The holy peaceniks of the Middle East

By Jonathan Freedland

LONDON: At least the catering isn't a problem. At these extraordinary, secret meetings, meal times are one of the few things neither side has to worry about. The rabbis insist on kosher food, which handily satisfies all the demands of halal -- making it good enough for the imams and sheiks on the other side. But that's the easy part; everything else has proved deathly difficult.

For these teams of unlikely negotiators are the Jewish and Muslim clerics who have met face to face for nearly a decade in their own secret, Oslo-style "back channel" to the peace process. Revealed for the first time today, it is an effort which has brought together men who should be the most implacable of enemies -- the religious leaders of Israel and Palestine.

They have met in Jerusalem and under the auspices of a European country which neither side wants disclosed. They have conducted some of their sessions under the cover of international conferences on religion, stealing off for private meetings to seek a solution to the world's most enduring conflict.

Their closed-door encounters have mirrored the peace process itself. Predating the Oslo accords of 1993, the sessions took off in earnest that year -- with the clerics meeting as often as every month as they sought to thrash out the differences that separate not only Israelis from Palestinians but Jews from Muslims.

In bad times, the dialog has nearly broken down, with the Palestinian leaders especially fearful of attack from their own people should their secret talks with the rabbis became public. Since the outbreak of the current intifada last autumn, the relationship has come close to drying up. But not yet.

It counts as a remarkable episode of diplomatic derring-do, with men of the cloth doing the work of statesmen, holy texts taking the place of treaties and ultimatums.

But it also turns on its head one of the hoariest staples of conventional wisdom about the Middle East: that the moment religion is injected into the conflict, the fire becomes a blaze -- a territorial dispute inflames into holy war. That cliche has gained ground in recent months, whether from Jewish settlers believing their presence on the West Bank is divinely sanctioned or Palestinian suicide bombers convinced that blowing up 20 Jewish teenagers at a beachside nightclub books them a martyr's place in paradise.

Rabbi Michael Melchior, Israel's deputy foreign minister and the lead member of the Jewish delegation to the secret talks, knows the dangers. "All those who don't want a solution can go to religion," he told me on Monday, during a brief trip to London. "Once it's My God against Your God or Judaism against Islam, there can't be any solution."

But Melchior, the Danish-born founder of Israel's first religious peace party, believes faith can provide hope as well as despair. For religion is the core of the dispute, he says; it's folly to ignore it -- a flaw, he reckons, of the original Oslo process. "If you ignore the religious element and say it doesn't exist, it does not disappear. It explodes in your face. You have to deal with it and understand how central it is to both populations, who see the legitimacy of their existence and identity in religion."

This is a radical departure from the decades-old consensus on the Middle East, which held that only secular leaders debating the earthy business of land and borders could hope to cut a deal. Melchior is calling for realism -- for a recognition that in a conflict where both sides are driven by faith, any future accord must at least square with people's passionately held beliefs.

That's why he and his Palestinian counterparts have recently been debating the Islamic concept of hudna, the notion of a modus vivendi, a way to co-exist with even your bitterest enemies -- and "to deal with the hatreds and myths about each other".

If Muslim clerics can develop that idea, telling their congregations that a deal with Israel is theologically justified by the Koran, says Melchior, then the task of selling an eventual peace accord will be that much easier. The same goes for the Jewish side: which is why Melchior and his fellow peacenik rabbis devote so much energy to demonstrating that compromise in the cause of peace finds approval in Judaism's most ancient sources.

On this, the deputy foreign minister is entirely upfront: he knows his encounter group of clerics could provide valuable cover to the politicians, declaring any future accord, how shall we put it, kosher.

But their value is greater than that. He offers an example of a row in 1997, sparked when an extremist Jewish group plastered the Palestinian city of Hebron with posters featuring a demeaning cartoon of the prophet Mohammed. The outrage was instant: a Satanic Verses affair in the heart of the West Bank. Despite an apology from the then prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, conflagration seemed imminent.

Thanks to the ground work of the clerics, an unprecedented meeting was arranged between one of Israel's two chief rabbis and the lead muslim authority of Hebron. The former assured the latter that Judaism did not sanction the denigration of Islam; that, on the contrary, it regarded those cartoons as a desecration of God's name. Hebron was placated; Israel's chief rabbi had achieved what its prime minister could not.

Melchior reckons that's a revealing precedent. "People don't trust the politicians, but they do trust religious leaders. There's a feeling that this is the real thing, this is authentic." In other words, if his group can find common ground, their peoples will follow.

Is that even imaginable? How can orthodox Jews possibly find common cause with imams who back Hamas and honor suicide bombers? Somehow they have managed it. When Ariel Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, negotiated last summer with Yasser Arafat a major obstacle was the future of the patch of Jerusalem revered as the Temple Mount by Jews and as Haram al-Sharif by Muslims: they could not agree.

But Melchior pleaded with Barak to use the work done by his group on the issue -- for they had already sketched the outlines of a solution. "If you talk about a territorial conflict in the realm of the material world, then either you own it or I own it or we can share it. You have to deal with it in a very limited, materialistic way. But in the spiritual world, the more spiritual it is, the more room there is: there can be no limitations." To these men of God, neither Palestinians nor Israelis need be sovereign over Jerusalem; that honor should belong to God alone.

Right now, these are lofty thoughts, remote from the bloody reality of a conflict which has entered one of its bleakest periods. But who can doubt that, if there is to be a solution to a conflict as old as faith itself, then faith will have to play its part?

-- Guardian News Service