Have you heard about our recent Impact Safari to Israel & Palestine? Over 10 transformational days, an intimate group of 15 storytellers, authors, entrepreneurs, and change-making leaders were able to experience the complexity and beauty of the incandescent region of Israel and Palestine with a local’s lens.
From breaking bread in Palestinian families homes and sitting in circle with the Ex-Priminister of Israel to discussions with social impact documentary creators and rare insights into pioneering peace-negotiation strategies happening on the ground. The group engaged with the dual narratives playing out across the region; Israeli and Palestinian, religious and secular, ancient legacies and innovative futures.
This is the professional and personal development we need when we think about leadership for a hopeful future. Many of the conflicting narratives the group explored were uncomfortable because every leader today needs to be able to understand real complexity, particularly how to see the perspective of those they don’t agree with, to help us navigate through the huge divides that are forming in our societies.
Amidst scooter rides down Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, many plates of hummus, storytelling around the campfire in the desert and floating weightlessly in the Dead Sea, life long friendships were formed as the group navigated how we can consider the multiple narratives facing our world and our work today, and how we can learn to hold the complexity, sit in the discomfort and engage in deeper dialogue to reconnect and rediscover the world anew.
The group was co-lead by Palestinian peace-activist and National Geographic explorer Aziz Abu Sarah, as well as Israel-born founder of Small Giants Academy Danny Almagor. While the two leads guided us through the region from remote villages in the West Bank to the most contested and sacred sites of Jerusalem, co-facilitator Eleanor Gammell held sharing circles for the group to ground themselves in humility and vulnerability as they grappled with the big questions around conflict, innovation and conditioned narratives.
With awe, the group looked across the rolling hills of the Middle Eastern Desert and the Jordan Valley as the water merged with the sky as if without horizon. With humility, the group witnessed thousands in deep prayer at walls built to contain and control. With grief, the group sat over meals with bereaved families who have lost their children to conflict, and with joy, the group experienced the power of connection between humans despite all odds, and the extraordinary innovation and cultural expression (dance, film, art and music) coming out of a yearning for peace and connection.
Impact Safari is not about the experience of a tourist. Impact Safari is an invitation for leaders to go deeper, to travel with consciousness, deep connection and learning. The recent journey to Israel & Palestine was life changing for our group who sat with the big, complex questions to listen, to learn and to check their own assumptions at the door. Expanding their thinking into the liminal space between competing narratives, the group returned home with deep connection and hearts wide open, bearing witness to this extraordinary planet we call home in order to move forward into new ways of being.
