“The exercise of getting ready for statehood was a concern for some as it represented unilateralism by the Palestinians. I am here to tell everyone it is indeed unilateralism. This is as it should be because it is about building a Palestinian state. It is about getting ready for Palestinian statehood. If we Palestinians don't build it, who is going to build it for us?”

—Salam Fayyad

Prime Minister of Palestine

Herzliya Conference on Strategic Governance, Israel

February 3, 2010

The Birth of New Indigenous Thinking

On a moonlit night in late October 2004, two men sat at an outdoor café in the Yemeni Quarter in Tel Aviv engaged in casual conversation over light Middle Eastern fare. Raffi Nasser was a successful securities trader on Wall Street, and came from an Arab Jewish family with a long history in the region. For centuries, his ancestors were a part of the cultural fabric of the ancient city of Aleppo, just a few hours’ drive to the north-east. His family migrated to Europe soon after the creation of the State of Israel. The other man, Neri Bar-On, who would become the head of the Center for Human Emergence in Israel in later years, came from an ancestry of European Jews. He looked deceptively ordinary in his attire but, in reality, Bar-On was a celebrated star in the micro-chip industry for his contribution to nano-technology.

A Palestinian co-worker and engineer, Mounir Bannoura, had written a technical book about Bar-On's proprietary technologies and their contribution to Motorola's domination of the cellphone market in the 1990s. Israel is full of bright engineers who are at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy. At any given time, a passer-by can hear conversations in the cafés between men talking enthusiastically about what might be next on the high-tech horizon. Tel Aviv is a technological hub, an oasis of innovation on the Mediterranean shore. It remains a leading source of high-tech inventions in the world, second only to Silicon Valley.

On that October night, sitting in the café overlooking the Mediterranean, these two men were not discussing the next big thing in technology or business. They were focused on a different type of value – a product that no amount of money or military might have been able to deliver to the region. They were focused on bringing lasting security and peace to their beloved Israel through new methods. They were hoping to initiate a movement at a grassroots level where Israelis and Palestinians could talk to each other through a new prism of values, instead of the historic polarized positions on both sides of the ACE Model.¹

Earlier that evening Nasser and Bar-On had moderated a deep discussion in the field of conflict resolution based on Don Beck's pioneering work in South Africa.² That evening the words “memetics” and “large-scale psychology” in terms of generating change came together for the first time on Middle Eastern soil. The failure of Israel and Palestine to understand each other's cultural value systems was a significant insight to the salon participants. Israelis were getting their first lesson in the scientific differential diagnostic tools for determining what ails a culture, understanding socio-cultural emergence, and remedies for cultural value-system conflicts. It would be ground-breaking to use a platform, similar to what Beck recommended for the South Africans, to try to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As they parted ways that evening, both men were convinced that this fresh approach could create a possible shift in thinking. It would certainly represent the first substantive change in the Israeli approach in over three decades. This could be the ultimate tool for facilitating peace and building essential soft skills, and their goal was to place it in the hands of Israelis at all levels of society.

At that time in my life, I had been a consultant for Arab businesses for a few years, and was forging a pioneering path in the use of the bio-psycho-spiritual dimension of leadership in a culture I knew well. I was mostly engaged in executive leadership training in cultural values for both Western corporations looking to understand the hows and whys of cultures of Middle Eastern businesses and Middle Eastern corporations looking to develop capacities to understand the behaviors of their employees.

It is customary for a mid-size enterprise in the Middle East to have its top management team from ten different Western countries, middle management from 30 different countries, and thousands of low-level employees from any of the third-world countries in Northern Africa and from the Asian sub-continent. Just like the Israelis were realizing that there might be alternative ways of approaching peace, I had no doubt that a similar understanding could be brought to the Arab world by employing a holistic approach through the Large-Scale Psychology framework. The Middle East was my birthplace, and Arabic was my mother tongue. Understanding what the region needed in order to emerge had become my lifelong goal.

By 2004 I had known Dr Beck for a number of years and had been following his work. We were both excited about the possibilities to work together, but didn't give it much thought at the time since we both understood the magnitude of the task at hand and the enormous political barriers that could prevent any meaningful work from taking root. We both knew that US Middle East policy-makers had been stuck in their thinking for decades. Washington had become a closed system.

There was little to no possibility of any work being sponsored by the USA government or a Washington establishment. Beck had tried to influence fellow Texan George W. Bush and his aide Karl Rove. I, on the other hand, understood how previous Middle East peace treaties were orchestrated by successive administrations purely for political gain. For Washington, the Mideast peace card was always an ace in the hole.

In early 2005, Nasser attended a lecture offered by Beck in New York City on the subject of conflict resolution as seen through the eyes of the Spiral Dynamics Theory and ^VACE. Nasser met Beck for the first time after the lecture, and was able to share with him the grand vision he and his Israeli colleagues had about the use of cultural value systems as the essential tool for the resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. After a few minutes of discussion Beck accepted Nasser's invitation to come to Israel for an initial assessment of the Israeli/Palestinian situation. No grand promises were made as to the extent of Beck's involvement or as to where the first visit might lead.

About a week later, Beck called to ask if I would go with him to Israel to explore the possibility of working on the conflict. My first thought was why would I be needed in Israel when my cultural knowledge was the Arab world? My skepticism quickly disappeared when I realized that my contribution to the Israelis could be invaluable if they were open to understanding their neighbors from a cultural value-systems approach. To my husband's dismay, I quickly cleared my calendar of consulting engagements and agreed to join Beck on his first visit. Bar-On, Nasser and Orin couldn't have been happier. To them the admixture of a Texan and an Arab advocating jointly for a value-systems view of the Middle East was a powerful combination – breaking every stereotype on both sides.

Preparations to put a framework in place began in earnest. Beck and I began to guide our Israeli friends on the infrastructure that they needed to prepare prior to our visit. From the get-go, Beck presented the qualities of transparency needed for Seventh-Level YELLOW leadership. Meanwhile, I began my search for similarly qualified Palestinians whom I might work with – those who understood the culture well and were capable of systemic thinking. The name Nafiz Rifai kept coming up in various conversations with colleagues. I was then formally introduced to him through a mutual friend.

Rifai, a third-generation Fatah leader, had spent time in Israeli jails for his political views. He was imprisoned with Marwan Barghouti (the Mandela of Palestine) and the two created a learning community similar to Mandela's Robben Island University. Young Palestinians serving time in the same jail had no choice but to learn English and Hebrew and engage in intellectual discourse. Some even earned master's degrees while there. Rifai had written several successful novels and had the personal presence of a deep thinker who commanded respect.

Our other partner on the Palestinian side was Abdel Majid Suwaiti, member of the third generation Fatah and a man of the people who knew the Palestinian tribal mores and was respected by Palestinians of all ages. Both men were fighters who, after years of struggle, turned to the power of the word rather than the gun to find prudent solutions to the conflict.

Beck and I spent months in communication with our newly-found partners on both sides to make sure they understood how our initiative was going to address the anatomy of the conflict from the start. We carefully coached both sides on how to find the center positions in each culture separately before we might bring Israelis and Palestinians together. A good understanding of the shift that needed to take place in both cultures transpired. They began discussions on each side in preparation for our initiative to be sustainable.

To insure against any perceived biases in the conflict, Beck turned down any Israeli financial sponsorship and chose not to pursue funding from the US State Department for this venture. Instead he turned to business colleagues who had gained a competitive edge through utilizing Beck's management consulting talents in applying the value-systems approach. These were “conscious” CEOs in the United States who fully understood the values of the Seventh-Level YELLOW system and the superordinate purpose of our project. Many of them also understood Beck's profound involvement in South Africa and were standing by to fund any similar project he wanted to undertake.

PURPLE–RED Villages and BLUE–ORANGE Towns

In February 2006, Don Beck and I made our first trip to the Middle East accompanied by Susan Vance, a former Colonel in the US Air Force representing Hearthstone Global Foundation, the charity that sponsored our work. Hearthstone's founder, John Smith, is a conscious business leader, had never visited Israel or Palestine, and had no biases to either side of the conflict, but understood the powerful methodologies of Beck's work.

On that day in February, I was the last person to clear Israeli customs after the necessary questioning customary for Arab-Americans. Beck stayed with me through the last interrogation. He later complained about the treatment I received from a journalist from the Israeli daily, Haaretz, who was there reporting on the initiative. As we got into our cab I started pointing out to Beck the different Arab villages along the way, and how the different architecture defined the simple ancient homes. His only response was “PURPLE.” Then we passed modern Israeli settlements. His only comment was “RED–BLUE with ORANGE architecture.” This was my insight on how to keep my focus on the framework – absorbing the culture through the lenses of the Spiral.

Many Israelis were gathered in anticipation of our arrival. They wanted to hear about the framework that changed South Africa. For an entire week, we met with influential change agents, academics and politicians in Tel Aviv and Herzliya. At Tel Aviv University, Professor Ephraim Ya'ar, the creator of the Peace Index which tracks highs and lows of Israeli public sentiment, was happy to meet with us to see how our framework might enhance the predictive measures within his research. The level of ORANGE sophistication I witnessed in the Israeli academic institutions rivaled that of the best universities in the United States.

Among the politicians we met with were Gilead Sher, the former Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Barak and one of the chief architects of the Peace Accords with Palestine. During our meeting, Beck made reference to the white paper “Hard Truths and Fresh Start” that he authored in 1991, about why the peace accords could not succeed and why traditional negotiation methodologies failed to detect the anatomy of the conflict resulting in polarization and alienation on both sides, perpetuating mistrust. Mr Sher, a seasoned negotiator, understood the approach and remains in contact with Beck to this day.

Later that week, we presented the Spiral Dynamics (SD) framework to a group of professors at Bar-Ilan University. One of the professors was so enthusiastic about the framework that he decided to teach it during his next semester. The new insights these professors uncovered heightened their intellectual passion as they debated the implication of the shift in views, and what would be needed in order to reach the “two-state solution.”

Our first week concluded with a public presentation, the first of its kind in Israel, to over two hundred people. We talked about the innovative science of value systems and Beck presented the macro-memetic view of his work in global hotspots like South Africa, being careful not to mention the word “Apartheid.” My presentation focused on the ^VMEMEtic structures of the different regions of the Arab world, and I updated the attendees on the role that women and the younger generations were playing in shifting business and cultural paradigms.

The following week was our opportunity to work with our Palestinian partners. As our cab drove us through wide roads lined with the ORANGE architecture of Tel Aviv, we wound our way through bumpy passages in PURPLE villages and a few BLUE checkpoints, and finally made it to the West Bank. Rifai had arranged for a local news network to meet with us to discuss the purpose of our initiative. After about an hour, the reporter suggested that we film additional interviews by the Wall of Separation that separates Israel from the West Bank to capture what many Palestinians have come to call the “Wall of Injustice.”

After we were given a tour of this concrete barrier, we understood what this young man was talking about. The wall separated families and neighbors. We also saw the opportunity to direct his passion (and that of his viewers) toward proactive efforts at reducing the rhetoric as to why Israel built the wall in the first place. However, unjust as the Palestinians felt the wall to be, our task was not to judge or justify the rightness or wrongness of its purpose. Our goal was to bring both sides to the center position of moderates, pragmatists and conciliators who might influence their respective cultures to the point that the wall would disappear on its own, like the one in Berlin.

There is no military effort included in this strategy. Military positions can no longer define the two cultures. It is simply a hearts and minds appeal to both populations where codes of self-reliance, respect for institutions, desire for prosperity and, later, peaceful co-existence will come to define the meme stack on both sides.

In an effort to inject these codes through the media, Beck and I pointed to the resilience of Palestinians everywhere in the world. From brilliant professors and philosophers, like Edward Said, who were shaping the minds of future global leaders, to bankers, managers and engineers who made the modern-day Middle East so attractive to businessmen. We also pointed to the highly-educated public in the West Bank and Gaza, and the scientific discoveries at universities in the West Bank. We discovered that the Palestinian youth were flexible, and therein lay an opportunity for shaping the thinking of future Palestinian leaders.

In addition to media outlets, we met with influential politicians, including the Governor of Bethlehem. The meeting started with the usual canned speech Palestinian politicians gave to Americans. They talk about the occupation and the checkpoints and what the US should do to improve the lives of Palestinians. Half-way through the Governor's speech Rifai re-introduced Beck as a fighter who worked side by side with the Zulus in South Africa to help them claim their freedom. The Governor informed Rifai that he would make the resources of his office available to facilitate our mission.

We also met with a number of Palestinian Parliament members, and listened to the concerns their constituents had about the occupation and struggles with Palestinian governmental agencies. The times that we weren't meeting with government officials and organized groups we were doing our own research into the life conditions of Palestinians. We visited refugee camps. We talked to people on the streets and in coffee shops. We visited the grounds of a mosque during services held for a young suicide bomber to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics that created the deadly meme. We used traditional channels of information and readily available research, and combined them with our own findings in order to begin to paint a more accurate value-systems view of the Palestinian culture. Our first visit pioneered new methods for uncovering the dynamics that contributed to conflict, the first macro-memetic picture of the Middle East.

The week with the Palestinians concluded with a town hall meeting at the Palestinian Women's Center. Beck and I delivered a presentation on our framework and engaged many participants, including a group of professors at Bethlehem University, on how to use the Spiral model to begin a shift toward empowering women and Palestinian youth. At the end of the evening the president of the women's organization presented me with their 50th anniversary book commemorating the women of Palestine. She pointed to the fact that one of the original, founding women of their organization was a Maalouf.

Empathy and the Five-Deep Strategy

Understanding what ails a culture is not an easy task. The best one can do is try to understand what keeps it in an arrested state, and prevents it from emerging into higher levels of existence. The goal of the first year of our mission was to teach those who were open to the framework, but more so to listen and learn. This essential element of the Indigenous Design process informs the alignment of the model to the culture. To a Seventh-Level YELLOW system designer, there is no higher priority than this first step in large-scale design. Listening at this level takes on a completely different dimension from listening in the First-Tier systems. This a space of deep empathy that not only addresses the surface behavior of a culture but employs a specific five-layer deep strategy that penetrates to the core of the bio-psycho-social roots of a conflict.

Peace accords are political manipulations, and not culture-wide solutions, so they become quick fixes that only apply to surface manifestations, the symptoms of a problem. This is essentially the tip of the iceberg in cultural complexity, and navigating through the visible surface ice will not result in a deep or lasting peace. When compared to our center's approach, a traditional conflict assessment barely penetrates the second layer of MEMEtocracy's 5-Deep Assessment Model (Figure 6.1).

In our first year of work in Israel and Palestine we intentionally began to look underneath the surface to understand the real-world life conditions, fears and values. Beyond the manifested actions and behaviors, we looked into the systems and structures that contributed to the behavior. With the help of the Indigenous Intelligence of our Indigenous Intelligence Experts (IIEs) on both sides, we then looked at the mindsets and ways of thinking: personal, institutional and societal. It is crucial to understand each culture's world view, including how it sees itself, its neighbors, its region and the world, and how that affects the design and the culture of its institutions.

Then we examined the memetic codes of each culture in an effort to assess the preference and priorities of the different groups belonging to each value system and what shaped its indigenous content. We explored the what or the who it held in the highest esteem, and where certain issues ranked on its list of priorities. Finally, we looked at the life conditions within each culture. We examined the factors that make ^VMEMEs surge, emerge, regress, or, in the worst cases, fade and become toxic. Was each progressive peace treaty just another translation of previous, failed peace accords, or did it have the potential to be transformational in the light of the evolving times? Were either the Israelis or the Palestinians stuck in their views of history to the point that positions on either side of the values spectrum ignored reality? Would those on the ground become naturally polarized because of misalignment with the times?

We also examined the importance of place, which takes center stage in this conflict as both sides claim one area as their ancestral land. We looked at the internal challenges that faced each culture, and the external challenges that might shape any final outcome in a negotiated settlement. Then we examined the circumstances that defined the socio-economic class, the political class and educational levels on both sides. In studying life conditions, an examination of circumstances must include the external dynamics that influence each side as well as the internal dynamics. We had to examine how much military, financial and international aid played a part in redefining the internal circumstances of each culture, and whether these influences and authorities distorted the views of the various positions on the ^VACE spectrum.

We further assessed who or what power mechanism controlled the flow of resources. The diagnostic tools that we had were made available to anyone (on either side) who held CAPI (authority, power, or influence)³ allowing them to see how they might make a difference in the future direction of Middle East peace. With the help of indigenous intelligences (stakeholders) in both the Palestinian and Israeli cultures, we were able to fashion a model of the ^VMEMEtic profile of each society that we later used as a general guide for the design aspects of our mission.

We did not go to the Middle East with preconceived strategies or views to impose on either side. We wanted to examine the existing assumptions for fallacies and deficiencies that were perpetuating the status quo. We introduced a body of knowledge and methodologies that people could use to solve the problems that existed, and that were based on a more complex system than the ones that initially created the problems.

We were careful not to make any grand promises. We provided insightful presentations that addressed the basic commonalities we all share as human beings on our endless quest to create more meaning in our lives. In Israel we listened to politicians, peace negotiators, academics and business leaders, educated women and young people, who spoke passionately about the hopes and dreams for peace and harmony.

On the Palestinian side we listened to parliamentarians, governors, professors and various leaders of women's and youth organizations describing their views and the challenges facing their emerging state. We were educated by both sides on the intricate realities of their daily challenges, and heard their vision of what it meant to live side by side. We listened to the codes that defined a successful Palestine. We captured patterns from the Israelis of what it meant to be under constant threat of attack.

By the end of the first year of research we had a better ^VMEMEtic picture of the dysfunction. The Israelis, much like the West, expected a partner in peace to be fully developed in the BLUE Fourth-Level system. Yet Israel, the West, the Arabs and the Palestinians themselves had done little to help assure that Palestinian institutions would have the resilience to maintain a prolonged presence at this stage of development. This is what the results of our research kept pointing to, and it was confirmed by our on-the-ground experiences.

One of the most significant factors that Beck and I set out to uncover during the first year of our mission was an assessment of whether both cultures were ready for change. Was either side Arrested or Closed in any part of the memetic structure of their value systems? With the level of interest we generated during our presence, it was clear that both sides actively desired an alternative way to move beyond the failed negotiations of the past. The high level of enthusiasm on both sides came as a surprise to us. I wasn't sure whether the attraction was for learning new perspectives because they wanted to hear about Beck's insights on South Africa or whether it was because they really wanted a change. Of all the media coverage of our first-year activities, Akiva Eldar of the Israeli daily Haaretz (2008, n.p.) captured our approach best. “Instead of coexistence, live and let live, I prefer prosper and let prosper, grow and let grow.”

Creating Israel's ^VMEMEtic Profile

The “prosper and grow” strategy is a key driver, a superordinate goal behind large-scale nation-building psychology. It is what defines the functionality behind MEMEtocracy and directs the healthy expressions of countries away from the path of destruction. I mentioned earlier Beck's white paper titled “Hard Truths and Fresh Start” (2014) where he predicted the failure of every peace accord. It was that paper that got me to believe that an alternative solution for Mideast peace was possible. Since 1991 Beck had hypothesized that at the root of the failed negotiations was the difference in the cultural development stages between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This was at the core of what he believed had prevented lasting peace and prosperity from taking root.

Now that we were on the ground in both countries with a team of competent IIEs, we had the chance to test Beck's hypothesis. We spent much time trying to verify the developmental gaps that have led to the failure of those peace initiatives. Although the questionnaire is called the Global Values Monitor, the assessments are adjusted by the Integral Design Architects (IDAs) with the input of the IIEs to capture the deeper memetic profile of their society. Our data from that first year of engagement and research confirmed that Israel has its center of gravity in BLUE–ORANGE values with a healthy presence in the GREEN ^VMEME.

The founding principles of Israel were born out of the values of BLUE political Zionism that emerged during the Industrial-Age, ORANGE values of Europe. This was a state that had been defined by institutions and the belief in the rule of law since its creation in 1948. BLUE is the beginning of abstract thinking that replaces personal power with the power of the institution. Respect for these institutions is the key to the foundation of every first-world country, organization and human society. Although much criticism continues to be leveled at the treatment of the Palestinians and the bloody history that established the country, Arab Israelis that hold Israeli citizenship today have more individual rights than most Arabs do in their own countries. However, limited their power is, they still benefit from the social programs and institutions of Israeli culture.

There is great support for Israel from a highly successful Jewish diaspora around the world, including a strong political lobby in the United States. There is great resilience in the people who believe in a homeland for the Jewish people. While we were laying the groundwork for our research we could not escape the presence of one of the densest BLUE codes that define a complex culture. In 2006, Prime Minister Olmert was being investigated for accepting an illegal campaign contribution or bribe which ultimately cost him the leadership of the Kadima Party and led to his resignation as prime minister.

This was a BLUE code that spoke loudly and clearly to us. It provided the thin slicing that gave us a forensic look into how well the different branches of government worked and, more importantly, how the culture held its elected officials accountable. This was a nation of law and order. Mr Olmert seemed to respect this code in his resignation speech: “I am proud to be a citizen of a country in which a prime minister can be investigated like any other citizen.”⁴ This particular brand of BLUE is yet to emerge in many parts of the Arab world, or elsewhere. Sadly, such scandals in the United States never reach the level of absolute clarity either. It is rare that the letter of the law costs a politician his or her political career.

Some of the other, more sensitive memetic profiling, like the culture of the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Knesset, were done by Beck with the help of our Israeli partners. According to him, although the Defense Ministry exhibited some of the brightest and most advanced ORANGE technologies and training, it still lagged behind on reading the ^VMEMEtic profiles of Palestinians crossing checkpoints. Beck offered to train the Israeli guards at the checkpoints on how to develop better sensitivities to the values of the Palestinians who were crossing.

Although the military intelligence was superior, their psycho-social skills in understanding the cultural codes of their neighbors and the rest of the region still lagged behind. When Beck asked them to explain this deficiency, high-ranking military officials told him that many in the military sought training in Systemic Design and Leadership. In addition to dealing with military BLUE, the training taught Generals and Commanders how to deal with ORANGE and GREEN values, but they failed to communicate these complex principles to soldiers on the front lines who faced RED existential threats from their neighbors. The lack of clear BLUE guidelines in the military command and control structure of the IDF was evident in the heavy losses they incurred in their ground invasion of southern Lebanon in the 30-day war of 2006. Most of the damage that was inflicted on Lebanon came from air strikes while the tactical and strategic ground movement suffered the loss of over 160 soldiers in just a few days.

As we continued to construct the Israeli ^VMEMEtic profile, our Israeli partners arranged for Beck to meet Knesset members from the newly-formed Kadima party. On the Israeli value spectrum, Kadima at the time represented the pragmatist position led by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. It represented the hopes of the Israeli for a unilateral decision to disengage from settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank. In our view, this represented Israel's entry into the ORANGE political values of “let's make a deal.”

With unilateral disengagement, Hamas declared the Israeli actions a victory for themselves and took control over Gaza, undermining the Palestinian Authority and weakening Kadima in the process. To the CHE-Mideast, these dynamics were yet another signal of how much more work needed to be done on the Palestinian side. It also confirmed that when Israel was under an existential threat, all sides shifted to a patriotic (hard-core) BLUE position making any peace efforts or negotiations from other spectrum positions disappear.

Figure 6.2 and 6.3 display two value-system profiles for Israel. Often when an individual or social entity, like a nation or tribe, is confronted by conflict, it will “hunker down” and exhibit the attributes of a previous value system. Thus the Israeli ORANGE–GREEN was not in play at the border as much as BLUE. Many other codes on the Israeli side came together from other areas to complete our ^VMEMEtic profile of the country. These came to us from many segments of the business community that represented the most innovative ORANGE in the region. Traditional ORANGE had the healthiest of all expressions. These were the older entrepreneurs who built modern-day Israel and had working relationships with Palestinian entrepreneurs. They had a sense of patriotic responsibility toward solving the conflict. Because they believed in the two-state solution, they listened intently to Beck and invited us to keep the dialogue open.

The ORANGE of the knowledge economy, however, was a completely different ^VMEME, and to us it was an early indication of disconnect in Israeli culture. The most innovative forms of ORANGE-entering-YELLOW were totally disconnected from the political process. These young entrepreneurs whose startup ventures crowd the NASDAQ have a personal ambition that enables them to feel that they're in charge of their destiny rather than dominated by cultural tradition and its characterizations. Palestinians, Arabs and the Israeli political establishment don't exist within their ^VMEMEtic profile of their group.

It was as if Israel's long-term prosperity and safety had nothing to do with what they were engaged in. The only thing they wanted was to know how our methodologies might offer them a more competitive edge in their business practices. They did not want to be bogged down by a slow-moving peace process. Their lives moved at the speed of the internet. As much as the values of this group were representative of the future of Israel, they were unfortunately in total disconnect from reality on the ground. In a way, they wanted to live and prosper in denial.

In the mosaic that forms the ^VMEMEtic profile of Israel, the GREEN codes appeared in the mothers and grandmothers helping Palestinians at checkpoints and documenting all abuses by the Israeli Defense soldiers. GREEN was also present in some former IDF soldiers we met who went to India after their military service in order to deepen their understanding of human nature. After achieving “inner peace,” they came back to an arrested BLUE state and the ongoing realities of the conflict.

GREEN codes were healthiest in the communities that the Israeli Integral Salons attracted. These salons attracted individuals from every background who represented Israel's potential to ascend to the Seventh-Level YELLOW system. Since they held little political clout, the movement couldn't reach the critical mass it needed to redefine Israeli values. Now (in 2013) the social movement in Israel has taken on the GREEN mantle triggered by the global phenomenon of the Occupy Movement that exposes the inequality between the rich and poor.

Like all other cultures, Israel has its RED. This value system was represented by defiant Flamethrowers, the settlers who believe that all Judea belongs to the Jews. They are religious Zionists with their own sense of BLUE entitlement. They fought the IDF soldiers who came to evict them as a part of the unilateral disengagement plan from Gaza and the northern West Bank. RED is also represented in some of the Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem who refuse to serve in the military on religious grounds, and receive social benefits from the state. They have their own closed BLUE that is not considered patriotic by most Israelis.

^VMEMEtic Profile of the Palestinian Territories

Many of my responsibilities at the CHE-Mideast during the first year of our mission were focused on the Palestinian side. It was of utmost importance to the success of our mission to create a ^VMEMEtic profile that was indigenously informed to enable our design to be reflective of life conditions. Our partners, Rifae and Suwaiti, understood this as we proceeded to construct the Palestinian profile. Just as the dense Israeli BLUE spoke loudly to us on the Israeli side, the loudest voices in Palestine came from the NGO activities that were taking place. These were well-meaning philanthropic organizations that crowded the streets of Palestine from Ramallah and the refugee camps on the West Bank to the allies of the Gaza Strip. They numbered 3 200 strong, and they each had their own ideas on how to best serve the Palestinians. Many of them were Europeans dealing with the GREEN guilt of causing the displacement of the Palestinians in the first place.

Others were well-meaning, and thought they could enhance the lives of Palestinians by offering weekend sensitivity trainings in the hope that such arbitrary GREEN values might somehow take root. Others offered empowerment programs to women who could barely make ends meet. Many of these women could not afford good schools for their kids, and most of their husbands were out of work. Post-modern European values that were steeped in cultivating soft skills, listening and empowerment were all abstract concepts that worked extremely well in a culture with a service economy based in ORANGE and GREEN values. However, the content of these programs was highly mismatched with the needs of Palestinian society.

As our search continued for institutions to deliver appropriate services, an insight came from our Palestinian partners about the political process. Much like the rest of the Arab world, politics had remained Tribalistic. PURPLE families who had traditionally held political office have the popular vote, with few exceptions. Our Indigenous Intelligence Experts kept pointing at the lack of leadership who were qualified to move their society into a unified BLUE under one superordinate goal. Because of the polarized dynamics between Hamas and Fatah, and also within both of these movements, a unified national vision never materialized. When we added the external political and military support of Hamas coming from groups like Hezbollah and from Iran, the Palestinians were further polarized away from a unified vision of statehood.

As our Palestinian partners completed their research, we all discovered that aside from religion and the presence of some passive institutions, the BLUE layer that the West and Israel needed to work with was very thin. They made no effort to hide the prominence of RED observed on both sides of the movements of Hamas and within Fatah.

Figure 6.4 shows a Palestinian value-system profile with RED bulge, PURPLE core, Hamas religious BLUE, Fatah transitional BLUE, and minimal overall BLUE-ORANGE emerging in business, academia, women and the millennial generation.

When Rifai and I presented our model at the Fatah headquarters in Ramallah, they had already lost the 2006 general elections to Hamas, and were in desperate search of answers. After we had made our way through their parking lot full of luxury cars, passing by Fatah members wearing Rolex watches, we started to question their commitment to the national BLUE that served the Palestinian people. When we invoked their past pride, reminding them of the days when they helped Palestinian families with building homes and providing services, they bowed their heads in acknowledgment of how the party had lost its way with the needs of the people.

This was when we were able to recognize that Fatah was an open system, willing to grow and learn. They invited Beck, Rifae, Suwaiti and me to train some of the top-ranking members of the third generation Fatah. The more we were exposed to Fatah and their party members, the more we were able to understand the memetic structure of Palestinian society.

Hamas gained popularity as the new, honest BLUE provider of services to most Palestinian living in PURPLE-RED values. By painting a picture of the corruption that took place under the leadership of the PLO and convincing their followers that Fatah's treaties with Israel had done little to improve their lives, Hamas ignited the passions of a grassroots movement. They called for new Palestinian BLUE based on Islamic fundamentalism that garnered the support of many Flamethrowers throughout the region. This was the old parochial Islamic BLUE. I got to experience a healthier form of Islamic BLUE when some of Hamas's moderate members reached out to Rifai and Suwaiti because they wanted to meet with Beck. We were surprised to see that, despite the party's perceived closed system, they were open to learning strategies on how to deal with Israel and the West.

It is noteworthy at this point to mention that while Beck wanted his colleagues to call him “Don,” I insisted that in Palestine everyone, including myself, address him as Dr Beck. This way he was respected as a professorial presence, as well as being viewed as a freedom fighter with a major role in changing South Africa. This way his BLUE authority could not be undermined. On the day of the training, the Hamas participants presented themselves in a starkly different way from the Fatah trainees. Beck commented later that when they walked into the Hamas training he felt as if his grandfather had walked into the room. The third-ranking member offered the introductions in ascending order as they all walked in perfect rhythm. The lowest ranking took his seat last. As a reminder of their conservative Islamic values, no one shook my hand.

The Hamas moderates had many grievances, and they made sure we knew about them all. The interjections and objections to what we were teaching never stopped. I took this opportunity as a “teachable moment” to show them how their lack of respect represented their RED values. If they wanted to get the attention of decision-makers (in other countries) they would have to follow certain polite rules of engagement. I started by limiting their questions to one question per person per hour. Every time someone violated that rule, I stopped him and reminded him of the commitment he gave on his honor to limit himself to just one question.

When the training was over, one of the high-ranking participants approached Beck and showed him an old key to his ancestral home. With a RED heroic voice, he declared that he wouldn't be a man unless he reclaimed his family honor for the future of his children. In an attempt to shift everyone's focus away from perpetuating the old paradigm, Beck interjected with: “What if, for the future of your children, your name was on a school that you built within a civil society?” Then the participant acknowledged what they have known all along: the house probably no longer existed, and it was time to build a new and different house.

As we composed these tentative ^VMEMEtic profiles of the Israeli and Palestinian cultures, we were very cognizant of the fact that they only provided a general guide, or an outer parameter that contained our research. ^VMEMEtic profiles are dynamic, and should be used with great caution. A Seventh-Level YELLOW designer uses the ^VMEMEtic lay of the land to build a strategy that enables flexibility and accommodation of changes in life conditions.⁵

The Birth of the Build Palestine Initiative (BPI)

Between 2006 and 2008 we supported and guided our IIEs in both Israel and Palestine as they continued to advocate the need for the conflict to be viewed through Spiral lenses. On subsequent visits, we continued to meet with change agents. Our Palestinian IIEs carried the voices and concerns of the Palestinian people directly to the global community through our CHE-Mideast website, blog and through Israeli and Palestinian media. On the Israeli side, Bar-On helped disseminate the framework via academic venues and at grassroots level. Beck and our Israeli partners continued to meet with the Israeli business community to build further awareness and commitment.

As we continued our cultural assessments of both sides, we came to the realization that the top leaders we were trying to influence on either side represented the arrested stages in the old paradigm. They held the old CAPI, and they would not consider change unless the hearts and minds of the people enforced it. To enable a fresh start to be informed by a new narrative, we had to focus on our own grassroots movement. In Figure 6.5 some photos of the BPI can be seen.

Israeli BLUE had long been defining Israeli institutions. The same couldn't be said about the Palestinian side, as institutions were in their infancy stages. We looked for ways to build the capacities in Palestine. We began to use our methodologies to balance the asymmetry on the Palestinian side with our sights on the long-term effects this could have on their negotiation position and ability in the future.

The Creation of a Superordinate Goal

Staying true to our approach, we could not perpetuate past perceptions, but instead of dismissing those past efforts and perspectives, we honored them. On the Palestinian side we used the ^VMEMEtic codes that our research had uncovered to decode the message aimed at building Palestinian institutions. Our partners kept telling people from every walk of life that our approach honored the past, worked with the present, but designed for the future. The enthusiasm of the third generation Fatah members in spreading this message to all corners of the West Bank was extraordinary. They felt personal responsibility for losing to Hamas and for preserving the few BLUE institutions they had worked so hard to build.

Moreover, they wanted to find ways to communicate a vision of a new Fatah to the powerful Revolutionary Guard, and the President's inner circle. The entire Fatah Party had come to the inevitable realization that corruption, lack of transparency and denying people the most basic of services were the leading causes of their demise.

Beck and I started a series of conversations with our Palestinian IIEs about their vision for a prosperous Palestinian state. Together we assessed the internal capacities of Palestinian society and the amount of international aid that poured into Palestine every year. Then, instead of simply asking how they would distribute the aid differently, we asked how they would use it to build the institutions that their society needs. These questions gave our IIEs, and the Palestinian supporters around them, the permission and opportunity to think differently about the future of Palestine.

Then, to prevent falling into old patterns of political corruption and dysfunction, we helped them create a superordinate goal: one that all Palestinians could get behind, but no single group could achieve on its own. The superordinate goal had to be inspiring enough to make every Palestinian proud of wanting to pursue it. We were careful not to make premature declarations that might unintentionally exclude meaningful segments of Palestinian society.

Since the time we started our work in Palestine, we had witnessed the optimistic ORANGE values of the tech-savvy Palestinian millennial generation. We examined the possibility of this becoming the primary source of our superordinate goal. After much discussion with Rifai and his group, it became apparent that the future pull that we needed towards prosperity was evident in the young Palestinians. To enable this to work, the declaration of a superordinate goal could not stop at just creating foundational institutions. The objective had to address leadership and economic and political issues at the regional level. Then, and only then, would a superordinate goal be considered resilient enough that Palestinians and regional and global powers could all support it.

As we vetted our ideas over many months, it became clear to us that Palestinian capacities could definitely accommodate a state as vibrant and as prosperous as the Mumbai region in India. The Palestinian population had one of highest percentages of engineers per capita in the region outside Israel. Many of the youth who joined the Intifadas out of frustration and boredom had employment in high-tech manufacturing and in call centers that cater to 300 million Arabic-speaking customers. Once a culture gets a taste of that individual ORANGE success, it will be difficult to get its young men to pick up arms or rocks and destroy what they built with their own hands. Or at least that was the premise based on the theoretical framework. Even in the long term it had the potential to become the superordinate goal for both Israel and Palestine. It was a good match for the ^VMEMEs in Israel, for potential future relationships in many Western regions, and for moving forward on the Spiral.

The future vision will include Functional Capitalism, those enterprises and people who are conscientiously implementing practices that benefit humanity and the environment (ORANGE–GREEN) designed from the Seventh-Level YELLOW. The corporate social responsibility movement is a draw towards ORANGE innovation in a global and local economic context. With a potential peace treaty, the Palestinians can be the ones who bring Israel's – and their own – technological innovations to the region.

We realized that without a working peace, and few BLUE Palestinian institutions at the time, our focus should be the Palestinian, not the regional, superordinate goal. The Palestinians needed to focus on building their own institutions first, and that would be a long process on their road to fulfilling the goals of the Build Palestine Initiative. After much deliberation, our Palestinian partners declared that Palestine's superordinate goal for the remainder of the mission would be: “To build the Mumbai of the Arab World.”

With this declaration as the future pull for Palestine, we brought clarity to the remaining involvement of our mission. Our partners began to spread the word about the need to build resilient institutions. They began to preach the virtues of transparency. They held town meetings on what it means to have good schools in tune with the needs of the job market of the future. They talked about what it means to have good hospitals and good health care.

At the same time, they created feedback and feed-forward loops that stayed in touch with local life conditions, an infant Vital Signs Monitor. They heard from farmers wanting better irrigation technology and knowledge of crop rotation. They got feedback from mothers with regard to the cost of a good education for the future generation destined to lead the Mumbai of the Arab world. Optimism was contagious as ORANGE talents rose to the surface to address developmental gaps that had been ignored for years. Many conversations ensued about developing a robust tourism sector.

Rifai arranged for us to meet with Fadwa Barghouti, the wife of the imprisoned “Mandela of Palestine” and Rifai's prison cellmate in an Israeli jail. This woman witnessed the 20-year transformation of her husband into a figure that both Hamas and Fatah might embrace as a unifying leader. While Palestinians view him as a freedom fighter, the Israelis continue his detention based on a violation of BLUE laws. The Israelis had imprisoned Barghouti's son but now he was being released from prison. One of our IIEs extended an invitation for him to attend training we had arranged for young professional Palestinians. This was the millennial generation that held influence, if not immediate power or authority, (CAPI) for the future of Palestine.

During the first day of training the young Barghouti demonstrated an uncanny understanding of Palestinian and Israeli value systems. He described how certain prison guards, while having to do their BLUE duty, would bring him contraband items, like cigarettes, magazines and newspapers. These guards represent the ORANGE–GREEN in Israeli culture – those who just want to move forward and live in peace with the Palestinians. After learning Spiral Dynamics and participating in a simulated enactment of the conflict on the ^VACE values spectrum, the whole group engaged in a discussion about how they might work with the Israeli center positions and specifically the ORANGE Pragmatist positions that wanted to make a deal.

When we spoke about shifting from seeing geographic maps to seeing memetic maps, Barghouti drew a map that illustrated a memetic profile of Israel. Barghouti led his team through an exercise that demonstrated how Israel surrounded the West Bank and Gaza with RED settlers as a first line of defense against any RED activity from Palestine. BLUE checkpoints and IDF presence represented another memetic layer that ran across Jerusalem and at every entry and exit point from the West Bank. BLUE presence was heaviest where it supported the areas around the RED settlers and at the Lebanese and Syrian borders where they created a buffer zone to protect the ORANGE business community. ORANGE itself was in the center of the country, while the ORANGE-GREEN of the knowledge economy occupied the coastal areas from Gaza to the border of Lebanon. In Figure 6.6, a Palestinian millennial generation view of the map of Israel, as presented by Maalouf (2014, p. 177), can be seen.

As we continued to expose more and more Palestinians to this new perspective on how to perceive the conflict, a new meme was being created (see Figure 6.4). Rifai heard from many corners of the West Bank that we were being called “the spiral people.” The more community meetings Rifai and our group held, the more people were being inspired by the potential our efforts had. What started as a grassroots effort in 2005 had grown into a movement that could no longer be ignored by the summer of 2007.

We began to attract the attention of high-ranking politicians on both sides. Suddenly senior members of Fatah wanted to know the nature of the framework from Rifai, Beck and me. Cabinet members and executive committee members from Fatah wanted to know how this theory might translate into more effective governance on the ground. When Rifai saw the level of interest increasing in Fatah as it was at the grassroots level, he suggested holding a national summit where community leaders from all parts of the West Bank and Gaza could share their ideas on the future of Palestine. Rifai and his colleagues called on the Fatah executive committee to talk to community leaders and canvas the entire West Bank to gather data so that everyone's voice could be heard at the national summit. Our goal was to present an up-to-date profile on Palestinian life conditions and to provide the participants with a roadmap of what needed to be done in order to implement the Build Palestine Initiative.

Our activities were now becoming visible to the Israeli leadership as well. At Beck's request, our partners at the CHE Israel exchanged correspondence with the office of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the office of the President of Israel, keeping them updated on our activities in Palestine. Beck and our colleague Bar-On met with Dr Pundak, the Executive Director of the Peres Peace Center, to explain our model. They explored its possible use within the Center's own efforts at nurturing a culture of peace among the youth on both sides.

Just as Dr Beck's team worked with both sides in South Africa, a similar balance in our Israeli–Palestinian communications was necessary. Our hope was that the Israeli leadership would engage with our Palestinian partners if the summit produced tangible results that could inform future negotiations and contribute to a new roadmap for peace. After all, this was an initiative that reflected the will and aspirations of the people, not the closed views of the politicians.

We did not believe that the division between Israel and Palestine was as distanced and institutionalized as the division between people in South Africa. Israel could take a leadership role in making our template a reality. All our Palestinian partners needed from the Israelis was an acknowledgement of their efforts as a starting point to build a state. Israel had no natural resources and its ORANGE was primarily in information technology.

By the beginning of the fourth year of our mission in 2008, we were optimistic that the Israeli business community would understand the vital role that the ORANGE ^VMEME plays in the emergence of cultures. Heading into 2008 we thought this could become a sustainable model funded by visionaries from both cultures who saw its transformational nature.

A Summit to Build Palestine

On January 2, 2008, one month before the scheduled nation-building summit in Palestine, the Global Center for Human Emergence received a call from the office of the President of Israel expressing regrets about President Peres's inability to attend due to a scheduling conflict. This was followed a few days later by a letter from the Israeli Foreign Minister's office expressing the same regrets. Although this was a confirmation that our work had garnered the right attention, the fact that the Israelis did not offer to engage our Palestinian partners or attempt to make contact with them was a cause for early concern.

The Palestinian superordinate goal was defined, the one between Israel and Palestine required different dynamics and assumptions at the level of the heads of states. After the developmental roadmap of the Build Palestine Initiative was given a chance to succeed, the mutual superordinate goal would have a better chance of becoming a reality.

However, we were worried that there was no clear superordinate goal for a two-state solution to create a new frame of reference. While the Afrikaners under De Klerk's leadership had a clear goal of ending an unfair system and dealt with their own intra-conflict, the Israelis were dealing with far more extremist positions within their own culture. This began to reflect on their ability to commit to an initiative – we could not garner full political support in Israel. The same dynamics were in play in the Palestinian culture on Hamas's side; they wanted no association with a movement that sought national unity based on values that sidelined their extremist position. This was still true five years later.

On February 2, 2008, the first Palestinian MeshWORKS was held. It was the first conference of its kind in the Middle East. There were only two other MeshWORKS events outside of South Africa:

• One had been organized in the Netherlands a few years earlier with Dutch IDAs looking to design a new BLUE to deal with Muslim extremism in that country.
• The second MeshWORKS event brought together a national assembly of over one thousand people in Iceland aimed at informing the design of a new future for Iceland after the financial crisis of 2008. This led to revisions of the Icelandic Constitution.

All events were research-based conferences designed by IDAs certified and personally trained and supervised by Beck. The MeshWORKS events in Europe were the culmination of many years of work on the ground, first at the grassroots level, and then in coordination with the political leadership. All of the methodologies pioneered by Beck illustrating the value-systems approach were outlined in the 1996 book Spiral Dynamics.⁶

The chaotic scene at the Shepherd Hotel in Bethlehem on the day of the conference was a result of the energy and enthusiasm that our Palestinian partners had exerted over the preceding three years. Rifai and Suwaiti had arranged for many of the community representatives to come and present their input. In a true fashion that captured the PURPLE soul of the value systems, Rifai had one thousand Keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headdress, made for the occasion.

While there were rumors that as many as twelve hundred people would be attending, Beck and I began to panic when, at the scheduled start of the conference, very few people had shown up. Rifai dismissed the tardiness because busloads of Palestinians always received extra scrutiny at Israeli checkpoints. At just 15 minutes past the start time, the buses started rolling in from every part of the West Bank. The last bus arrived, to great applause, after being held by the IDF at a checkpoint for over two hours. Many of its passengers were questioned, but all were allowed to re-board after the IDF verified their passes to the event. There was a sense of order in the midst of all the chaos. Women, who had been essential to the effort from day one, took charge of organizing the speakers, dealing with the media and delegating responsibilities to the millennial generation. Over seven hundred community leaders and other representatives attended the entire event, with many more coming to hear speeches or to attend specific segments of the event.

With the help of our IIEs, Rifai organized the attendees into groups with similar abilities, meaning those whose fields of work or knowledge might best serve a particular function needed to inform the design of the future state of Palestine. This could be considered end-user input feeding forward into the development of future projects in their field. While the groups were exchanging ideas and the findings of their research, many spoke about “new beginnings.” Only a handful of the 60 groups laid any blame on the Israeli occupation. All were focused on the Palestinians’ own empowerment and on how to proceed with building their own capacities to build a state.

One of the most moving speeches summarizing the transformational effect of our work came from Rifai himself. Judea Pearl, the scientist, philosopher and father of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, upon reading a translation of the speech, told his friend Beck that it was the most optimistic speech he has heard come out of Palestine in years. It may have been at this moment that our conference became a national summit for change. Below is a partial translation:

The idea for this convention was born when we asked ourselves the question “why haven't we been victorious over the Israeli occupation?” Many in Fatah tried to answer that question and failed. After a rebellion that lasted forty-three years we failed to see any progress. Why?

After a lengthy search for answers, we met Dr Don Beck, the author of the Spiral Dynamics theory. We found that there are reasons for our failures, and for those who have lost hope, I'm telling you all ladies and gentlemen, hope is all around you, but you need to know how to find it in order to succeed. We must put Palestine first, and all of us in Fatah, are to serve Palestine, to liberate Palestine and to build Palestine.

Today, we are at the beginning of the 21st Century and we must arm ourselves with education. In South Africa, the Zulus armed themselves with education. They understood their enemy, but more importantly, they understood themselves. Now comes our turn to apply Dr Beck's theory.

Please don't speak about the past, because all of us must leave the past behind. Let it be a loud cry and a message carried to our leaders and to the rest of world. We want to talk about our vision for the future. How are we going to shape that future?⁷

Many other speeches followed that day. I spoke about the Palestinians’ courage and patience in wanting to try something different by giving our approach a chance and about the role of the CHE Center. Beck gave a speech that had the BLUE content that the Palestinians needed to hear about their patriotic duty toward the future, the third generation Fatah and their ability to lead real change. Then he turned to the audience and announced that he would like to speak to their future directly: He invited a ten-year old girl to the podium and asked her what she wanted to become when she grew up. She answered by saying she wanted to be a doctor. Beck then implored all the participants to dedicate their efforts from that day forth to build the institutions that would insure that that ten-year old girl's dream became a reality.⁸

Different groups made presentations about what they would like to see in the design of a new Palestinian State. The 60 groups representing broad coverage of the West Bank put together a list of actionable goals that were later presented to the leadership. A woman engineer prepared the list below with her group, and it captured the essence of what Palestine could look like:

Within a few short days after the summit, the effects began reverberating throughout the West Bank. Many high-ranking Fatah party officials called Rifai to offer their help with the implementation phase for meeting these goals. Our IIEs prepared a booklet with all the recommendations from the summit and made it available to the Palestinian Authority and to Tony Blair's office representing the Middle East Peace Quartet. The findings were also published in many local newspapers. I wrote a summary of our four-year efforts in the Common Ground newspaper, which had global readership.⁹

After the summit, Beck and I began phase two of our initiative in earnest, to help our IIEs design the institutions that were to build Palestine. We started a new series of meetings and design sessions with Rifai and his group. The aim was to consolidate the gains made by the grassroots efforts and to start the design process at the leadership level. Based on the principles of our framework, our Palestinian partners wanted, first and foremost, to create a culture of transparency for anyone wanting to contribute to the future of the movement. Over the next few months we helped our IIEs create a charter for the Build Palestine Initiative (BPI) containing general rules of conduct, covenants and principles that participants in the design wished to adhere to. This BLUE foundation helped assure the sustainability and integrity of the work.

Rifai suggested the creation of a 50-member Think Tank representing the diversity of Palestinian society. Beck and I made sure that representatives of institutions and segments of society who contributed to the design of the MeshWORKS were included. This was a crucial element to the success of the plan. In order to assure a seamless flow from strategy and planning to implementation on the ground, this phase of our mission needed staffing. Rifai needed to hire assistants and research associates who could help navigate the political and diplomatic channels of Fatah politics, the NGO community and the UN agencies.

In the United States, the Global CHE had maintained a volunteer staff for many years and continues to do so. Beck's inspiration to do work that matters had inspired many capable volunteers around the world. We met with the US State Department in Washington and gave them a rundown on what we had been able to accomplish on a shoestring budget with a volunteer staff over a four-year period.

By the summer of 2008, our past sponsors had begun to feel the effects of the coming financial crisis. In recessionary times, philanthropic causes are the first to suffer. The Hearthstone Foundation, our primary sponsor, went through a major restructuring as homebuilding was going through one of its worst contractions in decades. As the financial crisis took hold of the global economy in the fall of 2008, all funding sources disappeared. Unlike Beck's experience in South Africa, no one in political leadership on any side stepped forth to sponsor our work. The business community, which played a catalytic role in South Africa, was nowhere to be found in Israel or in Palestine. Rifai was shocked at the UN's inability to provide funding. One month's salary for a UN Program Director could fund 12 full-time research associates to help make the Build Palestine Initiative a reality. The UN chose to continue to do weekend empowerment programs instead. These programs certainly did not appear to be a priority to the Palestinians according to our four years of research.

Because of the global financial crisis and lack of interest at the UN, our Palestinian partners couldn't hire the extra help they needed to take our plans to the next phase. This was terribly disappointing, although the ^VMEMEs that our work created had deeply penetrated every segment of Palestinian culture. Building Palestine had become common language on the street of Ramallah, Bethlehem and everywhere in between by the end of 2009. It gave many Palestinians, young and old, the sense of pride that comes from self-empowerment and self-reliance. It shifted the cultural focus from passive involvement to a people empowered by the capacities for self-determination. The change was most visible at Palestinian universities, where for the first time in ten years, the third generation Fatah students had won elections through the student body by painting a picture of a bright future that captured the hearts and minds of their ambitious youth. The “Build Palestine ^VMEME,” as Rifai described it once, became rolling thunder on the ground.

As we continued to seek institutional sponsorship, the Global CHE continued to work on designing the framework for the institutions to inform those capable of building Palestine. Beck and I helped Rifai prepare a proposal for implementation of the Vital Signs Monitor (VSM), which was to be presented to the Palestinian Ministry of the Interior. Although a non-autocrat had replaced Eisheh, the minister who agreed to implement the VSM initially, Rifai felt that the new Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was committed to building Palestinian institutions and would support the project.

Our experience throughout Gaza and the West Bank catalyzed the need for central oversight of NGO activity within the Build Palestine Initiative. Based on the results of the 2008 summit, we recommended that Palestinian leadership create a cabinet-level Department of Integration. Essential to the MeshWORKS model, this newly created department would align and integrate all NGO activity into one platform serving the needs of Palestinians from a YELLOW perspective. The Department of Integration would be able to identify and limit overlapping activities and those without the capacity for sustainability or measurable long-term effects. We needed to develop memetically-honed technology to address past inefficiency and utilize new tools that properly aligned the well-meaning intentions of NGOs with what life conditions identify about the needs of the Palestinian people.

Dr Kevin Kells designed testing methods to solve this problem, which had accounted for hundreds of thousands of dollars in inefficiency and misaligned spending. After months of research he presented Beck and me with a technology similar to that of the barcode. It can measure the ^VMEMEtic profile of an entity in a short period of time and align its values with the segment of Palestinian culture that fits its services. Since its invention, this technology has become an essential part of the large-scale design for the entire constellation of CHEs around the world. It is the BarCode technology of Kells that is discussed in Chapter 3.

By 2009, any hopes that we had of institutional sponsorship had faded. The financial crisis had taken its toll on many of our sponsors. Some even sought bankruptcy protection in the face of the harsh economic reality in the United States. My husband, a real estate developer, began to feel the financial pressure from my four years of pro bono work. Meanwhile our Palestinian partners anxiously awaited our return to the West Bank. According to Rifai, over two hundred thousand Palestinians have shown interest in learning the value-systems approach to conflict resolution.

Prime Minister Fayyad had begun to build the Palestinian institutions that mattered most to Palestinians and had secondary ramifications for Israel and the West. He focused his efforts on many of the elements that were identified during our presence in Palestine. Before he resigned in June 2013, Mr Fayyad had created a new BLUE layer in the Palestinian culture, which had not been possible under previous leadership. This was a developmental roadmap quite similar in its reach to what we had identified. The only difference was that Fayyad's plan did not include Gaza. Hamas rejected his preconditions to recognize Israel's right to exist.

In an April 2010 article, the Financial Times identified Prime Minister Fayyad's policies as “Fayyadism.” Fayyadism rested upon three main tenets for strengthening Palestinian BLUE, namely strengthening the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, creating the basis for good governance and providing economic opportunity.

Fayyad embarked on a detailed two-year working plan for the Palestinian Authority for establishing the fundamental infrastructures and reinforcing the institutions of the future Palestinian State. He called it “Palestine – Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.” This included, among other elements, the development of existing and new infrastructure, such as government offices, a stock market, an airport, free markets and separation of powers.¹⁰ A ^VMEMEtic profile of the West Bank at the time of Fayyad's June 2013 resignation is displayed in Figure 6.7 (Maalouf 2014, p. 119).

After witnessing the effects, the BLUE institutions that Fayyad had put into place, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton renewed the United States’ call for a permanent solution to meet the needs of both sides. In an open letter to President Obama, the CHE-Mideast repeated the call for a design conference to precede any peace negotiations. This continues to be our official position as to how a final settlement can be reached as the facts that we uncovered in our research remain true to this day. Before peace can take root, much has to be done to level the asymmetry in capacities between the two cultures.

Conclusion

What started in 2006 as an exploratory visit to the region developed into a large-scale design that still has the potential to transform the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Our work has created a template and a developmental blueprint that would place the region on the road to sustainability and self-reliance. Our center added many tools to an already resilient toolkit, and has honed the applications of value systems to the Indigenous Intelligence.

After all is said and done, democracy in the Middle East will be a functional democracy, or a MEMEtocracy based on the needs of the region. This is what the MEMEtocracy theoretical framework provides. No matter where in the world nation-states are built, governance has to be informed by the challenges that face people within their geographic boundaries and within their value-system capacities.

In declaring the superordinate goal for Palestine and Israel, Beck compared it to the same superordinate goal that helped integrate South Africa. This was the motto of “prosper and let prosper” which has in it the mechanisms for building resilient peace. While much of the region begins its long journey towards building BLUE institutions and economic viability, the business community must be a partner and a catalyst in making these institutions the pillars on which the future of the region rests. Just as the visionary business leaders in South Africa turned the country's natural resources into an agent of change, business leaders in the Middle East can take the lead in making sure that businesses play a more integral role in defining the future of the region.

About the Author

Elza S. Maalouf is a Lebanese-American futurist specializing in large-scale systems and societal change. She is the founder of the Center for Human Emergence-Middle East.

In Emerge!, Elza pioneers new concepts for designing a functional democracy. Her work focuses on the conscious emergence of corporations and on decoding social and political complexities of the Middle East.

Elza advises administrations, visionary corporate leaders and global think tanks on the latest advances in whole-systems applications.

She has lectured at various international platforms, including the United Nations, The Oslo Center for Human Transformation, The World Future Society, Paris-Sorbonne University and third generation Fatah leaders in Palestine.