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WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES:
CURRENT DIALOGUE
Issue 41, July 2003
Jews, Muslims and Peace
Yehezkel Landau and Yahya Hendi
With ongoing violence sapping the spirits of Israelis
and Palestinians, and with the Iraq war generating shock
waves throughout the Middle East, we call on our fellow
Jews and Muslims to join forces with concerned
Christians to transcend this cycle of death and
destruction. Jews and Muslims should be spiritual
allies, not adversaries. Any student of comparative
religion knows that Judaism and Islam are as close to
one another as any two faith traditions can be. In both,
the sacred texts prescribe communal norms, and the
criterion for genuine faithfulness is the practice of
justice and compassion. The Hebrew and Arabic languages,
too, are amazingly close to one another. Muslim and
Jewish scholars, at times both writing in Arabic, have
nourished each other’s spiritualities for centuries. It
is only in the past hundred years that the conflict over
the Holy Land, whether called Israel or Palestine, has
engendered competing nationalisms and the violation of
basic human rights affirmed as sacred by all three faith
traditions. The conflict has also undermined the
historic cross-fertilization of these traditions.
The mixture of religion and nationalism is dangerously
combustible. On a human, pragmatic level, two nations in
a dispute over a land claimed by both should be able to
compromise and share the territory. But when God’s will
is invoked to absolutize one or the other claim, then
compromise becomes sacrilege, and religious extremism
generates grotesque ideologies of domination, death, and
destruction.
In recent years, we have wept as our sacred traditions
have been hijacked and contaminated in this way.
Religious leaders who share our sorrow are sometimes
intimidated into silence by the extremists, or else the
political constraints of their public roles encourage
self-censorship. Their reticence only compounds the
tragedy.
One of the reasons the Oslo “peace process” failed is
that it was a secular peace plan imposed by secular
leaders on a Holy Land, where large minorities of Jews
and Palestinians are motivated by deeply held religious
convictions. There are festering wounds that require
spiritual, not only political, remedies: the
displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948
and of Jews from Arab countries afterwards; a series of
Arab-Israeli wars over half a century; a prolonged,
unjust, and humiliating occupation of Palestinian
territory since 1967; continuing violence against
civilians; the reluctance of many to accept each other
as neighbors; and the growth of hatred and suppression.
All of these factors have sustained a chronic religious
pathology.
Despite this crisis of the spirit, leaders of the
various religious communities were not enlisted as
partners in the struggle for peace. If the September,
1993, signing ceremony on the White House lawn had
included an Israeli chief rabbi and a high-ranking
Palestinian Muslim cleric, the message projected on that
occasion, especially to the faithful, would have been
very different. And if religious leaders from the three
faiths had been brought together from the outset to help
make peace possible, the diplomacy would have had a much
greater chance of success.
Instead, Israeli and Palestinian leaders, with the
endorsement of American and European diplomats, labeled
Islamic militants and ultra-nationalist religious Jews
as “enemies of peace”. The dynamic that ensued, with
fervent Muslims and Jews feeling threatened by a “peace
process” that excluded them, has contributed to the
dreadful impasse in which we are all caught. Religious
issues important to both sides were pushed aside and not
properly addressed. These include sensitive issues like
Jerusalem and the status of what Jews call the Temple
Mount and Muslims call the Haram Al-Shareef.
In a more conducive context of trust and good will, it
might be possible for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to
design a political framework for peaceful coexistence in
a shared Jerusalem. Both nations could agree to offer up
to God the sacred plateau at its heart, as
extra-territorial space in terms of sovereignty and with
the waqf Islamic trust continuing to administer the
Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. This was the late
King Hussein’s proposal, and it seems to us the fairest
and most practical option. But, in the meantime, voices
are heard on both sides delegitimizing each other’s
attachments to this sacred site. This mutual denial adds
poison to an already lethal atmosphere.
Part of the problem is that the notion of “political
sovereignty” often eclipses the fundamental religious
truth that only God is sovereign over Creation, and that
we human beings are God’s regents or servant-partners in
blessing and perfecting this world. This means that all
political realms are under Divine judgment and that
their power is relativized by God’s ultimate authority.
The ramification for Israel and Palestine, under any
agreement establishing two adjacent sovereignties, is
that these two states should be understood as means for
ensuring the rights and opportunities of people, not
ends in themselves. A federation or confederation,
perhaps including Jordan as well, might be a more
effective framework for enabling the self-determination
of each people and, simultaneously, serving the needs of
all on the basis of equity and interdependence.
In fostering interreligious peacebuilding, a Christian
mediation role is helpful on two counts: to encourage
polarized Jews and Muslims to find common ground, and to
inspire Western Christians to make amends for their own
bloody history toward the other two Abrahamic
communities. For Palestinian Christians, rooted in the
land for centuries, reconciliation between their Muslim
brethren and Israeli Jews is essential for their own
economic and spiritual welfare.
The major burden, however, falls on the Jews and the
Muslims themselves. Both communities, guided by wise
leadership, need to overcome longstanding prejudices and
resentments. Each tradition has sacred teachings that
can be enlisted to build bridges of respect,
reconciliation, and cooperation. Wise religious
leadership consists of identifying those teachings and
educating both peoples in that spirit.
There will be no political peace in the Middle East
without a spiritual underpinning reconciling Jews and
Muslims. At this critical moment in our history, with
heartbreaking suffering and loss on all sides, we need
to be inspired by the Divine light that shines forth
from the holy Qur’an and the holy Torah. They both
affirm life, not death. They both teach compassion, not
callousness or hatred. They both call for a richly
diverse human family under the sovereignty of the One
God.
We both pray that--insh’Allah, b’ezrat Hashem, with
God’s help - 2003 will be a year of genuine peace and
security for everyone everywhere, starting with our
common homeland, Israel/Palestine.
YEHEZKEL LANDAU is co-director of the Open House Center
for Jewish-Arab Coexistence in Ramle, Israel, and
Faculty Associate in Interfaith Relations at Hartford
Seminary.
Imam YAHYA HENDI is Muslim Chaplain at Georgetown
University, spokesperson for the Islamic Jurisprudence
Council of North America, and director of the Peace
Office of the Muslim American Society. |
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