U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Israel

Week 7

The Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian Peace Processes. This week is a basic overview of the next few weeks specifically related to the American led-peace process. 

Often the decisions have involved the leader, while other decisions have been made by subordinates. Using the well-known Eisenhower Matrix this week we will use certain examples to match. 

The eisenhower matrix

Question: The Legacy of Camp David looms large over every subsequent U.S. administration and its attempts to bring peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians. From your lecture notes and in your opinion why has the U.S. taken such an active role?

The Erasure of Historical Memory


The erasure from our historical memory of Israeli attempts to achieve peace by agreeing to Palestinian statehood, and of the serial Palestinian rejections, is now standard practice. This erasure sustains the libel that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ seeking ‘permanent occupation’ and underpins a ludicrously uncritical attitude to the Palestinian national movement, its leadership, and aspects of its political culture. From Human Rights Watch to Nathan Thrall, Peter Beinart to the Carnegie Endowment, the debate now proceeds as if those offers were never made and never rejected. Bringing those offers back in, and those rejections, we get a more realistic picture of the obstacles standing in the way of achieving two states for two peoples.

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ is the slogan of the fictional English Socialist Party led by Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Orwell understood that the erasure of history is a useful tool to control the present narrative and to influence the future. While perhaps an exaggerated analogy, there are Orwellian parallels in how anti-Israel organisations and thought leaders now treat some of the key historical elements of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This is clearly evident in relation to the multiple offers of statehood made by Israel to the Palestinians in the 2000 to 2008 period (the ‘Statehood Offers’). These events do not fit the fictional narrative of those who portray Israel as a colonial-settler enterprise that seeks to dominate the Palestinians in an endless occupation that has been characterised by some as ‘apartheid’.

A central element of this viewpoint asserts that Israel’s control of the West Bank has always been designed to be permanent. (It also considers Gaza to be occupied, despite not a single Israeli being present in the area, but this topic is beyond the scope of this article.) Thus, the notion that the West Bank and Gaza are semi-autonomous entities that may eventually become a sovereign Palestinian state is a fallacy and the whole region between ‘the river and the sea’ must be considered one entity under two systems that by design discriminates against Palestinians.

The concept of ‘permanent occupation’ as Israeli policy is demolished once we undertake a full and honest accounting of the Statehood Offers. Over this period Israel, with the assistance of the Americans who facilitated negotiations in 2000 and 2001, offered the Palestinians a full independent state that according to most Western observers contained all the elements of what a final-status deal should look like. The Clinton Parameters were a set of core positions provided to the Israelis and Palestinians in December 2000 as a vast improvement over the statehood offer in Camp David during the Summer of 2000. The key elements of the parameters were:

  • Creation of an independent Palestinian state with contiguity on nearly 100 per cent of the West Bank with land swaps, 100 per cent of Gaza and a dedicated link between the two areas.
  • Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine divided under the principle that existing Arab areas would be Palestinian and Jewish ones Israeli. This would also apply to the Old City, which would also be divided.
  • Palestinian control of the Temple Mount/Haram and Israeli control of the Western Wall.
  • The ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinians would be allowed into the new Palestinian state.
  • End of conflict agreement that would end all claims and satisfy all relevant U.N. resolutions.

There is agreement among experts that Ehud Barak accepted the Clinton Parameters while Yasser Arafat said no. Over the years many observers have made endless excuses for Arafat on why his rejection was justified, such as that he was under too much ‘pressure’ or that the negotiations went forward even though Arafat did not want them, but the fact of his rejection is not disputed. Some anti-Israel commentators still peddle falsehoods such as that the offers only provided for non-contiguous ‘Bantustans’ or a capital in Abu-Dis, despite clear evidence to the contrary. In October 2020 Al Arrabiya television released a groundbreaking interview with Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who recounted the last hours of Arafat’s rejection of Clinton’s final offer for statehood. Bandar placed all the blame on Arafat and has called the rejection a ‘crime’ and a ‘tragedy.’

On September 16, 2008 Ehud Olmert made a similar offer to Mahmoud Abbas in a presentation made to the Palestinian leader and his negotiating team at Olmert’s Jerusalem residence:

  • Creation of an independent Palestinian state with contiguity on nearly 100 per cent of the West Bank with land swaps (6.3 per cent to Israel for the major Israeli settlements exchanged for 5.8 per cent of Israeli territory plus a dedicated link between West Bank and Gaza) and 100 per cent of Gaza.
  • Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine with Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem transferred to Palestinian control.
  • Placement of the Old City, including the holy sites, under international control by a committee comprised of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Israel and the US, which meant that Israel ceded control of the Temple Mount.
  • The ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinians would be allowed into the new Palestinian state with a modest form of symbolic return into Israel proper.

This offer for statehood was rejected by Abbas who skipped a follow up meeting with Olmert the next day, claiming that he ‘had forgotten’ that he had to go to Amman. Abbas did not bother to reschedule or negotiate further and the Olmert statehood offer was officially dead. Years later Olmert said that, ‘From that time, I am still waiting for Abbas’s telephone call.’ American and Palestinian leaders have not disputed these events. Abbas claimed that he said no because he was not allowed to properly study Olmert’s map and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat admitted that he was not willing to give up a ‘single inch’ of the June 1967 lines. In 2011 Condoleezza Rice revealed in her memoir that the Americans continued to work with the parties behind the scenes to revive the peace plan. She recounted that President Bush met with Abbas in the Oval Office at the end of 2008 asking him to reconsider Olmert’s offer. Rice concluded that ‘The Palestinian stood firm, and the idea died.’

This erasure of Israeli attempts to achieve peace and grant Palestinians full statehood on nearly 100 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza is now standard practice in the anti-Zionist narrative, which has evolved to libel Israel as an apartheid state. Several documents from the past year clearly demonstrate the practice of erasing any history that contradicts key points in these demonising narratives.

Human Rights Watch

A lengthy April 2021 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) titled A Threshold Crossed charged Israel with the crime of Apartheid. Central to the claim is the contention that Israel, the West Bank and Gaza are in reality one combined entity with two separate sets of laws, one for Jews and one for Palestinians. By treating the region as one political entity, HRW dismisses the fact that Israel is a democracy with Arabs active in all areas of society, recently highlighted with the entry of an Arab party into the governing coalition. Critical to HRW’s thesis is their assessment that Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza has always been intended to be perpetual in nature, indicated on the first page of the report:

Several widely held assumptions, including that the occupation is temporary, that the ‘peace process’ will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses, that Palestinians have meaningful control over their lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and that Israel is an egalitarian democracy inside its borders, have obscured the reality of Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians … a number of Israeli officials have stated clearly their intent to maintain this control in perpetuity and backed it up through their actions, including continued settlement expansion over the course of the decades-long ‘peace process’.

For the charge of apartheid to ‘stick,’ even within the already heavily manipulated definition of the word, HRW focuses on this concept of permanent control of the territories, there being no intention on Israel’s part to create two independent states. Kenneth Roth, CEO of HRW, recently Tweeted that ‘the no-end-in-sight 30-year “peace process”’ does not absolve Israel of the crime of apartheid, adding that the peace process was a sham meant to mask Israel’s intent of permanent domination. Eric Goldstein, acting executive director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, confirmed that this concept is absolutely central to the apartheid thesis, writing that the peace process obscured the ‘clear intention of Israeli authorities to perpetuate a system of … domination’ and intends to maintain this system.

The reality of the Statehood Offers sharply contradict this key HRW assumption, which is why the report completely avoids a discussion of these events. The only allusion to the Statehood Offers in the report is the following line: ‘The parties did not reach a final status agreement by 2000 and have not in the two decades since, despite off and on negotiations primarily mediated by the US.’ The report further dismisses the negotiations as merely a tactic to ‘oppose efforts for rights-based international action or accountability, and as cover for Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians in the [Occupied Territories].’ Without any supporting evidence, HRW goes one step further than previous revisionist viewpoints in dismissing Barak and Olmert’s efforts as nothing more than a ruse by Israel to solidify Israeli domination over Palestinians and all the territory.

The egregious disingenuousness of the HRW report is further demonstrated by its cherry-picking of quotes from Israeli officials. The report notes that ‘Statements by Israeli prime ministers and other senior officials highlight the extent to which the intent to maintain demographic control has guided policymaking.’ The report quotes Netanyahu from 2003 and 2019, Ariel Sharon from 2002 and Shimon Peres from 2012. It cites Ehud Olmert, but only from 2003, three years before he became prime minister, with a statement that purports to show his intent to preserve a ‘Jewish majority’. To further prove that Israel has always sought to ensure ‘Jewish control over the land’ and demographic ‘domination’ to ‘confine Palestinians to dense population centres,’ HRW cites snippets from a range of other Israeli figures, both well known and obscure: Ben Gurion from 1948, Jacob Edery, Minister for the Development of the Negev and Galilee, from 2007, a leaked document from Yisrael Koenig, northern district commissioner of the Interior Ministry, from 1976, Ariel Atias, Israel’s Housing Minister, from 2009, Israel Kimhi, director of planning policy at the Interior Ministry, from 1975, Teddy Kolleck, mayor of Jerusalem, from 1982, Labour minister Yigal Allon from 1976 and Member of Knesset Yariv Levin from 2014. But the 200-page report, which HRW and others have touted as comprehensive and well researched, conveniently and incredibly skips over the entire history of the Statehood Offers. HRW’s tactic is to pretend that these events never happened and assume that no one will notice or care.

Nathan Thrall

Another notable example of the erasure of the Statehood Offers is a recent article by frequent New York Times contributor Nathan Thrall titled ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.’ The article has been hailed as an extraordinary piece that breaks new ground, but the 20,000-word document is nothing more than a long-form anti-Zionist essay which for all intents and purposes is the same as the HRW report.

Like the HRW report, Thrall covers a wide swath of history with liberal use of quote snippets ranging from Theodor Herzl in 1895, Yehuda Blum in 1977 and modern leaders, all to show that for more than a century the true goal of Zionism was ethnic cleansing and permanent domination of Arabs by Jews. Also like the HRW report, Thrall omits the Statehood Offers. He mentions Rabin’s plan for a Palestinian entity as ‘less than a state’ and Netanyahu’s ‘state minus’ but conveniently missing are the names Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. Thrall’s only reference to the Clinton Parameters is to assert that it allowed Israel to annex certain settlements, again positioning Israel’s actions for peace as sinister. Thrall parrots the proven falsehood that Palestinians were only offered ‘Bantustans,’ a charge which chief US negotiator Dennis Ross called a canard since the well documented plan put forth by President Clinton was for nearly 100 per cent of the West Bank with no possibility for cantons or Bantustans.

Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart, who has recently distinguished himself as perhaps the most prominent anti-Zionist Jew, wrote a notable article in July 2020 calling for a one-state solution. Beinart explains: ‘The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades — a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews — has failed. The traditional two-state solution no longer offers a compelling alternative to Israel’s current path.’ Beinart further informs the reader that, ‘Understanding why the classic two-state solution is dead requires understanding how its current incarnation was born.’ Astonishingly, his explanation for how the two-state solution evolved and then failed does not include the words Clinton, Arafat or Olmert. A full and honest recounting of the Statehood Offers would totally undermine the fabricated narrative Beinart weaves.

The Carnegie Endowment

In April 2021, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a report titled Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo. The paper purports to offer an analysis of how to shift US policy after ‘decades of on-and-off negotiations and failed peace initiatives’ but totally fails by not mentioning the names Clinton, Arafat, Barak, and Olmert even once and not assessing the Statehood Offers. The authors’ assert: ‘The growing dominance in Israel of a leadership that openly embraces permanent control of the occupied Palestinian territories and the steady decline of Palestinian democratic governance have been trends for decades.’ Really? Only 13 years ago Olmert offered Abbas a full state that was arguably more generous than that offered under the Clinton Parameters in 2000.

Israel Policy Forum

The downplaying of the Statehood Offers is also a phenomenon of pro-Israel, Zionist organisations such as the Israel Policy Forum. The forum’s core value is to support the ‘realisation of a viable two-state solution’. In February 2021, the organisation published a report titled In Search of a Viable Option, Evaluating Outcomes to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict but this document also erases the Statehood Offers. It seems that the authors’ desire to appear ‘fair and balanced’ led to the clear avoidance of the elephant in the room: the two-state solution failed in 2000, 2001 and 2008 due to Palestinian rejectionism and refusal to budge from maximalist demands that, if met, would one way or another end Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.

The study’s cover page asks, ‘Is the two-state solution still possible?’ and the first lines of the report note that ‘The two-state solution has been widely criticised from the right and the left as an idea whose time has passed and been overtaken by facts on the ground. As a result, many other models for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been advanced.’ Incredibly, in a paper that is specifically devoted to analysing the two-state solution and its alternatives, there is absolutely no analysis of why the two-state solution failed in the 2000 to 2008 period. There is no assessment of the Palestinian negotiating stance at the time, no discussion of why Barak and Olmert said yes while Arafat and Abbas said no, and no review of why these two-state offers were not sufficient for the Palestinians. Clinton is mentioned only twice in the 120-page document and Arafat not at all.

The study concludes that ‘Even though the two-state outcome is the best approach, or the one assessed to be least flawed, it has serious challenges mostly pertaining to acceptance by the current Israeli government, some of whose leaders are working tirelessly to kill it.’ Somehow, to the Israeli Policy Forum none of the fault lies with the Palestinians. The authors’ do not see ‘serious challenges’ related to the Palestinian’s prior rejections of two-state offers and do not even deem it necessary to review the Statehood Offers to draw lessons on why Arafat and Abbas said no.

John Kerry

Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech in December 2016 addressed the Obama administration’s relationship with Israel and the reason behind his decision to abstain from a UN Security Council vote to criticise Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. In a 70-minute speech which recounted many historical aspects of the conflict, Kerry devoted exactly one vague sentence to the Camp David era: ‘President Clinton deserves great credit for laying out extensive parameters designed to bridge gaps in advanced final-status negotiations 16 years ago.’ By ignoring this important milestone in the history of the conflict it allowed Kerry to simply blame the settlements as the key obstacle to peace – not Palestinian rejectionism in any way.

At least President Biden Gets It

It seems that even well-intentioned pro-Israel Zionists who desire to see themselves as ‘honest mediators’ do not want to accept the simplest and depressing answer to why the two-state solution has failed since first proposed in the 1930s: the absolute rejection by most Arabs and Palestinians of Jewish statehood on any borders and its corollary demand of the literal ‘Right of Return’. One only has to listen to President Biden who seemingly ‘gets it’ better than most experts when he recently said: ‘Let’s get something straight here, until the region says unequivocally they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state, there will be no peace.’

References

[1] Condoleeza Rice, No Higher Honor, p. 723-724.

Two State Solution Chronology
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‘Doing God’, or the importance of religious peacemaking: an interview with Rabbi Michael Melchior

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, this is part of the divine plan. It can’t be that we see our return to the land as part of the fulfilment of the vision of the prophets and as part of a divine plan yet think the Divine made a mistake by letting another people live here. This is a priori, for me, though it is probably a posteriori for my rabbinical colleagues. But when the religious sit together – and you see the radical rabbis sitting, learning together with Islamists – they realise that these are serious people who aren’t going anywhere. Nobody is betraying their religion, their tradition, their dreams; they remain fully loyal to those things. But they are willing to face reality and to find a political compromise. It’s difficult, but I am meeting only open doors and I go to some of the most radical leaders on both sides – the more radical the better.

CBD: What are these meetings like?

MM: This past year I have met with many of the leading radical figures in the Islamic world outside Palestine. Our Palestinian colleagues who set these meetings up tell us how ideologically weird it is for them to meet with Zionists! And I’m not just some Zionist rabbi – I am a former Israeli cabinet minister! They haven’t even met a Jew before and now they get everything in one package. They meet with other national-religious rabbis and see the trust and friendship we have created between the Palestinian and the Jewish leadership, and they understand.

These radicals want Islam, even political Islam, to be a part of the world. They want it to be part of modernity without giving up on one letter of the fundamentals of Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bad for them. The hatred in their camp against Jews and Israel is not bringing them anywhere good; just as the hatred and racism amongst us is bringing us to new depths. These radical Muslim leaders feel that putting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict behind them serves Allah and the purpose of Islam. It’s not something they do for the sake of our blue eyes, but it is part of an overall strategy of where they want Islam to go. For us it’s also part of our purpose of having a State of Israel – a Jewish state. We have a state not just to provide a safe haven for Jews, but also to sanctify God’s name. And how amazing would it be if we could build a model of religious peace that becomes a model for Nigeria, Baghdad, Kashmir, Paris and Sri Lanka? We are on the verge – a lot has gone under the radar.

CBD: Have you been frustrated by the tendency of the media to emphasise extremism amongst religious groups?

MM: In the Haaretz peace conference they didn’t get how sensational it was that somebody like Sheik Abdullah Nimr Darwish spoke. He told us how he had created the Islamic movement and Islamic Jihad, had been in prison for terrorism, but has now decided that he is going to spend his life making peace. On the same platform was Rabbi Avi Gisser, Rabbi of Ofra, the biggest settlement in Samaria, who also expressed his intention of making religious peace. Sheikh Raed Badir (prominent leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel) was also on the panel. But what did Haaretz put as their headline the next day? That Martin Indyk supports the Oslo Accords. That’s the news?! It seems that if peace comes from another place than this ‘safe place’ of the (secular) tribe, it’s not desirable. Somehow, it is threatening, so it is ignored.

CBD: You’ve talked about meeting with very sceptical Islamists.

MM: Not only sceptical, I’ve talked with the people who have written the books about how to blow us up.

CBD: So what happens at these encounters?

MM: Together with Jewish and Islamic friends, I present our concept of religious peace. We must get over some psychological barriers. Eventually, they say, ‘Well, if it doesn’t come from secular Tel Aviv people who want to corrupt our tradition, but from religious sources, that’s a different story. Nobody ever talked to us in this language. We’re on board.’ When they join the coalition, they begin to speak in a different language. No one who has agreed to be part of the network has subsequently returned to writing the things they did before.

Religious peace after Duma

We had an encounter after the terrible events in Duma (when Jewish hilltop youth set fire to a Palestinian home, killing three of the family members). Some right-wing rabbis called me and said they wanted to do something – not just to condemn the murders but also to meet some of the Islamists. I agreed to organise it, but on condition that it wasn’t a onetime encounter. Ultimately a group of leading rabbis from Tzohar, the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and others met with a group. We prayed. The debate was very hard and the accusations were very tough.

When there was the horrific act in Itamar a couple of years ago (when five members of the Fogel family were killed by two Palestinians), Sheik Raed Badir and the others called the leaders of Hamas and told them of their intention to publish a harsh statement condemning the incident and that they wanted Hamas to accept it. They released a statement on the Islamic Movement’s website saying that, we should have had a Palestinian state a long time ago, but if this heinous crime is the way to obtain a Palestinian state, we will wait another 1,000 years. And then he said that if you (Israelis) think you can keep on having the State of Israel by doing acts like Duma, you’re not going to keep the State of Israel either.

CBD: Do you want recognition? Do you want them to view you as a legitimate, historical entity?

MM: No. I don’t need that. I don’t need Islam to become Zionist. I want them to live in peace with the State of Israel, not to accept our narrative of ‘We’ve come home here to our historic land.’

CBD: And we don’t need to accept their narrative?

MM: No we don’t. I’m willing to do that, but I don’t expect that from my colleagues. That’s not the kind of utopian peace we’re talking about. But we can live in a peace with common values and common ideals. If all the parties are inside the tent – and I’m hearing this from more and more of the people we’re getting to – peace will look very different. We need everybody – Fatah and Hamas as well as all parts of Israeli society – inside that tent.

CBD: What sort of approach to Hamas would you like to see?

MM: Hamas needs to come around to being a part of this deal, of being inside the tent of peace. I follow Hamas internal debate, and there are more and more serious religious and political leaders inside the movement who want it to be like the Tunisian Ennahda party, which constitutes a wonderful model for an Islamic party. It’s part of the Muslim Brotherhood, but also part of modernity and part of living together in a society. There are many people in Hamas who want their organisation, together with Fatah and the other parties, to be part of peace here. These guys are different from Daesh and other Islamic anarchists. But they also want something to come out of it so that down the road they won’t look like Palestinian President Abbas, who doesn’t get any response from the Israeli side.

CBD: This is a political question rather than a religious one: what does peace mean to you?

MM: The politicians will have to work out the deal. I don’t expect this of the religious people. Maybe the deal will be very close to the Clinton Parameters. Maybe there are issues in which the religious leaders will have a stronger input. When it comes to the issue of the Jewish presence in the Palestinian state, I think that’s something that secular leaders previously couldn’t envision but is now increasingly being talked about. Again, when everybody is inside the tent, peace becomes much more realistic. If half the Palestinians are going to blow up the deal, it’s not very realistic.

CBD: Before July 2000, you and your partners came up with some ideas regarding Jerusalem that were rejected. What were they?

MM: When it came to the Old City we thought about having joint Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem, and joint Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious steering of the Old City. Any change could be vetoed. My Muslim partner Sheikh Darwish said that if the Jewish Messiah comes and instructs us to build the Temple, he would be the first one to carry the stones for the building of the Temple, even though he is crippled. If that’s the will of Allah, then that’s the will of Allah.

CBD: Your discussion of leaving things until messianic times reminds me of the Talmudic idea of Teiku (an issue that in the ‘here and now’ is left undetermined but which in the end of days will ultimately be resolved). Should we put some things aside and forget about deciding who has ‘won’?

MM: Yes. And another judicial principle that exists in both Jewish and Muslim law is a situation in which two people argue over a tallit (prayer shawl) and both claim that all of it is theirs. In such a case, they have to go to court and swear that half is theirs (because if they both swear that all of it is theirs, one of them is lying). They still believe that all is theirs, but they divide it and share it. This exists in both Jewish and Muslim law.

The Torah tells us the whole land belongs to God and we all are temporary residents here. Muslims have the same concept. Sovereignty is a modern political concept, not a judicial Jewish or Muslim one.

CBD: Even though they are supportive of Israel, many Jews feel uncomfortable with fundamentalist Christians who believe that sometime in the future we’ll convert and embrace Jesus. Are you not suggesting something similar? Don’t you too believe that that in the far-off future we will be proven correct and all the land will be ours, but in the meantime we’re going to live and let live? Is there a difference?

MM: I don’t care about their dreams for the future. I have a problem with what they do today. To have a messianic idea for the future is legitimate. I don’t understand why people were so angry at Tzipi Hotovely’s dream of an Israeli flag on the Temple Mount. It might not be the most diplomatic idea. As the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, at this point of the violence – when we’re trying to do reduce the hate propaganda about the Jews wanting to burn down Al-Aqsa and rebuild the Temple – I’m not sure hers was the brightest statement. But in principle, what’s bad about that?

CBD: So from your perspective, at a meeting between religious Jews and religious Muslims, when someone says, ‘I dream about one day the third Temple being rebuilt’ and someone else says, ‘I dream about one day being in Jaffa’, that’s all OK?

MM: Over the summer I wrote that Jews pray for the return of the divine presence to Zion and that this is my dream, my prayer, my wish. I pray for this every day. But I also wrote that in the meantime this dream is out of bounds. For my Islamic friends, this was fine.

CBD: Do you feel like you’re making progress?

MM: Yes. This past year Yom Kippur and Eid al-Adha overlapped for the first time in 33 years. The heads of the Jerusalem Police came to my office and said they had warnings of terrible riots – both on the Jewish and the Muslim side – and asked me to use my contacts. We went to the most radical leaders – not part of the coalition, but the real radicals who have the most influence – and said: do you want this day to be a bloodbath? They issued a fatwah, which most radicals signed, saying that all Muslims have to respect the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. It appeared in the Palestinian press and was displayed in all the mosques. The rabbis published a statement that people driving on Eid are not disrespecting the day, or meaning to disturb Yom Kippur. And these were the quietest days we’ve had. It shows how much influence they have over the people. The police came to me afterwards and said, ‘You do this for three days, why can’t you do this the whole year?’

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