When it comes to conflict resolution, the dominant view has been that God should be taken out of the equation. Rabbi Michael Melchior, the former Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, argues that treating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a mere land dispute has been one of the reasons for the failure of the peace process. In this interview with Fathom deputy editor Calev Ben-Dor, Melchior explains why we have to ‘do God’ to secure peace.
Calev Ben-Dor: Many people say religion is a source of conflict. Why do you argue it can be a source of peace?
Michael Melchior: First of all, religion is probably the biggest NGO in the world. It is the biggest component of identity for a great many people and it connects those people to tradition, history, culture and ethnicity. And at the centre is God. Religion plays many different roles – it soothes lives, heals and can provide redemption, but it can also separate people, causing war, hatred and racism.
We know that religion plays a major role in many conflicts. It is often used by the protagonists as one of the ‘reasons’ for conflict. And this leads many people – especially in the Western world – to suggest taking God out of the equation, in order to get on better with conflict resolution and with what they see as the ‘real’ issues. But the world doesn’t work that way. God is very much inside the equation; God is one of the real issues.
What the Israeli-Palestinian peacemakers decided to do was to take religion out of the equation. They wanted a quick fix peace agreement that would deal with certain aspects of the conflict, leaving the existential aspects to be dealt with later. This was attempted in Oslo, Camp David, Annapolis, in George W. Bush’s Road Map, and during the aborted John Kerry-led talks. It has been like going down a blind alley with four flat tyres. The first time around one could say that we didn’t know it was a blind alley. But we should have learned from experience and analysed what went wrong. Why didn’t we succeed? I think everybody will agree that the religious factor was the main thing which blew up the Oslo Accords.
When Oslo was signed I was afraid it would fail because it excluded the religious aspects of the conflict, and the religious leaders themselves. And that is what happened: on both sides it was these excluded groups who blew up the conflict.
Religious spoilers on both sides
On the Palestinian side, the people who made sure that Oslo didn’t succeed were the Palestinian Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who mounted terrorist attacks. Rabin said, ‘We will fight terror as if there is no peace and continue with peace as if there is no terror,’ but it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. The people saw that ‘peace’ led to terror, and so they didn’t buy into the process.
On the Jewish side we had the religious delegitimisation of the process and the demonisation of the people who led it. We had Baruch Goldstein (who murdered 29 worshippers in Hebron in February 1994) and Yigal Amir (who assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in November 1995). The Palestinians saw Israel putting more and more settlers inside what was supposed to be a future Palestinian state, so they perceived us to be unserious about peace. And we saw that they weren’t serious about peace. 22 years on, neither side believes it has a partner.
CBD: So for you, one reason for the failure of Oslo was what you call the ‘secularising of peace’. What do you mean by that term?
MM: Those who led this process made a major mistake. They wanted the peace process to be part of the secularisation of Israeli society, and it was seen as such by the religious population on both sides. The Oslo architects just didn’t know how to speak a religious language. When they talked about Judea and Samaria – it’s similar today when the Israeli left talks about it – they talked about getting rid of the West Bank; as if it was a burden, as if Israel had no connection to it. As a religious Jew, I believe that Hebron, Otniel and Shiloh are pieces of our heritage. They belong to the Jewish people. A secular language does not speak to the vast majority of Israelis, who look towards religion, tradition and the connection to the land as a major source of their identity.
We have to say this land belongs to us. It’s not maximalist; it belongs to us. We believe in it and have the connection to it. To divide the land is a tremendous sacrifice. It is like cutting off a part of our body. But sometimes one has to do just that to survive. Yet saying we have nothing to do with Hebron, Otniel and Shiloh is cosmopolitan political talk which ignores the issue of identity.
CBD: Even some non-religious people look at it that way.
MM: Yes, because many of the old Zionists saw the Bible as the title deed to the land. It’s not just traditional Jews who were turned away from peace by a kind of cosmopolitan political humanist language. Not just those who are strict on where they put their tea bags on Shabbat. This is about the essence of the identity of people. And when you make people choose between peace and their identity, people will choose their identity.
The Alexandria process
CBD: You have written about ‘systematic conflict resolution in a religious existential context.’ What do you mean?
MM: My first serious attempt to do something in this area of religious peacemaking was in 2002 in Alexandria together with a Palestinian colleague and close friend of mine, Sheikh Talal Sider. At that time I was the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and he was a leading religious figure and a junior minister in Arafat’s government. It was the peak of the Second Intifada and we decided we wanted to do something dramatic by getting all the religious leaders of the Holy Land together. We also involved the Grand Imam as a chairman, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Bakshi-Doron. We brought leading rabbis, church leaders and Palestinian Muslims in order to sign a joint declaration. It was tough but we had a very good conference together.
The Alexandria Declaration became a model in many different places around the world for how to make a religious peace. In Nigeria they carved the same declaration in stone where tens of thousands of people, Muslims and Christians, had been killing each other. And on that basis they made religious peace between Christians and Muslims, preventing all the religious killings in Kaduna, the biggest province in northern Nigeria. Brave people are now taking the Alexandria model into the Boko Haram areas and are doing wonderful work. On the basis of this declaration we also convened an inter-religious council for peace and inter-religious dialogue, with the Chief Rabbi and the Palestinian Authority.
What I discovered was that if you really want to make religious peace, you can’t speak to the mainstream. You need to speak to the radicals, to those opposed and sceptical of peace. Not to the good guys, but to the difficult guys. And they weren’t in Alexandria as they opposed it. What I discovered was that those radicals are the ones we need inside the tent of peace in order to make peace.
That’s much harder, but I set out to see if it was possible. I started having one-on-one conversations on both sides. This has been my main effort in recent years. We now have several centres. The Mosaica centre here (in West Jerusalem), and the Muslim partners that we’re working with have created centres in Kfar Kassem, East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Gaza and now in Cairo. They have a network all over the Islamic world and are winning support for the concept of a religious peace in Israel and Palestine. But we have to realise that we will not become Peace Now. And the other side won’t become Meimad (an Israeli moderate religious party that Melchior used to head). It’s not going to happen – neither with the national religious rabbis, nor Hamas, Islamic Jihad nor the radical Islamic leaders. We’re also not going to find – at least not at this stage of history – an Islamic Zionism, which might be our dream and our hope (and we’re allowed to have our dreams). We’re talking about people who believe in all their hearts that this land belongs to them.
CBD: On both sides?
MM: Yes. It’s the ‘Greater Land of Israel’ on the one hand and ‘Waqf’ (holy Islamic land) on the other. However, there is also modesty on both sides. Both believe that ultimately all land belongs to God. And both have commitment ‘not to do to the other what you wouldn’t want the other to do to you.’ And there are religious precedents written down in piskei Halacha (Jewish legal decisions) and fatwas (Islamic legal decisions) that declare religious peace to be desirable and legitimate. Not a tahadiya (ceasefire) or hudhna (long term agreement) but a salam (peace). This doesn’t mean one needs to give up legitimate aspirations for the future. There can still be a future Caliphate or Messianic times. But these people need to understand that we are currently in a situation where two peoples are living here together and we need to find a solution. It needs to be a solution that is inclusive of both sides, and which will possibly lead to a two-state solution in which there will be a strong Palestinian presence in Israel, and a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria.
This solution will come from a different starting point: respect that there are another people living here. For me, th