Last week, January 12-15, an unusual conference featuring 35 religious leaders from the Gaza Strip and West Bank was held in Cairo. Participants were official guests invited by Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, who bears the title Sheikh Al-Azhar. Participants included Imad Al-Faluji from the Gaza Strip, a former Hamas operative who served as PA Communications Minister in Yasser Arafat's government, Sheikh Tayseer Al-Tamimi from Hebron, who heads the PA's Islamic legal system (a few days before the Cairo meeting he was detained and questioned in Jerusalem for having allegedly violated security orders), and Sheikh Talal Sider, also from Hebron and a former PA Cabinet minister.
The other participants were familiar figures from the Waqf Muslim religious trust, or well-known preachers in Islamic frameworks in the territories.
Israel's government allowed participants to travel to Cairo for the event, even though some of them are known to hold extremist views. Though no current leading Hamas operatives took part in the event, some participants are known sympathizers of Islamic militants. There is no doubt that Arafat and his aides carefully reviewed the list of participants, and gave a stamp of approval to their involvement in the event.
Israel allowed the Islamic activists from the territories to travel to Cairo because the event was effectively the continuation of the Alexandria Conference, held two years ago (January 2002) at the initiative of Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. George Carey. In the Alexandria event, invitations went out to Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious leaders from the Holy Land; and the turn-out was impressive. Six leading patriarchs from Jerusalem participated, as did then Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron and then Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, and also prominent Palestinian Muslim personalities. England's Prime Minister Tony Blair and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak officially recognized the conference. The meeting culminated with the release of the "First Declaration of Alexandria of the Religious Leaders of the Holy Land," whose main clause stated: "According to our faith traditions, killing innocents in the name of God is a desecration of his Holy Name, and defames religion in the world. The violence in the Holy Land is an evil which must be opposed by all people of good faith."
A number of subcommittees continued to operate after the Alexandria Conference, and they initiated a number of public meetings, the least of which was last week's Cairo gathering. At first glance, this appears to have been an internal meeting of Palestinian Islamic leaders; yet Rabbis Melchior and Menahem Fruman from the Tekoa settlement were also invited.
In fact, the participation of the two Israeli guests turned the Cairo meeting into a special event. MK Melchior (Labor) spoke to conference participants at length. "Bloodshed today in many parts of the world, including our country, differs from wars of the past in that they do not derive solely from a political-territorial dispute, but also from cultural-ethnic rivalries in which religion plays a leading part," Rabbi Melchior declared. In his view, the fact that political leaders have ignored religious dimensions of the Jewish-Arab dispute has damaged the peace process. During Ehud Barak's tenure as prime minister, Melchior proposed that a Jewish-Muslim dialogue be initiated; but Barak rejected the idea, arguing that tackling religious issues would only worsen the situation.
The same idea held sway among Palestinian leaders. Melchior recalls that when he attended the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, he told Arafat's adviser Marwan Kanafani that a religious dialogue must accompany the peace process. Kanafani replied: "The way to take care of religion in the dispute is to put the sheikhs in mosques, the rabbis in synagogues and priests in churches, and then lock the doors behind them and throw the keys away in the sea - they can only interfere with the process."
Anglican Minister Andrew White, Melchior's collaborator in a steering committee formed at the Alexandria Conference, said a year ago in Jerusalem that the peace process is failing because it has been handled by secularists. "After all, this is the Holy Land, and religious rivalries are the crux of the dispute - so why are secular leaders entrusted with handling it," he asked.
Frightened by fanaticism
Rabbi Melchior claims that the willingness of Islamic leaders (including Palestinian ones) to take part in events like the Cairo meeting has risen since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. Pious Muslims from around the world have been frightened by Al-Qaida's violent fanaticism, and so they are more inclined to take part in intra-religious discussions, Melchior suggests. In other words, they are more willing to recognize the legitimacy of other religious viewpoints, and surrender some portion of their own faith's absolute claims. Opposing Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, Rabbi Melchior speaks about a coalition of civilizations.
For five hours at the Cairo conference, Rabbi Melchior confronted outbursts of rage, and vehement criticism of Israel's policies articulated by dozens of Palestinian religious leaders. These figures feel humiliated and frustrated by Israel's actions, Melchior says; and they spoke as leaders who represent furious, desperate religious communities.
The main challenge faced by Melchior is that the peace process has been viewed on both sides as a by-product of cheap secularism. On the Palestinian side, Arafat's aides who came to Gaza from Tunisia and served as Oslo peace architects are perceived as having not only formed the new Palestinian government, but also as having imported decadent Western culture. Today, Palestinian participants in the Geneva Accord peace initiative are identified as "secularists," as moderate leftists; meantime, the Geneva Accord's opponents are viewed as Islamic loyalists, as Hamas and Islamic Jihad hard-liners.
Melchior identifies processes of secular-religious polarization on Israel's side as well. Rabbi Eliezer Shach, Melchior recalls, was for years known for his dovish views, and once wondered aloud about the Jewish people's relation to the territories. "We lived for 2,000 years without the territories, and we can live without them for some more years," Rabbi Shach declared. Nonetheless, Rabbi Shach opposed the peace process, viewing it as an initiative spearheaded (in a famous phrase) by "rabbit eaters" - that is, as a process which undermines Judaism.
The intra-religious dialogue which began two years ago in Alexandria has not captured headlines, and it is not easy to measure its impact. Muslim participants at Alexandria, including Sheikh Tantawi, were attacked verbally and even received death threats. After Alexandria, in at least one instance Tantawi's name was affixed to an expression of support for suicide bombing.
Last week in Cairo, Rabbi Melchior asked Palestinian Islamic leaders whether they are prepared to accept Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel; that is, he asked whether there's any point in continuing the dialogue. They responded that they definitely do accept such sovereignty, that UN Security Council Resolution 242 is acceptable to them, and that the discussions should continue.
