The Holocaust-denial theories aired last week in Iran were denounced Friday from an unexpected source - in a statement released by sheikhs of the Islamic Movement in Israel. Simultaneously, Religious Zionist rabbis issued a statement denouncing damage done to the Muslim cemetery in the center of Jerusalem in the construction of the Museum of Tolerance.

Both statements came out of a conference of Kedem, an organization of Jewish, Christian and Muslim clergy. The leaders of Kedem, which operates in the framework of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), say cooperation in the organization cam be a model to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During the two-day conference sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the World Conference of Religions for Peace, a roundable discussion was held among MKs from the National Union-National Religious Party, Kadima and the United Arab List-Ta'al. Participants sometimes expressed themselves harshly: MK Rabbi Yitzhak Levy (National Union-NRP compared Hamas to the devil and MK Abas Zkoor (UAL-Ta'al) spoke of religious
im

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imperatives to fight infidels. Nevertheless, all agreed that Muslims and Jews in Israel had to cooperate, even without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Levy proposed cooperation on issues like family values, combating violence and corruption. Zkoor said a common enemy of the Islamic Movement and the Jewish religious right was secularism.

The war in Lebanon and Yisrael Beiteinu's joining the government almost broke up the organization. Many participants reported pressures to back out, even from their spouses.

"It's impossible not to discuss the conflict," Rabbi Ron Kronish, Kedem's Jewish director and director of the ICCI, said, "but trust among participants meant that even after the harshest statements people did not leave the room."

Ahead of the conference, Kedem published the results of a poll showing that 83 percent of Jews in Israel described the level of trust between themselves and Arabs in Israel as "bad" or "terrible." The situation is expected to worsen following unilateral initiatives like the document released two weeks ago by the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, which included a demand to make Israel a binational state. An attempt by the
Israel Democracy Institute failed to formulate a covenant for Jewish-Arab relations after the Arab representatives refused to accept the definition of Israel as the Jewish state.

"We recognize there is no possibility today to reach agreements on macro issues," Kronish said, "but there is a lot to be done on the micro." Among other things, Kedem Has been working for over a year to establish Muslim prayer rooms in public places in Israel such as hospitals. Sheikh Kamal Riyan, the Muslim director of Kedem, says one reason for the organization's success is its egalitarian attitude toward Muslims. "When
I was asked to take part in the discussions of the Israeli Democracy Institute, I felt I was being patronized. Here we are equal partners to the Jews." Riyan, a leader of the southern faction of the Islamic Movement says he feels more comfortable today with rabbis of the Religious Zionist stream than with secular peace activists.

MK Rabbi Michael Melchior, an initiator of the 2002 Alexandria interreligious conference, says a major reason the Oslo peace process failed was the failure to involve clergy.

"We once thought we had nothing to talk about with the Israeli religious right," Riyan said. "But we have discovered they are willing to compromise on anything that does not contradict halakha [Jewish law]," he added. "I know rabbis who live in the territories who are willing to accept a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders."

Rabbi David Stav of Shoham, a colleague of Riyan's in Kedem, says Riyan "is right in principle but very mistaken on the practical level. It's true the solution to the conflict can come from interreligious meetings, since the essence of the conflict is religious and not territorial. But from the moment religion became a tool of the politicians, the genie can't be put back in the bottle."