I had expected the World Conference on Dialogue convened by the King of Saudi Arabia to be little more than a photo op for the King, a cheap way to buy good public relations for a regime that has refused to increase production of oil as a way to reduce the current surge in the price, provided haven and support for the Wahabist form of Islam that has fostered extremists like Saudi-born and raised Osama bin Ladin and many others, and has done far too little with its wealth to alleviate the poverty and suffering of many in the Middle East.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear the Saudi King in a language that, as one Muslim observer pointed out to me, sounded more like the New Bottom Line of the Network of Spiritual Progressives than it did like a speech of a self-absorbed monarch.
King Abdullah started with a strong affirmation of the goal of a new kind of tolerance between religions. Religions have not caused wars, said the king, but rather extremists who have misused religion in a hurtful and harmful way. A truly religious person would not resort to war, the King reminded us. But why do people respond to the extremists? Because there is a deep spiritual crisis in the world, and it is that crisis which creates the conditions in which exploitation, crime, drugs, family breakdown and extremism flourish.
The king went on to explain that it should be the task of the various religious communities of the world to work together to overcome that spiritual crisis. But that will require religious cooperation, which must begin with mutual respect and tolerance. We need to emphasize what all religions have in common -- the ethical message that permeates every major religion. That message is that hatred can be overcome through love. We in the religious world need to choose love to overcome hatred, justice over oppression, peace over wars, universal brotherhood over racism.
To me, this didn't sound like the King I had come to expect from Western media. Just as the media has frequently distorted our message of Spiritual Progressives, and the Jewish community media has for 22 years consistently represented me and the peace-oriented position of Tikkun as anti-Israel or as New Age posturing, so the Western media has portrayed the Saudis as backward reactionaries. I can't remember hearing either Bush or Carter speaking like this or, for that matter, any Israeli Prime Minister including Rabin.
The overwhelming majority of people in the room were leaders from Muslim countries around the world. It appeared as if they were the King's primary audience. He was introducing a new language into the Islamic religious discourse, and it was a language that has in the past largely been rooted in Western humanism and human rights. Many Muslims in the room mentioned to me or to others that they felt that this speech was actually a significant breakthrough, because the King is one of the more influential figures in Islam, since his role as "Protector of the Two Mosques" (in Mecca and Medina) gives him immense influence in the Islamic world.
The Saudi King was followed by the King of Spain who talked about tolerance as an old Spanish tradition, presumably referencing the period when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in Spain in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. He made no mention of (or apology for) the Spanish expulsion of all Jews in 1492, nor the forced conversions and expulsions of Muslims in the following decades. He made a point of stressing, however, that today Spain is a democracy (presumably to acknowledge that unlike the King of the Saudis, the King of Spain no longer rules Spain in the way that the King of the Saudis actually does rule Saudi Arabia).
Next, the leader of the Muslim World League spoke about the common values held by all humanity that should be a foundation for transcending our political differences. Instead of rejoicing at the possibility of a clash of civilizations, as some right-wingers in America have preached (like Norman Podhoretz in his most recent book World War IV), we actually need to be seeking cooperation between the various global civilizations. Islam, he insisted, believes in the equality of all. There is no legal foundation for the prevalence of any given community or race within Islam.
Here too was an incredibly hopeful message. It wasn't relevant, really, whether this is an accurate description of Muslim practice. It was, as was the King's talk, an obvious attempt to change the thinking in his own community, a change that could have profound political effects if it is taken as seriously as the people here seem prone to do.
After hearing the King of Saudi Arabia speak, there was a reception line in which each of us was to give our name and shake the hand of the King. I was in one of my more irrepressible moods, so when it was my time I broke protocol and said to King Abdullah "I represent the many Jews in the world who wish to see cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians and a peace that provides security and justice for both sides (and I pointed to the Tikkun pin I was wearing which has the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag both with the words Peace, Justice, Life, TIKKUN). I hope that you will use some of your huge oil-generated billions of dollars to help Palestinians build decent housing and plumbing in the refugee camps." By this point the people surrounding the King were moving to push me forward, and the King merely gave me a big smile (it was being translated for him by his US Ambassador) and I moved on into the dining area.
To my surprise, I was seated at a table with eight members of the King's cabinet and his closest associates (I was the only non-Muslim or non-Saudi at the table). I sat next to the Secretary of Labor, and next to him was the Secretary of Finance, and then the others I remember included the Secretary of Communications and one person who was introduced as the King's main counsel and another as a close personal friend of the King and another was one of the major corporation heads in Saudi Arabia. To my surprise, several people knew about Tikkun and it turned out that these men had mostly been educated in the US or England, several at Oxford, some at the University of Southern California or at University of California. Whereas at almost all of the other tables in the huge dining room there were several conversations going on at the same time, these people stopped their separate conversations and focused on me and wanted to know my perspective on American politics and on Israel/Palestine. I told them the Tikkun perspective, particularly the need for a new consciousness based on open-heartedness, mutual repentance, and compassion.
A few embraced this, others argued that certainly I couldn't ask for equal repentance given that the Palestinians had been made homeless by the 1947-49 conflict and were living in terrible conditions. I said that it was a shame that the Saudis with all their wealth had not done more to help the Palestinians. The Finance Minister smiled and said that that was simply not true, but that Israel was not letting their aid come through. I pointed out that Palestinian refugees lived in Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon and particularly in Lebanon their conditions were appalling and that the Saudis could rectify that. He responded by saying that they had done more than was known, but that the particulars he was not going to discuss. I then pointed out that Gaza and the West Bank were in the hands of the Arabs from 1948-1967 and that their Arab hosts and the Saudis had done nothing to improve their slum-like conditions. Several people pointed out to me that the Palestinian leadership that existed at that time (prior to the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization) did not want to accept that the expulsion from their homes was permanent, and hence did not want to begin anything that would appear to be a resettling in the refugee camps. Didn't I agree that the refugees had suffered a huge humanitarian disaster? Yes, I said I did agree with that, but that Israelis were fearful that if Palestinians were to return now with their millions of people, that would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. And I referenced my article on 'Israel at 60' in Tikkun in which I had analyzed the situation in terms of the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome facing both Jews from our long history of oppression culminating in the Holocaust and the Palestinian people as a result of their displacement for the past sixty years.
My even-handedness was challenged by some who said that certainly the suffering of the Palestinian people couldn't be excused by reference to the suffering of Jews in Europe, since it was not the Palestinians who had participated in the Holocaust. I replied that the Palestinians had played an important role, along with the Saudis and other Arab states in convincing the British to cut off immigration of Jews to Palestine. They responded that this policy was understandable, given the explicitly stated goal of the Zionist movement leaders to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and thus, Palestinians feared, to exclude or evict Palestinian settlers (and as several pointed out, Israeli revisionist historians had uncovered documents and letters from Zionist leaders saying indeed that their intent in accepting the UN resolution of 1947 to partition Palestine was only a first step in their larger intent to eventually take over all of Palestine--and that goal was clear to the Arabs as well as to the Zionist movement and accounted for their resistance to the partition agreement). I pointed out that whatever their fears, the reality was that they had chosen an immoral path in pushing the British to close immigration to Jews, and that a majority of my larger family had died in Europe during the Holocaust and might have been saved had there been a place to escape to, and that Palestine was the nearest place in which Jews had some historical claim.
At this point the Saudis challenged my contention that the Palestinians or Arabs had had much of an impact on the British in their decisions. I argued that the British in the 30s and 40s were following policies shaped by their concern for steady oil supplies for their coming war (either with Hitler or Stalin). The Saudis responded by telling me that they (the Saudis) were not a major source of oil for the British and that in any event the British were a colonial power that was shaping the policies of other Arab states, and not vice versa. I was not sure that that was true, but then switched my line to point out that wherever colonial authorities ruled, they always tried to set the native populations against their minority groups, and that this is what had happened in Palestine and more generally in the Middle East. The Jews, I argued, were the minority in Palestine at that time, and the potential Arab revolt against colonialism had been weakened by the distraction onto opposing Zionism.
But was it a distraction or were the Zionists really agents of colonial rule? The Saudis pointed to the Balfour Declaration in 1917 proclaiming Britain's commitment to supporting the Jews in establishing a state in Palestine. I argued that a. the British had no right to determine the future of the area, since it wasn't theirs in the first place (a point that showed the Saudis that there were indeed Jews who did not identify with the colonialist perspective) and b. that most Jews coming to Palestine were fleeing oppression, most form Europe but some from Arab countries. They responded that Jews had lived in harmony with their Arab hosts until the colonial period and the rise of Zionism.
At that point, rather than pursue that argument (I disagreed with them and would have pointed out that the conditions were akin to apartheid for Jews in most of those countries through much of that history), I turned instead to the larger frame of our discussion and said, "Wouldn't it be better if we really wish to build a future of peace that we stop trying to get a triumph on the issue of guilt? There are two national discourses here, and each has lots of facts to back it up, but it is futile and destructive to follow the path now being followed in which each side tells the story as though they are the righteous victims and the other side are the evil oppressors! Let's move beyond that to ask what we can do to build peace now, and start by each side acknowledging that the other has a legitimate though partial view, and that each side has sinned and gone off course." I then explained the Jewish view of "sin" as similar to an arrow going off course, implying that the sinner was fundamentally good, not evil, but had lost his or her way. They seemed happy with that notion.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun and national chair of the Tikkun Community/ Network of Spiritual Progressives.
People are invited to subscribe to Tikkun magazine or join the interfaith organization the Network of Spiritual Progressives-- "both of which can be done by going to www.tikkun.org
So, Saudis openly say that Israel has 200 nukes and the delivery system? That is in total violation of all the non- proliferation agreements. Now, if that is so, why won't they ( the Saudis) demand in the UN to develop sanctions against Israel? And why don't they publish that opinion of theirs openly? They have their own media.
What also became clear from the discussion above is that the tremendous wealth of theirs is being efficiently used to maintain the situation in the Middle East the way they want it. Israel thus is nothing but a pawn. Now, about religious thing. With all respect to Rabbie ( he will be out of the job if the following occurs) the ONLY way to have peace in the ME or elsewhere is to take all the gods out of the equation. Secularity is the key to survival of the species and I hope we will live until the times when religious conferences will discuss philosophy and other non-power- related issues. Let them have fun but no power to them.
One more thing: Why it was a legitimate thing to discuss the US Jews as a part of an Israeli equation? Israel is a country. US Jews are not its citizens. As such a Rabbie from the US cannot be considered a person who in talking with the leadership of other countries can speak as a source about Israeli affairs, neither can he tell those leaders that the Jews in the US have something to do with the way Israel behaves or can behave, sorry.
Rabbie Lerner means good. But sometimes he oversteps the boundaries. I again specify that the proper way is to consider Israel as as a separate country and promote that view. Thus a Jew from the USA should only speak for himself.
by
Mark Sashine (54 articles, 19 quicklinks, 252 diaries, 3605 comments)
on Monday, July 21, 2008 at 10:20:49 AM
Rabbi, I like your values. I wish you and your Tikkun the best of luck and success. One can only hope that the values of peace and understanding will rule the day. I do fear that the neo-cons will force a Third World War on us soon; but if they don't it is people like you who will build a 21st Century of peace.
Stirling
by
Lord Stirling (25 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 141 comments)
on Monday, July 21, 2008 at 12:31:55 PM
Thank you so much, Rabbi, for the message of hope. This is exactly the kind of coverage I wish I was able to find on network TV, and I am very grateful to have it here on OEN.
by
Meryl Ann Butler (49 articles, 53 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 449 comments)
on Monday, July 21, 2008 at 2:42:58 PM
4 comments
How would you rate this?
You must be logged in (if signed up) to do ratings.
It's free to signup! And easy. And takes just a minute or two....
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
