These thoughts are written in a time when there might be a narrow opening in the political peace process in the Middle East. We are also in an important season in the religious calendar—a rare convergence of dates when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish Days of Awe are adjacent to each other. The ideas of this sacred season give us reason to believe that we can turn this narrow opening into a wide window of opportunity.
Many people think that because something has failed once or twice or three times that means that they are doomed to fail in all future attempts. For this purpose, Judaism teaches us a revolutionary concept of repentance, which really means that even if you have failed as an individual or as a society, once or twice or a hundred times, you have a possibility of not only building a new future but turning the failures, by learning from them, into successes, or as Rabbi Nachman of Bretslav said, if you believe in your power to fail, and to destroy, then you must surely also believe in your power to mend and build.
When we look at the successes and failures of the pursuit of peace in the Middle East, we can see that there has been a failure to integrate religion and interreligious dialogue. The repeated attempts to ignore this critical role in the search for peace have been proven wrong. Today, almost no conflicts exist in which religion does not constitute a central component or serve as the underlying cause. U.S. President Barack Obama's recent speech in Cairo highlighted the religious component of conflict, and consequently interreligious dialogue, and placed them back in their rightful places.
This is the century of religion. This has its positive or negative consequences depending on how you look at it. Religion is of course meant to be the search for meaning, for values, for subordinating our lives to serve God and therefore in principle is the true tree of life. But parallel with this, we know from all human experience that religion has been used and misused for crushing life and demolishing hope and holding hostage the future in some impossible past.
There's no doubt that religion in its many forms assumes today a very central role in people's lives, even more than was the case in the 20th century. In many ways the 20th century, with its nihilistic, totalitarian ideologies, formed a parenthesis in history, when not all conflicts were around religion or ethnicity. There were those who claimed that with the end of the Cold War we had reached “the end of history.” This is of course not so. The return of religion brought us back to history, in the respect that we cannot deal with conflict resolution or with conflict management without understanding that religion is an important component that needs to be on the table.
A Peace Process Emptied of its Soul
The Oslo peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians was led and developed by people on both sides, mainly on the Israeli side, who wanted to exclude religion from the solution. There were four main reasons:
The first was sheer ignorance. Many of the opinion makers and policy makers were not religious people and because of the deep divide between religious and secular, could not at all identify with the many people who look to religion for legitimacy and identity, and they did not have any understanding of their ideas.
The second reason is that many of the policymakers believed that nothing good can come out of religion. They believed that it would be possible to ignore the religious element of the process and it would go away—not understanding that if you ignore things they don't always go away, they explode in your face.
Thirdly, a lot of policy makers thought they could deal with the important underlying issues of the conflict including the religious and cultural aspects after settling the political aspect of the conflict, in the style of the truth and reconciliation commission that was put into place in South Africa after the apartheid regime was deposed and a new political framework was put into place. They thought they could cut a deal in a short process that would take three to five years, and only then deal with the main underlying issues of the conflict, including of course the religious dimension. This theory turned out to be a failure. The deal in fact could never be made because the underlying issues were never addressed.
Finally, there is a view that is strong among left-wing Israeli and Palestinian policy makers that the peace process is a secularization process. They believe that peace is a vehicle to secularization in society, and that if there is no conflict, people won't need religion any more.
This attitude has emptied the peace process of its soul.
Although there are important religious components to the conflict it is at base a national conflict between two peoples claiming the same piece of land. However, because religion was excluded from the solution, it became an ever-growing part of the problem. A vacuum was created in the place where religion should be in the peace process. It was filled by the extreme, totalitarian elements of religion who tried to turn the conflict into a religious conflict—a conflict “my God” and “your God” where there can be no compromise and no solution.
I never would precondition a peace process on a religious track, but what has happened again and again is that a process that was supported by the whole world, and by a large majority of the people living here, has failed miserably. Today, while a majority of people know what the solution is and are willing to pay the price, they don't believe in it. Every failed attempt just adds to the despair and to the lack of hope for a different future.
Interreligious Peace through Dialogue
The way to narrow the gap between the mess we are in and the place we would like to go could be through religious peace and interreligious dialogue.
If it can be proven that religion can facilitate cooperation and peacemaking, that Islam is willing to live with the state of Israel in the midst of the Islamic world, Israelis would be much more open to the peace process, and it would restore hope for real progress. Likewise the Palestinians: if they would see that the Israelis are not here to spearhead the clash of civilizations or to wipe out the national-religious aspiration of the Palestinians, the Muslim world would be much more open to creating a different future together with Israelis.
The Mosaica Center deals with the core questions of coexistence. Mosaica endeavors to create cooperation particularly among people with religious beliefs, who have been totally excluded from the process until now. This is a difficult move to implement since religion has its own language and narrative that is different from the standard language of conflict resolution. There are totalitarian elements to religion, as there are to societies and maybe even to every human being. The belief of each religion that it holds the only and absolute truth is an inhibiting factor.
However, it is precisely religious people, who are sure of their identity, who have the strength to bring about the progression towards a common language with the other – instead of making room for extremism, and taking the conflict to an extreme place. When a person feels secure in his identity and its boundaries, it is easier for him to identify with the other, to speak to him and allocate him space. Secularization has not brought peace. But we who look towards religion as our main source of identity can find together a world not only of common interests but also of common values. This vision of a “New Middle East” has a totally different meaning than the one promoted by Shimon Peres in the 1990s.
When a person is less than sure of his religious identity and its boundaries, he will feel threatened by the other, who is different from him. Therefore, it is only natural that societies whose religious identity constitutes a central part of their lives should be our target population.
We at Mosaica can offer the missing link in the process. By involving the grass roots in the fields of education and culture, and by involving religious leaders skeptical of a peace process that lacks a soul, you can restore the vitality of the process.
The burden is on us to prove that we are able to rally the forces to do this. Otherwise we must declare that we have failed, as have the religions we love and care for. If religions can only take away hope from people, they have no relevance for building the future.
And therefore in order not to turn our dreams into a nightmare, we need to draw out of our sources of our beliefs not only common interests, but even more, common goals, common ideals, and common vision.
The good news, and the reason for optimism, is that over the few years of activity of Mosaica, have already seen on all levels that done the right way, prepared in the right spirit, interreligious dialogue can make these walls of hatred and suspicion come tumbling down because there are believers on both sides who are convinced that it is possible.
The two very intensive spiritual months of Ramadan and Tishrei create a double period of spirituality in the world, an opportunity for finding God and for God to find us. As both Judaism and Islam express it, it is a time for to recognize where the human limitation is and where we need to leave it to the Almighty to assist us and direct us. May it be God's will that we utilize this unique opportunity in order to build hope in a world which desperately needs to build and not to destroy.
Rabbi Michael Melchior is Founder of the Mosaica Center
