For use: Tuesday, July 26, 2000 and thereafter

 

ETERNAL ORGANIZATIONS: "Prayer for Peace"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Well, the 15-day peace summit with Arafat and Barak fell apart today. The two sides worked hard to pull together something that is almost unthinkable -- cessation of hostilities in the biblical heartland.

The issue the summit foundered on was the status of Jerusalem. Arafat wanted the eastern corner of the city for the Palestinian state. Barak was unable to deliver. It was just too much to concede.

News reports have not been specific about the precise reason for the talks' collapse. But it appears that Israel was unable to contemplate Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem's walled Old City, offering only access to the Al Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site. This was unacceptable to Arafat, and that, after a fortnight of effort and a day, was that.

It is disappointing, because it means the to sides have an even higher hill to breach the next time they meet. But it is more than that. It is an item of something very close to despair that the agreement collapsed because of the intractability of organized religion. Less than a month ago Barak survived a no-confidence vote by a handful of few votes. His coalition and opposition include several small but very powerful and very doctrinaire religious political parties. They draw their political inspirations from a fundamentalist view of the Jews as the chosen people of God.

These religious parties exercise veto power over the continued existence of the coalition. It is simply unacceptable to them, because of religious revelation, to share a mote of Jerusalem dust. Because their reasoning is encased in the armor plate of religion, there is no "reasoning" with them. Barak had no wiggle room with which to wiggle, which is an untenable position for any negotiator.

Polls in Israel show that 70% of the population want a permanent peace treaty with the Palestinians: no war forever between the two peoples. Across the country there is a visible hunger to get along, not out of the ancient scriptural obligations of neighborliness and charity, but because war and division and denial just don’t make sense in today's world of e-technology, no boundaries and full disclosure. The Jerusalem of the peace talks is a mythic place of deep symbolic significance to both faiths. But no one actually lives there.

How can it be that the sole obstacle to peace is the social force that should be propelling us toward peace -- religion?

Why does this matter to us on this side of the ocean? Unless you are Jewish or Moslem, the Mideast war does not mean very much. I've lived my entire life with it "over there," and I have thrived despite it. I ask because religion has sunk, on this side of the water, to a level of dismaying irrelevance. The most influential religious people in the USA any more are essentially talk show hosts. Mainline religions, those organizations with the best merchandise ever offered, are on the verge of going out of business.

What a coup it would be, and how inspiring it would be to the world, if Jewish and Islamic leaders were able, even now, during this dark hour of disappointment, to step forward with a statement of exuberant will to live peacefully and respectfully side by side, like the lion and the lamb of scripture?

That kind of statement, that kind of solidarity, that kind of peace would reverberate to the numb heart of an irreligious world.