There’s little reason to hope for a breakthrough at the Middle East peace summit in Annapolis, unless there is a fundamental shift in U.S. policy in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there’s little evidence to suggest such a change is forthcoming.
Activist artist Ellen O’Grady visits Hebron, the only Palestinian city outside East Jerusalem where Israeli settlers occupy the city center.
Every religious community in the world is now living through a profound crisis, an eruption of God, a world-wide earthquake brought on by modernity in every life-dimension: political, economic, sexual, ecological, military, cultural, biological. In traditional communities, new religious outlooks are being born. Believers are coming to new understandings of what the world came from and is moving toward, what aspects of the world are holy and what are either ordinary or demonic, what symbols and metaphors and practices are sacred.
Since September 11, in spite of the rhetoric on how the world has been transformed, U.S. foreign policy has approached the Islamic world and the war on terrorism as little more than old wine in new wine skins. During the Cold War, U.S. scholars and policymakers asked why people become communists. Now they ask why people become religious terrorists, extremists, and fundamentalists. What is so striking is that the solutions scholars give to this national security problem today is similar to the ones they proposed a half-century ago – more foreign aid to promote liberal democracy and free market capitalism. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) has been bold enough to call this policy “funding virtue,” even though scholars and policymakers have largely ignored the role of virtue or religion in sustaining democracy and development. The closest the United States has come to recognizing the role of virtue and religion in foreign policy is to promote religious freedom through the Office of International Religious Freedom created in the State Department during the Clinton administration.
Some world leaders are not exactly negotiating material. The recently deceased leader of Turkmenistan renamed the months and days of the week after himself and his family and tried to build a palace constructed entirely of ice. No one really tried to negotiate with him–he placed a ban on lip-syncing.
“We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people.” Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that’s the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.
Nine years ago Congress, under President Clinton, unanimously passed the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The Act authorized the formation of a bi-partisan Commission on International Religious Freedom to monitor the status of religious freedom around the world and identify countries that are inadequately protecting religious freedom within their borders. The legislation’s unanimous approval in both the Senate and the House reflected characteristics of the political situation of the late 1990s and of the Act itself.
This past Wednesday, I was among a group of American religious leaders and scholars who met with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York. In what was billed as an inter-faith dialogue, we frankly shared our strong opposition to certain Iranian government policies and provocative statements made by the Iranian president. At the same time, we avoided the insulting language employed by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger before a public audience two days earlier.
The majority of Israelis, like me, can no longer use the term "Zionist" to define what we believe in. "Zionism" has been hijacked by the movement of settlers who have built hundreds of settlements in the West Bank and are the primary obstacle to making peace with our Palestinian neighbors on the basis of the two-states-for-two-people solution. As I’ve argued in The Jerusalem Post, we need a new definition. We need a neo-Zionism.
The hijacking of Zionism is not a new phenomenon. It is at least as old as the occupation itself – 40 years. What is new is the realization that we may be facing the final opportunity to divide historic Palestine into two sovereign states. The settlement movement has changed the reality of the West Bank so deeply that many question the very possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state today.
With the Bush administration continuing to threaten Iran, what do to has become a hot topic for the presidential candidates. As the American presidential race moves forward, the topic of Iran will likely remain a fixture in an election dominated by issues of national security and foreign policy.