Why is it important for booths to come back to the same place again and again?

One of the questions we’re often asked is, “What does success look like to you?” “How do you know that you’ve made an impact?”

That's a question with multiple answers, but one important answer is: “If that person comes back to talk with us again and again, that’s success.”

Why is that a success? The stories in this post illustrate the answer, addressing the question: Why is it important to keep coming back to the same place and talking with the same people?

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This week, we’re sharing two stories from Maya at the Rehovot booth, illustrating why maintaining an ongoing, long-term relationship with “returning customers” is one of the keys to the "Let's Talk Democracy" method.

🌷 “One with Shaul—a returning visitor I last spoke with a few weeks ago. At the time, he said that [because of the events of 7 October] the commander of the Gaza Division, the head of Military Intelligence, the IDF Chief of Staff, and several other senior military officials all needed to resign (I agreed), but that he didn’t understand why the political leadership should, because it wasn’t their responsibility.

Yesterday, after coming back to the booth almost every week and talking with other people, he told me that all those military officials should resign (again, I agreed), and this time he said that Netanyahu really should have finished off Hamas in 2014, and that he had also pursued some policies aimed at strengthening Hamas, which wasn’t exactly a good thing, so maybe he bears some responsibility too. - Progress!”

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The sequence of conversations that the volunteers in Rehovot had with Shaul demonstrates very well that our goal is not to try, within a single conversation, to convince people that we are right and they are wrong. The goal is to bring important issues up for discussion, share thoughts and feelings, ask questions, examine the possible implications of each answer together, and come back a week or two later to continue the conversation.

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How do we do that? Maya demonstrates it beautifully in the following story:

🌷 “The other conversation was with Naftali, also a returning visitor (not mine), who got annoyed by the word ‘democracy’ on my shirt because he supports it, but in his opinion it means that the majority decides who gets to rule, and 'you people' have no busineess blocking roads and telling pilots not to report for reserve duty. So I went back to saying that I’m ‘Maya,’ not ‘you people,’ and I didn’t block any roads. Then I asked him whether, when he puts a ballot in the ballot box, he’s giving the government a blank check to do whatever it wants.

He said that the government can do whatever it wants, and if it passes bad laws or does bad things, then in four years we’ll replace it and change things back. So I asked, ‘What if one of the laws it passes is that there will be no more elections?’ He said that couldn’t happen, and that the High Court of Justice would prevent it. (He agreed that the High Court should oversee the government, but only when it comes to things that are ‘really’ serious.)

Then I told him that they don’t have to pass a law abolishing elections. They could also make the elections unfair, and he agreed that that wouldn’t be okay either.

At the end of the conversation, he said to me, ‘But what have we accomplished? We still don’t agree, do we?’ So I told him that he would go home and think about what I had said, and I would go home and think about what he had said, and next week we would meet again and continue the conversation. Maybe we wouldn’t agree about everything, but we could still manage to find something we could move forward with.

I also told him that we both agree that the government can’t do anything it wants, but we just disagree about where the line is. He agreed with that.”

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The conditions for conversations like this often aren’t ripe the first time someone comes to the booth. To have these kinds of conversations, we first need to build a certain foundation of familiarity and mutual trust. We need to listen a lot and talk less at first, and not insist on arguing over every detail—even when someone says something we strongly disagree with. Because when people feel that their opinions also have a place in the conversation, that we’re genuinely listening to them and thinking about what they have to say, they feel more comfortable hearing and engaging with our positions and feelings, and giving them some thought as well.

This method takes time, patience, and persistence. But it also has many rewards, and it really does make a difference. 💪

In the picture, Maya speaking with a 'regular visitor'