Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 57

1945—

Meeting the Other Side

The whole secret of religion,” says Rabbi Menachem Froman, “is meeting the other side.” When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that’s exactly what he’s been doing for over forty years: reaching out to Muslims in Israel and other countries—even to violent Muslim organizations such as Hamas—in the hope of building peace.

Froman is an unlikely candidate for this kind of reconciliation. In the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, ex-paratrooper Froman and other Zionists founded Gush Enumin, a political group dedicated to populating the West Bank with Jews and edging out the Palestinian inhabitants. Froman still lives in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa—home of the ancient prophet Amos, another champion of social justice—and serves as its chief rabbi. But he long ago dropped his youthful insistence that Israel is only for Jews. Today, he is more than willing to live in a West Bank that’s ruled by Palestinians. What’s important is honoring the holiness of the land, not claiming ownership of it. So there’s no reason, he believes, why the Holy Land can’t be a peaceful home for all three Peoples of the Book. It’s only proper, he says, that Israel be “the place where members of all faiths convene to renounce their breeding of prejudice, hostility, and war.”

Although some Israelis consider him to be a traitor for it, Froman on various occasions met with both Yasar Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Ahmad Yassin, the leader of Hamas, to discuss the possibility of a peaceful accord between Arabs and Jews. In 2008, Froman teamed up with Khaled Amayreh, a Muslim journalist who has close ties with Hamas, to work out a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The concord called for an immediate end to Palestinian attacks against Israelis in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Hamas representatives endorsed the plan, but the Israeli government ignored it.

Rabbi Froman believes that Jewish and Palestinian populations are too mixed for a two-state solution to work if both sides insist on strictly demarcated borders. As an alternative, he advocates two countries without borders, Israelis and Palestinians being citizens of two sovereign nations who just happen to occupy the same land. Jerusalem, he argues, should be a free international city in which people of all faiths live in peace with one another. “The key to peace is peace in Jerusalem,” he says, “to re-establish Jerusalem as the capital of peace in the world.” But he’s quite certain that the ultimate solution to the conflict must be religious rather than political. The externalities of the conflict obviously focus on geopolitical disputes over land. But the “core of the problem is religious,” and only when all sides recognize that their worship of the same God binds them more than territorial spats divide them will the problem be solved.