For years, I have sat in dialogue rooms across from people whose politics, experiences, and understanding of the place we both call home were very different from mine. I shared my story, listened attentively to theirs, and tried to stay open even when it was painful. I believed in those rooms, and I think a part of me still does.
Somewhere along the way, though, I got tired. Not of the disagreements or the people, but of going back to the same conversations, explaining the same realities, and offering the same vulnerability, only to leave unable to say what our meeting had changed. Dialogue does matter. It complicates the stories we tell about each other and turns an abstraction into a person. I have seen relationships form among people who were taught to fear or distrust one another. But dialogue can also become a place to hide from harder work.
In those rooms, I told stories of the Nakba, expulsion and internal displacement. I described discrimination and inequalities in access to land, resources, and freedom of movement. People listened, and some were moved to tears. Then the session ended, and we returned to very different realities. One of us might return to a refugee camp while another drove home to a house by the sea. I returned to a society where, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I experienced discrimination in law and everyday life, while others returned to a system that afforded them greater rights and privileges because they were Jewish. Whatever had happened between us in that room had not changed the conditions waiting outside it.
Even the word peace has begun to ring hollow for many of us, not because we have stopped wanting it, but because we have heard it too often without justice beside it. Peace can come to mean quiet, or simply the ability to stay in the same room without confronting what exists outside it. For those living with the consequences of injustice, that is not the peace Palestinian Christian theology asks us to pursue. This insistence that peace and justice belong together is not new. The 2009 Kairos Palestine document speaks of being “ready for reconciliation once justice has been restored.” I have returned to that distinction often because it names something I struggled for years to articulate: peace that asks us to live quietly with injustice is not reconciliation.
There is a certain comfort in saying that a conflict just needs people to sit together, listen, and recognize each other’s humanity. In certain Christian spaces, it can even pass for reconciliation. But what happens when everyone has listened and the injustice is still there? For those living with it, dialogue is never neutral. It takes real labor to keep making your life understandable to someone who gets to encounter your reality as a conversation. You explain, listen, offer painful experiences for someone else’s learning, extend empathy, and hope it will eventually be extended to you. Often, you are expected to do all of this graciously.
Womanist theology has helped me think differently about that expectation. Delores Williams, writing from the particular history of Black women in America, challenged Christian traditions that treat suffering as redemptive when its burden keeps falling on people who are already exploited. Her context is not mine, and I don’t want to blur the two, but the question her work raises carries over for me: Who is being asked to suffer so that someone else can be transformed? I have started asking something similar about peacebuilding. Who does its emotional work? Who keeps going back to the room to explain, forgive, empathize, and wait? And when we admire that work, do we stop asking why it is needed at all?
My own understanding of peace has also been shaped by years in advocacy and international relations. I learned ways of talking about peace through agreements, stability, institutions, and the absence of violence. Those things matter, but lived experience has pushed me toward a more difficult question: What kind of peace, and for whom? Scripture asks us to take that question seriously. In Jeremiah, God condemns those who “dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, NIV). It is difficult for me to read those words without thinking about how easily we can mistake the language of peace for peace itself.
Jesus does not ask us to avoid uncomfortable truths for the sake of keeping people at the table either. He tells his listeners that if they remember someone has something against them, they should leave their gift at the altar and “first go and be reconciled” (Matthew 5:23-24, NIV). Reconciliation, in that teaching, is something you get up and do. That distinction has become more important to me as my own work has changed. I used to see peacebuilding and advocacy as separate kinds of work, but I no longer do. I have not stopped believing in reconciliation, but I have changed what I think it requires. I have not given up on peace, but have become more demanding about what we mean by it.
Sometimes building peace means creating a space where people can meet. Sometimes it means asking those who have encountered injustice what they will do about it. Sometimes it means organizing, advocating, and backing the people working to change the conditions that produced it. And sometimes it means admitting that another dialogue circle is not enough. Dialogue itself is not the danger. The danger is letting it stand in as proof that we have done something just because something meaningful happened in the room.
I used to leave a good dialogue feeling that something had been accomplished, and I think many of us do. Being moved, listening well, and staying in relationship are good things, but they do not measure whether an encounter mattered. That gets decided by what we do once we have left the room. If sitting together does not change how we spend our time, our money, or our voices, I am not sure what it was for.
So what are we willing to change because we sat together?
