Daniel Taub and the art of constructive disagreement

As an Israeli diplomat and negotiator, Daniel Taub has experienced far more than his fair share of arguments. But his new book, Beyond Dispute, is not about shunning disagreements, but instead how to disagree constructively. As the tagline for his event in North West London last night said: “Don’t argue less, Argue better!”

That’s fortunate, since as Moses discovered in the Wilderness when he regularly referred to the children of Israel as a “stiff-necked people”, arguing less has never really been an option. But Taub, the former Israeli ambassador to the UK, reckons that it was a little later in our history that learning how to argue constructively was vital to our survival.

“The Jewish approach to argument is not to be found in the Bible”, he told the audience last night, at a joint JW3-Jewish News event chaired by TV star and professional barrister Rob Rinder.

“If there was an argument in the Bible, it was by and large resolved by a bolt of lightning or the ground opening up, which is a great way to win an argument, if you can do it. But what happened 2000 years ago is that the Jewish world went through an incredible crisis, and the point that I make is that social crisis, which gave rise to a new form of Judaism, and with it, a new thinking about argument, is very, very similar to the social crisis that a lot of Western societies are going through today.

“It arose as a result of the destruction of the Temple and the exile and the loss of prophecy and the loss of the priesthood. But in practice, it meant we had no shared social centres, no common trust in authority, no common sources of information.”

Multiple streams of Judaism did not survive. But the Rabbis “reinvented Judaism and reinvented the notion of argument. And what they said is, ‘no longer is truth going to be something that comes down from above. Maybe we would have liked that, but that’s not possible today. Truth is going to become a collaborative exercise. It’s going to have to be something that we work out together’.”

That format, Taub describes, is enshrined in the Talmud.

“If you ask a kid, you can even ask a six year old who is in a yeshiva what they’ve been studying in Talmud, they will reply with something called the Shakla V’tarya, which means the to and fro of the argument…this rabbi says this. This rabbi says this, this one counters with this, this one brings this proof.  You can ask the CEO of a Fortune 500 company what happened in a board meeting, how was a decision arrived at, and ask him to summarise the arguments, and it would be very difficult for him, because we tend to think in binary bottom line terms. And what that means is we are losing an enormous amount of the value of that debate.”

Taub’s new work, praised by Rinder as “erudite, insightful unexpectedly hopeful… part Malcolm Gladwell, part Talmudic essay, and completely compelling”, is not just about disagreements internal to the Jewish people, but arguments with others. His own experience as a negotiator, sitting across the table from Palestinians in what must be the most entrenched geopolitical disagreement on the planet, brings an extra level of complexity and interest to the book.

“One of the things that I’ll sometimes do in difficult conversations, when somebody states their position certainly certainty, I’d say, can you give yourself a percentage chance evaluation of how much you think that position is right”, he says.

“Very rarely will people give it 100%. They might be in the high 90s, but the moment that they recognize that there is a little space between where they are and their position is, that’s where it narrows the space between you and the other thing.”

He also described how he found “how personally impacted I was by the power of stories to change your mind. I was involved in many rounds of negotiations, and I can hardly think of a case where the person on the other side of the table brought up a fact or a data point that I wasn’t prepared for and that I couldn’t counter in one way or another, but I wasn’t ready for the stories.”

As an experienced negotiator, Taub cites how he “tried as far as possible to focus on those situations in which I had felt myself impacted or persuaded or changed. And in many, many cases that is stories… I’ll give you an example from the negotiating room in our early rounds of negotiations with the Palestinians, the Palestinians were trying to convey to us how it felt to have Israel’s insistence on security provisions, you know, saying we’ll pull out this territory, but we need to have the right to do this, that and the other. And the way that they conveyed it to us was telling us an old Arab fable called Musa’s hook, the story of a mischievous young fellow called Musa who sells his house, but he sells his house on the condition that he can continue to use a hook that is hanging on the wall in the house. And the guy thinks, well, that’s not very problematic, and the house is a good price. And so he buys the house. But then after that, Musa is coming in and out of the house every hour of the day or night, to put his hat there, to put his coat there, to take it off, and so on and so forth. And finally, the guy can’t take it anymore, and packs up and leaves the house. And they were using this story as a shorthand way of saying, ‘This is how it feels to us’.”

Few things nowadays cause bigger arguments – both inside the community and outside – than discussions about Israel. Taub stresses that he tells people “not to try and be defence attorneys for Israel, but rather to act as character witnesses”, and that people should find the element of Israeli society which speaks the most to them and work to build their connection to it. Within Israel itself, of course, prior to 7 October the country was riven by internal conflict over attempts to limit the Supreme Court’s authority – an issue that has receded into the background since, but hasn’t entirely gone away. But Taub describes how he has “a bunch of kids who are serving, have served over the last two years, when they come back from the front, there is this kind of moment of hesitation before they enter back into Israeli society, where these arguments don’t make sense.

“They have just come from a place where they will be with people of different religious backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds, different political backgrounds, and they were in foxholes together, and they were in tanks together.

“The challenge that they place in front of others is, where are the foxholes and tanks in Israeli society, where we can conduct those conversations.”

Beyond Dispute (Hachette UK) is now available at a wide range of UK bookshops, as well as via online retailers.