BLOODSHED and oppression form the staple diet of news from Israel and Palestine, with religion, and the fanaticism it can breed, often being singled out as the source of the problem.
But Edinburgh and Glasgow this week are hearing an impassioned plea from two men committed to putting religion at the cutting edge of a solution. A Palestinian Christian and Anglican priest, Canon Naim Ateek is also the widely-respected director of Sabeel, the Palestinian liberation theology centre in Jerusalem whose conferences on Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation have gained international recognition. Professor Marc Ellis, currently with the Harvard Centre for Middle
Eastern Studies, is an American Jew and the author of Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time.
In Scotland at the invitation of the Scottish-Palestinian Forum, chaired by a former Church of Scotland Moderator, the Very Rev Robert Davidson, and the Edinburgh University Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, the two are challenging their co-religionists in Britain to use the 50th anniversary of Israel's founding and the Palestinians' dispossession as a chance to reconsider the moral imperatives of their faith.
Sizeable audiences at a number of venues are getting a blunt message from the two theologians. ''There are,'' says Ellis, ''Jews and Arabs who don't want the next half century to repeat the past 50 years.'' But unless they get
support from Jews and Christians in the West their ability to stop history repeating itself will be fatally undermined.
Ateek, however, is not wholly pessimistic. Of the twentieth century's three seemingly intractable inter-communal problems - South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Palestine - he sees two already offering the hope that even the bitterest conflict can be transformed if a change of heart among old enemies is fostered and reinforced by outside intervention.
But peace needs to be credible to all sides. The Palestinians must commit themselves to a non-violent approach if Israelis are to believe in peace. But, equally importantly, if the Palestinian man and woman in the street are to give the peace process yet another chance, Israel must recognise the Palestinian need for justice.
Both men see justice as not only a religious imperative but also a political necessity, especially for Israel. Ateek is categoric: ''Israel will destroy itself if it does not act justly.'' Injustice generates
an implacable and destructive reaction on the Palestinian side, but it also saps Israel's moral strength from within.
As a Jew, Ellis is particularly concerned about this aspect of the problem and he doesn't pull his punches. ''For years,'' he says, ''the Israeli establishment has been liberal towards Jews, but towards Palestinians has been fascist.'' He rejects the suggestion that this is simply a question of the influence of the often-scapegoat religious right. The problem goes deeper and requires heart-searching among a much wider spectrum of Israelis and Israel's friends abroad.
HOWEVER, Ellis reserves his hardest-hitting and most controversial criticism for Christian churches, which have been, he alleges, too willing to make an ''ecumenical deal'' with pro-Israeli groups whereby Jewish-Christian dialogue is promoted at the cost of giving Israel a free hand to deal with the Palestinians any way it chooses.
It is when looking at what the moral imperative means in practice that Ellis and Ateek begin to diverge. For Ellis, Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank and Gaza has created a map that precludes the establishment of a Palestinian state and ghettoises the Palestinian population in tiny and unviable enclaves completely at Israel's mercy.
The question, therefore, is: will Israel try to maintain the present unworkable situation by force or will it, with Palestinian agreement, take the daring step of incorporating Israeli and Palestinian areas into a unitary but fully democratic and bi-national state? Jerusalem, in particular, cries out for the unitary solution, but only if Palestinian rights in the city are fully implemented.
Ateek, on the other hand, believes it would be ''a grave and unforgivable mistake'' if Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority accepted anything less than an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, since statehood for the Palestinians is the logical counterpart of Zionist insistence on a state for the Jews.
Both men are united, however, in believing that the moment has come to bring maximum pressure to bear on Israel's right-wing government, including boycotting goods produced by illegal Israeli settlements. This is necessary not only to deter Israel and uphold international law but also to demonstrate to Palestinians that non-violence can be made to work and that the outside world has not abandoned them.
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