A Jew in the mosque

A self-described "average Israeli" talks about his daring journey to pray with the Holy Land's Muslims and Christians -- and why Arafat cannot head a Palestinian state.

By Suzy Hansen

Oct. 30, 2001 | In the raging, seemingly irreconcilable conflict of the Middle East, the complexity of journalist Yossi Klein Halevi's own experience and opinions seems right at home. The son of an Orthodox Holocaust survivor, Halevi grew up in a Brooklyn community that was angry at and fearful of Christianity. He then married an Episcopalian who converted to Judaism, and she moved to Israel with him 20 years ago. During the first intifada, Halevi served as a soldier in Gaza. In his latest book, "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God With Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land," he returns to a Gaza refugee camp to pray. Two years ago, he voted for Ehud Barak because he was willing to see Jerusalem divided in order to create a Palestinian state. After this last year's violence, he no longer believes a Palestinian state is possible as long as Yasser Arafat is in power.

Halevi, the Jerusalem correspondent for the often-hawkish New Republic, has written what is ultimately a blend of memoir, travel book, celebration of worship and experiment. For two years, Halevi met and prayed with Sufi mystics, Muslim sheiks, Armenian Christians and Catholic nuns, embracing Islam and Christianity and their different ways of experiencing God. With each moving, often troubling encounter, Halevi asks whether religion can heal the wounds that politics cannot. Somehow, despite the emerging violence of 2000 and attempts to convert him, Halevi remains hopeful, inspired by what he witnessed in mosques, convents, West Bank towns and a Gaza refugee camp to believe that faith unites the people of the Middle East. "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden" reverberates with mesmerizing prayer, compelling dialogue and surprising humor. Especially now, this important narrative seems like a record of sanity. Halevi's intense, brave questions reveal that there is something in the Holy Land that withstands violence and waits for peace.

Salon spoke to Halevi by telephone from his home in Jerusalem about the failure of the peace process, the fearlessness of Islam and Israel's role in the war on terrorism.

You write that you feel that the Oslo Accords were too secular. How does the peace process neglect religion?

In July 1998, I was at a conference at the island of Rhodes which brought together Palestinian and Israeli journalists. It was sponsored by UNESCO and the European Union. What struck me at that conference was how unrepresentative so many of the journalists were of the cultures they come from. The Israeli journalists were eating calamari and the Palestinian journalists were drinking wine. We could all be cosmopolitan together on the island of Rhodes, but as soon as we came back to the Middle East, the walls went back up again. That incident really encapsulates where the peace process lost touch with the sensibilities of the peoples in the region.

From the very beginning, imams and rabbis should have been brought into the process. The idea that we could leave Jerusalem for last was so clearly a misreading of the significance of religion for both peoples. It all blew up in our faces.

How could this have been done differently?

Some very sincere efforts were made to bring people together on both sides through grass-roots work and encounter groups between psychologists, doctors and students. But religious people weren't brought together. A few peripheral attempts were made but never by the architects of Oslo. They themselves feared and were emotionally cut off from religion. You can't make peace in the Middle East without going through that door.

How does American intervention affect this?

America misunderstood the cultural nature of the Middle East. Separation of religion and state is not only a cardinal principle in America, it's what makes America work. But you can't transfer that concept to the Middle East. There is no separation of religion and state in any of the countries. Both Judaism and Islam see religion as a total experience: For religion to be authentic, it needs to address all aspects of life.

The struggle that we're having in Israel -- and as a religious person, I am very much on the secular side of this struggle -- is to contain religion as much as possible to the private sphere. Yet even people like me who believe in that, don't believe that it can be done completely. This is not the West and if that's true for Israel, it's far truer for the Arab world.

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