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Another Muslim Arab whom I befriended (name withheld) is principal of a Muslim high school in Israel. This father of four is an Israeli citizen and has achieved a modicum of success: he drives a better car than my own. He told me he came to the conference because he believed in peace, and tried to teach it to his students—but his students didn't believe the Israelis are really interested in peace with justice for Palestinians. When I asked him what he thought of suicide bombers, he said he sympathized with their frustration and desperation. But is it right to target innocent women and children? "They are all human beings, just like soldiers," he replied. He could not bring himself to condemn the bombings.
If the speakers and attendees were arresting, the conference itself was even more remarkable. Put together by Alon Goshen-Gottstein (an Israeli Orthodox rabbi who earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from Stanford), "Religion, Territoriality and Peace: An Interreligious Conference" was cosponsored by Goshen-Gottstein's Elijah School for the Study of Wisdom in the World Religions, a German foundation, and McGill University. It was one of those rare occasions when Muslims and Jews and Christians addressed each other, and perhaps the first to discuss so directly the current conflict in Israel/Palestine using the medium of comparative theology.
Here, in contrast to other religious studies conferences I have attended, there were no obsequious bows to what "we know" from the historical-critical method about the history behind and before scriptural texts. Instead it was enough to quote a text of Scripture for authority—whether from the Qur'an or hadith (compilations of sayings and deeds attributed to Muhammad), the Hebrew Bible or rabbis, or the New Testament. Professor Cornell was not alone in equating the words of a sacred text with God's words: "We have other verses [in the Qur'an] where God says … " This was a conference of religious leaders and academic scholars—most of the latter of whom were trained in some of the best of the world's universities—who regarded their own Scriptures as divine revelation and (for the most part) treated other traditions' claims to revelation with respect and sometimes approbation. At the same time, most clerics and scholars at the conference clearly did not believe that the three Abrahamic traditions were saying the same thing in different words. Nor did most of them believe they were three equally valid paths leading to the same destination.
This was the sixth summer conference that Goshen-Gottstein has organized for his Elijah School, but the first to which he had invited an evangelical scholar to make a plenary presentation. He, and nearly all the other Jews and Muslims there, seemed surprised that the evangelical theological approach to Israel was so different from that of mainline Protestants and Catholics.
I told the conference audience (which included religious leaders, politicians, and a host of interested onlookers from Jerusalem) that evangelicals played important roles in the modern history of Israel. According to Paul Merkley, evangelical William Hechler was Zionism founder Theodor Herzl's "first … most constant and most indefatigable follower." It was Hechler who helped open doors for Herzl to Europe's palaces and corporate boardrooms, and Hechler who helped Herzl formulate his vision for a Jewish state. In the quarter-century that led to the creation of Israel in 1947-48, "the sturdiest champions of the restoration of the Jews to Israel were the evangelicals and fundamentalists. In the years when Britain was turning away from her commitments under the Balfour Declaration, and was supported in so doing by mainstream Christianity, evangelicals sustained the Zionist cause."2 According to David Rausch, "the [evangelical] movement on the whole recognized at an early date that the Holocaust was impending and believed that six million Jews had been murdered at a time when most liberal Christians were denouncing 'Jewish atrocity propaganda.'"
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