c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ I recently attended an unusual conference in Germany where Jews, Christians, and Muslims gathered for three days to confront two of the most powerful forces in today’s world: politics and religion.

The meeting, hosted by the Evangelical Protestant Academy in Loccum, a small village near Hanover, and the American Jewish Committee’s Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn Institute for International Interreligious Understanding, drew religious and political leaders from western Europe, the United States, the former Yugoslavia, North Africa, and the Middle East _ all regions where the interplay of politics and religion is decisively shaping history for good or ill.

The conference had a special edge because of the German location where the memory of the Holocaust is always present, and because of the recent warfare in the Balkans.

The Balkan wars of the 1990s represent the worst outbreak of fighting in Europe since 1945, and this painful fact has shaken the confidence that wars in Europe were a thing of the past.

In Loccum, Smail Balic, a Bosnian historian, reminded conference participants the Balkans are an explosive cauldron of Catholicism, Islam, and Eastern Orthodoxy that combine with a host of historical grudges held by the various Balkan peoples.

Some of those disputes involving Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, and Kosovars are often more than 500 years old. Tragically, in that part of the world religion has not been a force for peace and reconciliation but rather an instrument of conflict.

Balic’s forecast for the future was bleak, and I had the sense wars would break again once the international peacekeeping forces, including Americans, leave the Balkans.

Professor Abdelwahab Hechiche, a Muslim who teaches at the University of South Florida in Tampa, described how politics and religion are currently interacting in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and his native Tunisia.

The clash between the forces of modernity and Islamic extremism will be the central struggle in the early years of the next century, he said.

The 30 year dictatorial rule of Muammar Qadaffi in oil-rich Libya and the recent death of the moderate King Hassan of Morocco are examples of the tensions existing in North Africa.

Algeria’s suppression of Islamic extremism and Tunisia’s attempt to balance democracy and traditional Islamic values are other flashpoints in a part of the world frequently underreported in the Western media.

Surprisingly, the most hopeful report came from the Middle East conference participants.

Professor Shlomo Avineri of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, declared that a form of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians was possible. Avineri said this could happen not because the two peoples love each other, but because”both sides have exhausted all other possibilities except for negotiation.” Israel has been involved in more than five major wars and endless campaigns of Arab terrorism since its founding in 1948, and happily, it has won them all. But while its military power provides security for Israel, it has not satisfactorily solved the Jewish state’s relations with the Palestinians.

Avineri also noted most Palestinian leaders now recognize Israel is not going to disappear despite numerous Arab diplomatic victories at the United Nations and elsewhere. Nor has the military/terrorism option been successful against Israel.”Exhaustion has set in on both sides,”Avineri concluded.

Muhammad Hourani, an Arab Muslim who is a citizen of Israel, concurred with Avineri, his former professor at the Hebrew University.

Hourani, who works in Jerusalem, is a professional educator who has established the first middle school program that teaches Palestinian students about the Holocaust.

More than 150 Arab youngsters, in both Israel and in the Palestinian Authority, are enrolled in this pioneering effort to sensitize Arabs to the mass murder of Jews between 1933-1945.

Hourani told me during the Loccum conference that it has taken”great effort”to gain the approval not only of Arab school officials, but, most importantly, the approval of the students’ parents.

Hourani strongly believes his unique program of Holocaust education for Arabs will pay huge dividends in the future.”It’s not just the 150 students who are directly involved, but their families and friends as well.” That, too, is a piece of optimism but one that goes beyond the politics of exhaustion.

DEA END RUDIN