own underwear.

I realise this may create gasps of incredulity, but the great master of empathy Mahatma Gandhi only comes in at second place. After his return to India from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi decided that if he was going to campaign for Indian independence from British rule, he would need to experience what life was really like for the poorest people in the country. So he threw away his fancy barrister’s suit and collar, wrapped himself in a dhoti or loincloth, and established the Sabamarti Ashram, where he lived from 1917 to 1930. Ashram life was about stepping into the shoes of peasant farmers. He and his followers grew their own food, spun their own cloth, and cleaned out the latrines – a job usually relegated to the Untouchable (Dalit) caste. Gandhi’s deep empathetic instinct also took him across religious boundaries. He was appalled by the violence between Hindus and Muslims, and fervently opposed the creation of a separate Muslim state. A devout Hindu himself, he once declared to a group of Hindu nationalists: ‘I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew – and so are all of you.’ These words, which still resonate today, rank amongst the greatest empathetic statements of all time.

Find out more: There’s no better starting place than Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Also try Gandhi’s An Autobiography – or The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

#1. Claiborne Paul Ellis

C.P. Ellis, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, with his friend Ann Atwater.

Top of our empathy poll is…C.P. Ellis. ‘Who?’, you are bound to ask. C.P. Ellis was born into a poor white family in Durham, North Carolina, in 1927. Finding it hard to make ends meet working in a garage and believing blacks were the cause of all his troubles, he followed his father’s footsteps and joined the Ku Klux Klan, eventually rising to the top position of Exalted Cyclops of the Durham chapter of the KKK. The turning point in his life came in 1971, when he was invited to a ten-day community meeting to help solve racial tensions in schools. C.P.Ellis was chosen to head the race committee jointly with a local black activist who he hated, named Ann Atwater. But working with her completely exploded his prejudices about African Americans. He saw that she shared the same problems of poverty as his own and that their real enemies were white businessmen and politicians who kept their wages low and pitted poor blacks and whites against one another. ‘I was beginning to look at a black person, shake hands with him, and see him as a human being,’ he recalled of his experience on the committee. ‘Somethin’ was happening to me. It was almost like bein’ born again.’ On the final night of the community meeting, he stood at the microphone in front of a thousand people and tore up his Klan membership card. C.P. Ellis later became a famed civil rights campaigner and labour organiser for a union whose membership was seventy per cent black. He and Ann remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Find out more: Read the moving interview with C.P. Ellis by the oral historian Studs Terkel in his book, American Dreams: Lost and Found. You can also find an extract here.

I imagine you have your own empathetic heroines and heroes, so I invite you to leave a comment revealing to the world your personal choices of people who deserve a place in the Empathy Hall of Fame.

Jo Berry (right) standing next to Pat Magee, the man who killed her father.

One of the greatest challenges of leading an empathetic life is trying to step into the shoes of people who we consider to be ‘enemies’ or whose views and values are very different from our own. If you’re on the receiving end of a racist comment from someone at the pub or a torrent of unfair verbal abuse from your boss, the idea of trying to empathise with them would probably be the last thing on your mind. If you came face to face with the person who had recently burgled your house, could you overcome your anger to see the crime from their perspective, and understand the circumstances that may have driven them to it?

Empathising in such instances might seem like wishful thinking. But consider the case of Jo Berry. In 1984 her father, Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by an IRA bomb at the Party Conference in Brighton. In 1999, one of the IRA members responsible, Pat Magee, was released from prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Jo’s response was a desire to meet him. She felt that trying to create a relationship with the man who had murdered her father was the best way of overcoming her anguish and anger. Since then they have met over fifty times, gradually – and often painstakingly – developing an understanding of one another’s perspectives on the bombing. Twenty-five years after the event, Jo has now launched a charity, Building Bridges for Peace, which aims to use dialogue and non-violence to promote peaceful resolutions to violent conflicts.

Jo is often asked whether she forgives Pat. Her answer is that forgiveness is not the right word or concept. What really matters, she says, is empathy. She has come to empathise with her father’s killer: ‘I’ve realised that no matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each other’s lives, we could all have done what the other did.’

Their unlikely and remarkable friendship reveals that empathy is not only possible in the most extreme circumstances, but that it can transform individual lives and is a route towards social change. Below they tell their story in the own words. First in an interview broadcast on the BBC World Service, and then in a profile for The Forgiveness Project. If Jo Berry can find a way to empathise with Pat Magee, couldn’t we all discover new possibilities for empathy in our lives?

Jo Berry

An inner shift is required to hear the story of the enemy. For me the question is always about whether I can let go of my need to blame, and open my heart enough to hear Pat’s story and understand his motivations. The truth is that sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. It’s a journey and it’s a choice, which means it’s not all sorted and put away in a box.

It felt as if a part of me died in that bomb. I was totally out of my depth but somehow I held on to a small hope that something positive would come out of the trauma. So I went to Ireland and listened to the stories of many remarkable and courageous people who’d been caught up in the violence. For the first time I felt that my pain was being heard.

In those early years I probably used the word ‘forgiveness’ too liberally – I didn’t really understand it. When I used the word on television, I was shocked to receive a death threat from a man who said I had betrayed both my father and my country.

Now I don’t talk about forgiveness. To say “I forgive you” is almost condescending – it locks you into an ‘us and them’ scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won’t change anything. But I can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgement. Sometimes when I’ve met with Pat, I’ve had such a clear understanding of his life that there’s nothing to forgive.

I wanted to meet Pat to put a face to the enemy, and see him as a real human being. At our first meeting I was terrified, but I wanted to acknowledge the courage it had taken him to meet me. We talked with an extraordinary intensity. I shared a lot about my father, while Pat told me some of his story.

Over the past two and a half years of getting to know Pat, I feel I’ve been recovering some of the humanity I lost when that bomb went off. Pat is also on a journey to recover his humanity. I know that he sometimes finds it hard to live with the knowledge that he cares for the daughter of someone he killed through his terrorist actions.

Perhaps more than anything I’ve realised that no matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each others lives, we could all have done what the other did. In other words, had I come from a Republican background, I could easily have made the same choices Pat made.

Pat Magee

Some day I may be able to forgive myself. Although I still stand by my actions, I will always carry the burden that I harmed other human beings. But I’m not seeking forgiveness. If Jo could just understand why someone like me could get involved in the armed struggle then something has been achieved. The point is that Jo set out with that intent in mind – she wanted to know why.

I decided to meet Jo because, apart from addressing a personal obligation, I felt obligated as a Republican to explain what led someone like me to participate in the action. I told her that I’d got involved in the armed struggle at the age of 19, after witnessing how a small nationalist community were being mistreated by the British. Those people had to respond. For 28 years I was active in the Republican Movement. Even in jail I was still a volunteer.

Between Jo and I, the big issue is the use of violence. I can’t claim to have renounced violence, though I don’t believe I’m a violent person and have spoken out against it. I am 100% in favour of the peace process, but I am not a pacifist and I could never say to future generations, anywhere in the world, who felt themselves oppressed, “Take it, just lie down and take it.”

Jo told me that her daughter had said after one of our meetings, “Does that mean that Grandad Tony can come back now?” It stuck with me, because of course nothing has fundamentally changed. No matter what we can achieve as two human beings meeting after a terrible event, the loss remains and forgiveness can’t embrace that loss. The hope lies in the fact that we are prepared to carry on. The dialogue has continued.

It’s rare to meet someone as gracious and open as Jo. She’s come a long way in her journey to understanding; in fact, she’s come more than half way to meet me. That’s a very humbling experience.

Expanding your empathy might offer just what you are looking for. Empathising is an avant-garde form of travel in which you step into the shoes of another person and see the world from their perspective.  It is the ultimate adventure holiday – far more challenging than a bungee jump off Victoria Falls or trekking solo across the Gobi desert.

Here are my five top tips for transforming yourself into an empathetic adventurer over the coming months.

1.CULTIVATE CURIOSITY ABOUT STRANGERS

Curiosity in action on the streets of London.

One of the best ways to develop your capacity to look through the eyes of others and escape the confines of your own worldview, is to have regular conversations with strangers, especially those outside your usual social circle. This doesn’t mean a brief chat about the weather. Rather, it involves a mutual exchange of thoughts on your most important beliefs and experiences, and – crucially – an attempt to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day – the heavily tattooed guy who delivers your post, the dignified elderly woman across the road who always wears a red beret, the new Thai employee who eats his lunch alone in the office canteen, the woman who sits in the underpass all day preening her dog. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with a stranger once a week. All it requires is courage.

2.LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES

Some bosses are not known for their empathetic sensitivity.

Ask yourself this question: When has somebody failed to empathise with me, and what difference has it made? Expanding your empathetic imagination requires recognising the impact that empathy – or its absence – has had on your own life. Perhaps you have a nasty boss who has criticised you for missing a deadline without considering that you are using every spare moment to care for your mother who has Alzheimer’s. Or maybe your partner enjoys spending each Sunday playing five-a-side football with friends, but just can’t see that it burdens you with yet another day of doing the childcare, just when you really need a break. Such experiences – when another person fails to take into account our feelings, beliefs, or daily realities – can upset us, make us angry and diminish our self-worth. Unless you happen to be a rare empathetic saint, you can also ask yourself a second question: When have I failed to empathise with other people, and why? And then a third: When have others empathised with me, and why did it matter? Exploring this triumvirate of questions is sure to help sensitise your empathetic soul.

3.TACKLE YOUR FAMILY EMPATHY DEFICIT

Take the initiative and call your sister.

The film The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy features an ingenious device called the Point-of-View Gun. When it is fired at someone, it causes them to see things from the perspective of the person who pulled the trigger. This singular weapon was designed at the request of the Intergalactic Consortium of Angry Housewives, who were tired of ending every discussion with their husbands with the statement, ‘You just don’t get it, do you!’ There is probably somebody in your family at whom you would dearly love to fire the Point-of-View Gun. But there is equally likely to be someone who would wish to fire it at you. The task before you is to identify a family member you have failed to empathise with and make an effort to do something about it. Give them a phone call or take them out for a meal and do your best to listen and understand where they are coming from. Try to get inside their skin, just like an actor attempts to inhabit their character, and grasp all the nuances of their thoughts and emotions. You might find that your irritating sister or heartless uncle do not deserve the harsh judgement you usually reserve for them.

4.TAKE AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY

What is Helen Keller thinking?

There is nothing wrong with a little armchair empathy – sitting down with a good book and letting it take you into the mental landscape and experiences of someone whose life is utterly different from your own. This is ideally done through first-person narratives, where you can hear the voice of the author or main character and let it become one with your own. These are five of my favourite empathy books, which will take you on unusual journeys into other minds:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997): enter the world of a man who is completely paralysed and can only communicate by blinking his left eye.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933): find out how to become a tramp and what you can learn as a kitchen assistant in a fancy hotel.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970): a history of the American West as told from the perspective of Native Americans such as Sitting Bull and Geronimo.

May the Lord and His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast by Tony Parker (1993): interviews with ordinary and extraordinary people about the conflict in Northern Ireland, from bus-drivers to terrorists.

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (1903): autobiography of the deaf-blind writer who reveals the beauties of the world by expanding our appreciation of the senses.

5.CHALLENGE YOUR PREJUDICES

Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticise him.

We all have prejudices or make false assumptions about others. These are frequently based on the collective labels we apply to people – like ‘single mothers’ or ‘Muslim extremists’ – without delving into their individuality and uniqueness. One of the most rewarding ways to expand your empathy is to gain direct experience of their lives, putting into practice the Native American proverb, ‘Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticise him’. How can we do this? It requires pinpointing the individual or social group who is the target of your strongest prejudices, and then inventing a way of stepping into their moccasins. So if you disdain people who live off the welfare state, spend a week trying to survive on Job Seeker’s Allowance, which currently stands at £64.30. If you detest wealthy bankers, see if you can shadow one of them at work for a day. If you are fervently religious, you might treat yourself to attending the services of religions different from your own. You get the picture. This experiential empathising is likely to be etched on your skin and memory forever.

These five ideas should provide a stimulating itinerary for your New Year’s Explorations. They may lead you to start new friendships, shift your values, rethink your ambitions and perhaps expand your moral universe. But there’s no need to let your travels stop there. Next time you are wondering where to go on holiday you might decide against a vacation in the sun and instead take the option of an escape into empathy.

I believe that empathy can help us escape from the narrow confines of our own existence and guide us towards more adventurous and fulfilling lives. Empathy is also a radical tool for social transformation that has the potential to bring about change not through new laws, policies or institutions, but through a revolution of human relationships. Barack Obama has said the most fundamental problem in modern society is ‘the empathy deficit’. Harnessing the transformative power of empathy is the great challenge of the twenty-first century.

This weekly blog will contain my own thoughts on empathy, the stories of empathetic adventurers, interviews with key empathy activists and thinkers, and act as a global portal for empathy news from around the world. I also hope it becomes a place where people can share their personal experiences of looking at life through they eyes of others.

I would like to launch this blog with a story that I hope you find as inspiring as I do.

The Locket

‘It was a sight I will never be able to forget, and it changed my life completely,’ remembers Rami Elchanan, an Israeli graphic designer. On a Thursday afternoon in September 1997, his daughter Smadar, a vivacious fourteen-year-old who loved modern dance and dreamed of becoming a doctor, had gone shopping for new school books with friends on Ben Yehuda Street in West Jerusalem. At three o’clock Rami heard news reports on his car radio of a Palestinian suicide bombing nearby that had injured hundreds and left several people dead. He immediately went looking for his daughter, frantically running from street to street, from hospital to hospital. Finally he found her. Smadar’s body was laid out in a morgue.

Rami’s immediate reaction was rage. ‘When someone murders your little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death.’ Gradually the anger subsided and his life became enveloped by an unbearable grief for the loss of his child. A year after the bombing Rami was invited to a meeting of the Parents Circle – also known as the Bereaved Families Forum – which brings together Israelis and Palestinians whose family members have been killed in the conflict. Initially reluctant and sceptical about the usefulness of such an organisation, he eventually agreed to take part. He watched with detachment as other Israeli families began to arrive. And then he witnessed something extraordinary. ‘I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women, children, coming towards me, greeting me, hugging me and crying with me. I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed in black from tip to toe and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old. A singer sang in Hebrew and Arabic, and suddenly I was hit by lightning. I can’t explain the change I underwent at that moment.’

Until then Rami, who was forty-seven at the time, had never shaken hands with a Palestinian, let alone embraced one. The meeting, for him, was a new beginning. He realised that there were Palestinians who had suffered the same sorrows as him and his family. They were united by a shared experience that allowed them to understand one another’s lives. ‘What connects us is the pain,’ he says. ‘Our blood is the same red colour, our suffering is identical, and all of us have the exact same bitter tears.’ Through his involvement with the Bereaved Families Forum, Rami was able to humanise the enemy, to see that Palestinians, not just Israelis, were victims of the conflict. ‘I had gone through a long process of demonizing them,’ he admits. ’By meeting the Palestinian bereaved families, I saw Palestinians as human beings, not caricatures in newspapers or articles or history items, but real people, crying with me. That was my turning point.’

Rami Elchanan (far right) with Palestinian members of the Bereaved Families Forum, Mazen Faraj, Fadi Abu Awwad and Aziz Abu Sarah.

Since that first meeting Rami has dedicated himself to the cause of Israeli -Palestinian reconciliation and the pioneering work of the Bereaved Families Forum, whose membership comprises over five hundred families. He took part in a unique project where bereaved Israelis travelled to a hospital in Ramallah and donated blood for Palestinian victims, while bereaved Palestinian families went to Jerusalem and donated blood to the Israeli Red Cross. Another initiative, called ‘Hello Peace’, is an unusual form of answering service. You dial a freephone number and if you are Israeli you can speak with a Palestinian, and if you are Palestinian you talk to an Israeli. Since it began in 2002, there have been over a million conversations between the two sides. While some calls begin as screaming matches, others have led to lasting friendships.

Rami Elchanan, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, is regularly abused and ridiculed in Israeli circles for fraternising with the relatives of suicide bombers. But he knows that there is no hope of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without mutual understanding, without conversations between strangers that erode the distance of ignorance: ‘We must be prepared to listen to ‘the other’. Because if we will not listen to the other’s story we won’t be able to understand the source of their pain and we should not expect the other to understand our own.’