The Palestinian issue has figured prominently over the past week in stories with a religion angle. Pope Benedict’s visit to Israel, which ended on Friday, was the most prominent. While visiting Bethlehem, he called Israel’s barrier in the West Bank “one of the saddest sights” on his whole tour. Early this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met U.S. President Barack Obama for the first time. Netanyahu said the Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for peace talks while Obama said Jewish settlements in the West Bank “have to be stopped.” On Wednesday, United Nations human rights investigators said they hoped to visit Gaza in early June and hold public hearings on whether war crimes were committed there in Israel’s blockade of the area governed by the Islamist movement Hamas.

(Photo: Palestinian protesters wave flags at the Damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City, 21 May 2009/Amir Cohen)

In almost every speech he made, Pope Benedict pleaded for more interfaith contacts and cooperation as a way to move forward towards peace. With the Israeli-Palestinian issue so polarised, the question of promoting understanding among the people of the Holy Land often seems to be reduced mostly to a Jewish-Muslim issue. The tiny Christian minority in the local population often seems to be standing on the sidelines.

But within the occupied West Bank, there are numerous examples of religious coexistence between the Muslim and Christian populations. The West Bank village of Aboud, which I described in a feature you can read here, is a case in point. Father Firas Aridah, head of the local Catholic parish, points to the joint celebration by Muslims and Christians of their respective religious holidays. The Catholic school he operates with a majority of Muslim students doesn’t impose the church’s beliefs on the student body but teaches them their own faiths.

The village’s religious pluralism is under threat because its Christians are slowly leaving, changing the demographic dynamics with the Muslim majority. Nearly 900 of Aboud’s 2,200 residents are Christians. One reason for the exodus cited in the Israeli media is rising Islamist extremism. But Fr. Firas will have none of that. “Islamic fanaticism, and all this, is propaganda,” he said. “It is Israeli propaganda that distracts people’s understanding that [Israel] is occupying Palestine.” The reason 34 Christian families have left Aboud since 2000, he said, was the Israeli occupation and the security restrictions it imposes, stifling the economy and limiting opportunity.

(Photo: Israeli wall at the Qalandiya checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah, 19 May 2009/Baz Ratner)

Husam al-Taweel, a Greek Orthodox member of the Palestinian Legislative Council from Gaza who was elected with support from the governing Islamist movement Hamas, told FaithWorld earlier this week: “I won’t say there are no problems and we are living in heaven. But there is no discrimination against Christians in particular. We don’t see ourselves as a minority, but as part of the Arab majority.” (Emigration) “is not a problem only for Christians. This is a problem for the Palestinian community in general. They’re all looking for a job, a better future.”

Our Jerusalem bureau has sent a very interesting report about criticism within the Israeli army of the Gaza offensive in January. What caught my eye was that it brings up the issue of a religious war, a term usually used in relation to Muslims.

(Photo: Israeli air strike near Gaza-Egypt border in southern Gaza Strip, 26 Feb 2009/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

The story starts off as follows:

Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive that they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.

“Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper on the second day of revelations about the Gaza offensive that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009″)…

The officer felt there was a “huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out”.

The corps distributed pamphlets about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, he said.  But the rabbinate’s message imparted to many soldiers the sense that “this operation was a religious war”.

Read the whole article here.

It’s hard to know when to use terms like “religious war” for violence such as what we’ve seen in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Afghanistan. The opposing sides in these conflicts have different religious labels, so there is — at least superficially — a religious angle there. But there is also an underlying political struggle which often plays a far bigger role than those labels. Northern Ireland, for example, is not about religion but has often been presented mostly as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants. By contrast, the unrest in Sri Lanka pits secessionist Tamils (Hindus) against majority Sinhalese (Buddhists), but nobody calls that a religious war. Some seem to evolve — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on more religious overtones over time while the Taliban are now seen more as insurgents than the Koran students their name signals.

What do you think? When is a conflict a religious war and when is it more a political struggle going on behind those labels? Or is it impossible to disentangle the two?

Here is our video report on the story and the script (including translations).

Is U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Jakarta a hint that President Barack Obama will pick Indonesia as the first Muslim country he visits in his drive to improve U.S. relations with the Islamic world? There were lots of other suggestions when he first mentioned this back in December, including Egypt (the New York Times pick) and Morocco (judging by what might have been a write-in campaign on our comments page).

My tip at the time was either Indonesia or Turkey. In recent weeks, Turkey’s star has probably faded as its relations with Israel soured recently. Those strains came after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily accused Israeli President Shimon Peres of “knowing very well how to kill” in Gaza during a debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos and then stormed off the stage.

(Photo: Hillary Clinton with Jakarta schoolgirls, 18 Feb 2009/Supri)

Clinton said all the right things today, like telling the country where Obama spent four years as a boy that it was proof that modernity and Islam can coexist. “As I travel around the world over the next years, I will be saying to people: if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity and women’s rights can co-exist, go to Indonesia,” she said at a dinner with civil society activists. Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda reciprocated by telling her Indonesia shared the United States’ joy at Obama’s election and she should tell the U.S. president “we cannot wait too long” for a visit.

Obama spent four years in Indonesia after his American mother, Ann Dunham, married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro following the end of her marriage to Obama’s Kenyan father. He told President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono during a phone call after his election that he’d like to visit Indonesia again. It would help forge  greater cooperation between the two nations and give him a chance to try local food again including meatball soup, nasi goreng and rambutan, a local newspaper reported him as saying.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) will meet in Singapore in November. It’s just a short flight from there to Jakarta.

(Photo: Obama image in Jakarta, 25 Oct 2008/Dadang Tri)

Rabbi Marc Schneier, a New York Jewish leader who has helped to build bridges with American Muslims, is planning to bring his campaign to Europe to help ease the anger fed by bloodshed in Gaza. “In the light of the recent conflict in Gaza, Jewish-Muslim tensions have been exacerbated,” Schneier, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, told Reuters during a recent visit to London. “We have seen a rise, I would say an exponential growth in anti-Semitic attacks, rhetoric coming from the Muslim world. We cannot allow for Islamic fundamentalism to grow.”

(Photo: Rabbi Marc Schneier/FFEU)

Schneier helped to bring together thousands of Jews and Muslims across America last November in an initiative in which 50 mosques were twinned with 50 synagogues over a weekend. Jews and Muslims worked together in community projects, formed study groups and got a better understanding of each other’s faith. They publicised this in the short video below and a full-page ad in the New York Times available here in PDF.

An eloquent and persuasive speaker, Schneier has advocated closer links between Jewish and Afro-American communities through the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, where he has worked with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.

Schneier feels there is a need for action at the grass-roots level to help heal the rift between Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe.  He is planning to repeat his ”Weekend of Twinning” this November and wants to extend it to Britain from North America.  “Jewish-Muslim relations are a great concern here in Europe, so we wanted to bring this programme across the Atlantic,” he said.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews told me they were very interested in the project and wanted to develop it here, building on their own linking programme. However, the climate is not easy.  Israel’s invasion of Gaza in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed has sparked fresh tensions between the two groups in Europe.

An umbrella group of French Jewish groups last week asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy to ensure that authorities do more to stem a rise in anti-Jewish crime. Britain has also seen protests over Israel’s campaign.

(Photo: Pro-Palestinian protesters in Paris, 24 Jan 2009/Gonzalo Fuentes)

Schneier dismissed concerns that members of close-knit Muslim communities in European countries such as Britain and France would be harder to reach than their counterparts in the United States, who tend to be better integrated into U.S. life.

“The challenge here is more of a language barrier than a social or cultural barrier. What we did in North America wasn’t an easy task either. There was much hesitation on both sides,” he said. “I see around the world there are pockets of moderation emerging within Islam. We cannot spurn the hands of the moderates in the Muslim world.”

Schneier’s initiative seems to be working in the United States, but can it be transplanted to Europe? We’d like to hear your comments here.

The tension in France because of the Gaza conflict has taken a new twist with a charge by three Muslim youths that Jewish militants had beaten them up because one of them had thrown away a pro-Israel pamphlet. The focus until now has been on rising anti-Semitic attacks, presumably mostly by Muslims angered by Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, but this puts another layer of complexity on the story. The attack happened almost a week ago, on Thursday Jan. 8, but the details are still unclear and the versions being put out don’t match up.

According to the victims’ account, about seven youths from the Ligue de Défense Juive (Jewish Defence League) were distributing the pamphlets on Jan. 8 outside Janson de Sailly, a leading lycée, secondary school, in a chic district of Paris, and handed one to a pupil of North African Arab origin.  When he threw it away, the JDL militants beat up him and one or two other youths of Maghrebin origin who came to help him. The lycée pupil and two others then filed a complaint with the police against the Jewish militants and police are now investigating the incident.

An LDJ spokesman flatly denied any link to this attack and said it does not distribute these pamphlets outside of lycées, only at universities. On its website, it was less clear, saying only that it “denounces the aggression against two pupils of the Janson de Sailly lycee. The LDJ rejects every form of violence.” The LDJ spokesman said his group had the same name and logo as the militant Kach movement banned in Israel and the Jewish Defence League banned in the United States — in both cases because they were suspected terrorist organisations — but had nothing to do with these groups.

CRIF, the umbrella group of Jewish organisations that has been at the forefront publicising a wave of anti-Semitic attacks here since Israel began its assault on Gaza on Dec. 27, has denounced the attack and urged police to track down “the authors of this act and punish them as the law foresees.” It noted the victims were French of Maghrebin origin but said nothing about the background of the attackers.

The Grand Mosque of Paris said on Wednesday afternoon that only two of the three pupils attacked at Janson de Sailly were of Maghrebin origin and urged an especially thorough investigation “if the racist character of this attack is proven.”

Although the attack occurred on Thursday Jan. 8, Le Monde broke the story on the afternoon of Monday Jan. 12 and the public prosecutor confirmed police were investigating late on Tuesday Jan. 13. “The aggressors have not been identified and the investigation is continuing,” a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said.

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The author is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. He is writing a book about Interfaith and Civil Society.

By Matthew Weiner

The last day of 2008 was a bad day for interfaith relations in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had his annual Prayer Breakfast at the New York Public Library, where several hundred religious leaders gathered (see video here). As usual there were prayers offered from many faiths. The Hindus were miffed, because a Sikh got their usual slot. Instead of praying, the Sikh explained Sikhism for a bit too long. The Buddhist monk also prayed too long, and the translation took forever. But poor staging was not the reason for the dark cloud that hung over us all.

(Photo: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 3 Nov 2008/Lucas Jackson)

Instead, it was the bombing of Gaza. Or rather it was the Mayor’s response the day before that created  tension in the audience. The night before, Bloomberg had sided with Israel in the conflict. “I feel very strongly that Israel really does have a right …to defend itself,” he said. The mayor said nothing about the loss of innocent life on the Palestinian side.

For him, the current situation is not a story with two sides. While he is the mayor for all of New York, and while there are more or less as many Muslims as Jews here these days, on this day he spoke for one side of his city.

This, anyway, is the way the Muslim leaders in New York who I spoke to see it. Their frustration is not that Bloomberg criticized Hamas, but rather that he took sides instead of calling for peace or a cease fire. The many Muslims who came to the breakfast were ready for battle.

“I thought not to come,” said one leader. “Then I was reading Gandhi on Non Violence, and I realized that I could not let his one sided political response stop me from joining a public forum.” Another Imam added, “If he had repeated what he said last night, I would have had to stand and walk out.”

Every Muslim I spoke to agreed. They also did not stand when the mayor got an otherwise standing ovation. Nor did not laugh at his jokes, the way others were. When I asked a rabbi afterwards if he noticed this silent protest, he had not.

In further quiet protest, the Muslim Consultative Network handed out a protest statement to participants. It was eloquent: “While one generally agrees with his simple point about self defense…it ignores the Palestinians, who have been dying in great numbers.” It goes on to say that there is a need to acknowledge the common humanity of both Jews and Arabs.

Bloomberg did not repeat his comments in front of this interfaith audience, and one can only guess that he was astute to the tension in the air. Perhaps this is a good thing.

(Photo: New York Public Library, 14 Dec 2004/Mike Segar)

But there is, I think, a serious problem here. It is not one of life and death, but one of perception and honesty when it comes to the public sphere. Interfaith events are intended to serve two basic purposes: to create a symbol of unity (call it the unity model), or to discuss and debate a problem at hand (call it the discourse model). In the unity model, religiously different groups stand together to condemn something, call for peace, you name it. It is a symbolic act, but a powerful one, and one done with a shared conviction of its power.

In the discourse model, interfaith can serve as a venue for debate and discussion. Interfaith is a part of civil society, and therefore a kind of public sphere. It’s what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action, where rational people debate an issue with the goal of a shared better understanding of the truth and the potential for shared action. Both kinds of interfaith happen in New York City and around the world every day. Every day, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and others join together successfully in this kind of public interfaith. It makes for a better democracy.

And Bloomberg has been good on interfaith in many ways. He was the first mayor to hold regular interfaith services and work with leaders from every faith. The problem with Bloomberg’s interfaith service this particular time around is not his own opinion (he is entitled to one) but that he held an interfaith event, while skipping both legitimate reasons for having one. He talked about the good work of his administration and the economic crises. Yes, this is indeed a shared issue for all, but it totally ignored the issue at hand, and (most importantly) his opinion on it. It left one side of his citizenry very angry- not because he did not take their side, but because the moral reasons for joining interfaith — to make a symbolic statement, or to discuss truth and shared action — were ignored.

Jewish groups may be happy with the mayor’s strategy, but what do we lose in the process?  Many mainline Jewish groups will not even discuss the conflict with their Muslim colleagues who they work with on so many other issues. As one rabbi who works for a Jewish agency said during breakfast, “My hands are tied.” This means that regardless of what he thinks (and I cannot pretend to know what he thinks), his agency will not let him work on a shared statement about the current crises. And yet he is mandated to work with Muslims on other issues.

While interfaith appears to go on as normal here, the tension and frustration run deep. It at least must lead us to ask the question of which public sphere we want interfaith to help create? Maybe this is a New Year’s question, as opposed to a contrite resolution, to hold onto.