Nobody Taught Us How to Fight

Communities rarely fall apart because they fight. They fall apart because no one ever taught them how. On conflict practice, drawn from Tamera, Traditional Dream Factory, and others.

What this essay argues

On why communities rarely break over the fight itself, and almost always over never having learned how to fight well. Sharon looks at the groups that build conflict practice on purpose.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. Bori, Joshua, and Sabine at Tamera, and Tonya at Traditional Dream Factory, are among the voices behind this essay.

The essay

What I see after years of fieldwork. The communities that last aren't calmer. They're braver.

Community meeting in the squat Nieuw en Meer in Amsterdam

I grew up in a society that was taking its last breaths of socialism while drowning in a violent political reality. The rituals of collective life were still everywhere around me, but they were hollowed out. For me, a lot of what remained was the friction.

I spent years in activism circles in Palestine-Israel, trying to use culture and art to build something across the deepest divides you can imagine. I organized dialogue programs. I sat in rooms where Israelis and Palestinians who were supposed to be enemies stayed up all night telling each other their stories. I was 17 the first time it happened. While participating in a peace program held in Austria, a Palestinian girl stood up after the Israeli youth group presented the topic of the Holocaust and asked, in a completely honest way: “If they did it to you, why are you doing this to us?”

Every Israeli in the room got defensive. Even the ones who called themselves leftists. I didn’t. I was curious. I stayed up all night with Samer, one of the Palestinian kids. He told me what life was like in the West Bank. I told him about the Holocaust. Neither of us had ever heard the other’s story.

That exchange didn’t resolve anything. But something opened in me that never closed.

Later in life, I co-founded Midburn, the Israeli regional Burning Man. I spent the better part of my twenties building local burns and art collectives, trying to create a culture of radical inclusion in a land that practices radical exclusion. I thought that if I could build the right container, the right culture, people would find their way to each other.

Alongside all the beauty and community it brought into my life, I kept running into the same thing: conflicts. Power dynamics inside volunteer organizations. Ego fights dressed up as creative disagreements. People who agreed on everything in principle but could not share a budget meeting without it turning into a war. I watched people who danced together naked in the desert tear each other apart over event logistics.

And when I tried to bring that same culture into political activism, to create spaces where Israelis and Palestinians could meet as equals, the conflicts multiplied. Now it was not just ego and logistics. It was history, trauma, and power asymmetry that no amount of good intentions could flatten.

In all those years in the leadership seat of these initiatives, one thing became clear: a big heart and good intentions were not enough. The conflicts I kept running into were not failures of the work. They were the work. And I had no training for it.

That is what sent me into the field.

A gathering of activists from the MENA region. Held in the Wadi Rum desert, Jordan.

The question underneath every interview

Fifteen years and more than 35 communities later, across Europe, the Fertile Crescent, India, and more, I ask every person I sit with some version of the same question: What happens here when things get hard between people?

The answers are the single best predictor of whether a community will survive.

Because here is what the data actually shows: conflict does not kill communities. The refusal to face it does.

Diana Leafe Christian, who has studied intentional communities for decades, estimates that roughly 90% never get off the ground. They run out of money, can’t find land, or get mired in conflict. But look more closely at that last part. The communities that collapse from conflict don’t collapse because the conflict existed. They collapsed because they had no way to move through it.

I recognized this pattern instantly. It was the same thing I had seen in activist circles. The same thing I saw in Midburn. Groups of passionate people who could build something extraordinary together, until the first serious disagreement arrived, and nobody knew what to do with it.

What I learned from the interviews

The pattern repeats so consistently that I’ve stopped being surprised by it.

Tonya grew up in a community and now lives at the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal. She has watched multiple projects fall apart.

“I’ve been in so many communities that have fallen apart, and just seen a lot of those be because of governance issues.”

But then she said something sharper:

“How people treat or are treated is probably the biggest reason why feelings get hurt, and things crumble apart. When leaders start getting into power dynamics, when there’s a lack of humility. People remember how you made them feel.”

That sentence. People remember how you made them feel. I wish I had heard it during the years I was organizing events and leading activist groups. It would have saved me from some of the worst mistakes I made.

At Tamera in southern Portugal, Sabine, one of the founding members, described how the early community discovered that political ideology was not enough.

“I was engaged in different left-wing communities or parties,”

she told me.

“And then I noticed, the same corruption, the same jealousy, all the things are going on here too. And this brought me more radical to the decision, we have to find something on a deeper level.”

I know exactly what she means. I saw it happen in real time inside Israeli peace movements. People who share every political conviction eating each other alive over roles, credit, strategy, and control. Shared ideology does not protect you from jealousy, ego, or the hunger for power. Sabine learned that in Germany in the 1980s. I learned it in the Holy Land in the 2010s. The lesson is identical.

That “deeper level” led Tamera to create the Forum. Someone stands in the center of a circle and speaks what they carry: jealousy, fear, rage, grief. The community witnesses. They don’t judge. They offer mirrors.

“We noticed how much we are identified with our pain body, with our fear,”

Sabine said.

“And this brought us to develop the forum where we make performances. If you feel very jealous, you are invited to bring the jealousy to the stage. And then to notice that’s not me. It’s my trauma point. It’s my story.”

Joshua, a younger member at Tamera, told me that at the community’s peak, members were doing twenty Forums a month. That number has dropped, but Forum remains their strongest tool for transparency. And transparency, he said, builds trust.

Bori, who has lived at Tamera for nearly 40 years, put it differently. “Nobody can destroy my inner peace unless I let them,” she said. She admits it is a very high bar. She also admits she hasn’t always met it. “There are points where I didn’t do it, because I was not brave enough, or because I was avoiding some conflict.”

That honesty matters. Because the most dangerous thing in a community is not the person who fights. It is the person who pretends everything is fine.

Sabine in the “Defend The Sacred” gathering of activists held in Tamera, Portugal.

We have a trust problem

Ilan Meyer has spent thirty years as an organizational consultant inside kibbutzim. He told me something about conflict that I keep returning to.

“There are two conditions for a thriving community. Sustainable growth and the ability to manage conflicts through dialogue. Dialogue for consensus is an art. It is not simple. Because conflicts will always be there.”

He went further.

“One of the biggest problems in kibbutzim is the loss of trust. Loss of trust in leadership. We live in a world today where the word trust barely exists. We are all surrounded by fake news and echo chambers. Everything happening in the world today pushes us further from each other.”

And then:

“In a community, this is supposed to happen less. But what can you do? There are WhatsApp groups there too, there are rumors, someone tells someone something, and she already went to her cousin, the lawyer, and he said they’re cheating her, and she already told everyone in her WhatsApp group. It’s a microcosm of what we see everywhere.”

At Kibbutz Samar, there was no leadership, and no legitimacy for leadership. “You’re going to tell me what to do? Who are you to tell me anything? Nobody had authority for anything. Every decision, everyone together. Everything open, everything exposed. And it explodes.”

I know that dynamic from activist spaces too. The allergy to authority. The belief that if you flatten everything, power disappears. It doesn’t. It just goes underground. And underground power, the kind that operates through WhatsApp groups and side conversations and social pressure that nobody names, is the most destructive kind there is.

Date picking in Kibbutz Samar, Valley Arava, Israel.

What do the communities that last actually do

At the Traditional Dream Factory, they are building something called a “game guide.” One document that covers everything from substance use to sexuality to conflict resolution. “We’re trying to have one clear place where people can go and see,” someone on the team told me. “For some situations, it’s very clear that a person cannot be in the space. A breach of consent, violence. We can refer back to the game guide.”

Tonya described her community’s approach differently: weekly check-ins, sharing circles, direct conversations where someone says “I’m noticing this, that’s not working for me.” And when something feels off, bringing it into the whole group immediately.

“We need to trust our intuition if something’s feeling weird or off. Just bring it into the whole and iron it out before it gets to phases that require a lot more repair work.”

Different methods. Same logic. Name it before it rots.

A 2025 academic volume from De Gruyter, “Conflicts and Conflict Management in Intentional Communities,” brings together fieldwork from kibbutzim, ecovillages, and cooperative housing. The researchers found what every community practitioner already knows: the problem is rarely the conflict itself. The problem is whether the community has the infrastructure to hold it.

What I’m taking from all of this

I came to this work through years of trying to build things in one of the most contested places on earth. What I learned there, in dialogue tents and activist meetings and late-night arguments about strategy that were often arguments about ego, is the same thing I keep hearing from people who have spent decades inside intentional communities.

The communities that survive are not the ones that avoid conflict. They are the ones who build a practice around facing it. Forum at Tamera. The game guide at TDF. The weekly circles Tonya described. Ilan’s insistence that you start with values before you touch procedures.

And underneath all of those practices is something simpler. A decision. When someone in the room is upset, you don’t pretend it’s not happening. You don’t route around it. You don’t wait for it to become a crisis. You sit down and deal with it, knowing it will be uncomfortable, knowing you might be wrong, and knowing that avoiding it is always worse.

That is what I failed to do in some of my activist years. It is what the communities that collapsed around my interviewees also failed to do. And it is what the communities that lasted figured out, not once but over and over again, for decades.

The ToGather archive holds interviews from communities across four continents. Real people describing real moments when conflict almost broke their project, and the specific practices that pulled them through. You can read them, search them, and trace the patterns yourself.

Explore the archive

If this piece landed with you, share it with someone who is building something. That’s who this is for.

One more thing. ToGather is currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Artizen to keep this field archive growing. If you want to support more fieldwork, more interviews, and more honest documentation of how communities actually work, this is how.

Support ToGather on Artizen

Bringing this into your own community

Build a conflict practice before you need one. Agree, while nothing is on fire, on what you will do the next time two people in the group fall out. It can be as simple as a standing check-in where anyone can name what is not working, or a written agreement like the game guide at the Traditional Dream Factory. The point is to decide the practice in calm times so it is there when the hard moment comes.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

Related in the Living Library

• Tamera Forum
• Restorative and Transformative Justice
• Circle / The Way of Council
• Truth Mandala
• ZEGG: Seven Values, Forum, and Sociocracy