Given the current tragic and deadly round of violence between Israelis and Palestinians which began on Saturday, October 7, 2023, JAMAAT issued the following invitation to a joint Interfaith Rally that will take place in Washington DC this week.
This is to invite you and members of your organization or congregation to take part in an Interfaith rally organized by JAMAAT (Jews and Muslims and Allies Acting Together) to take place in Lafayette Park in front of the White House on Thursday October 19 at 12 noon.
The purpose of the rally is to strongly condemn all military attacks on civilians--Israelis and Palestinians alike--as illegal, immoral and a desecration of all three Abrahamic faiths; and to demand that both sides protect civilian life to the maximum degree possible. Even as we denounce in the strongest terms the Hamas massacre of more than one thousand Israelis civilians, we call on the Israeli Defense Forces not to subject the civilian population of Gaza to life-threatening bombardments or cut off electricity, food, clean water or gas, steps which threaten the lives of tens of thousands. We call on the Biden Administration to urgently address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and call on both sides to adhere to international law.
In addition, we appeal to Muslims, Jews and Christians not to allow this horrific upsurge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to shatter our unity of purpose and drive us apart here at home. The strengthening of Muslim-Jewish ties in America is one of the most positive developments of the past two decades; creating ties of friendship and trust between thousands in our respective communities and building a coalition together with our Christian friends in support of democracy and pluralism in America. All of us have come too far to turn back now.
The following is an article that Sabeeha Rehman and Walter Ruby sent us about their interfaith work to promote Muslim-Jewish relations.
Since the early years of the 21st Century, the two of us have been involved in a movement in the U.S. and around the world to strengthen Muslim-Jewish relations. Our movement has been unexpectedly successful—exceeding the expectations even of many of its founders—in building a vibrant structure of communication and cooperation between Muslims and Jews in North America with allied movements in the UK, across Europe, Australia and beyond, on a person-to-person, congregational and organizational basis. The movement has, however, been less successful in publicizing itself and relatively few Israelis and Palestinians are aware of its existence.
We are therefore pleased to share an account of our burgeoning global Muslim-Jewish movement, in the awareness that while the challenges Israelis and Palestinians face in building human ties across the separation barrier dividing the Holy Land are considerably more onerous than those Muslims and Jews in America and elsewhere have faced, nevertheless, the methods and principles at the heart of our movement—forging bottom up, people to people ties to overcome mutual fear and loathing—are the same ones animating coalition-building efforts in Israel-Palestine. We devoutly hope that increased awareness of what has been accomplished by Muslims and Jews working together in the Diaspora will inspire Israelis and Palestinians of all faith backgrounds to redouble efforts to reach out to reach other.
Jewish and Muslim Neighbors in Staten Island
The effort to build Muslim-Jewish ties in America is decades old but began to pick up serious steam over the past 15 years. For Sabeeha, Muslim-Jewish engagement started with sidewalk chats with her Jewish neighbors in Staten Island, New York way back in the 1970’s; with mothers talking to mothers. Then a stay-at-home mom, she and her neighbors sat watching their children play and would engage in light banter. When Sabeeha invited one of the ladies over for dinner, the exchange led to a discussion on dietary restrictions and the aha moment: You don’t eat pork either! And when the Jewish lady invited Sabeeha in for a cup of coffee and she demurred with a Thank you, but its Ramadan, the conversation evolved into rituals of fasting. Within a year their dialogue had graduated to Interfaith 201. If you walked by, you were likely to hear, “When does Ramadan start?” or “How long will your sukkah tent be up?”
Soon, Sabeeha decided to introduce her Jewish neighbors to her Muslim friends. They would gather in her living room—couples—and savor Pakistani vegetable biryani and samosas, engaging in dialogue beyond getting to know one another’s faith. Intimate meetups in living rooms led to larger gatherings in public places, as each wanted their community to hear from the ‘other’ who was no longer an ‘other.’ What was becoming apparent was how much we had in common and how precious the zone of interfaith dialogue felt to all was. It was totally ground up, totally grassroots.
The Shock of 9/11 Became a Catalyst
After the tragedy of 9/11 shook America and the world, many more Muslims became active in interfaith dialogue; impelled, in the wake of a palpable anti-Muslim backlash, to make themselves better known and understood to the larger society; both in terms of their emphatic rejection of terrorism and the compatibility of their culture and faith with the American ethos. Relationships were formed that eventually led to historic initiatives like the 2006 invitation to Rabbi Erich Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) to address the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim organization in the U.S. and Canada.
In the wake of that breakthrough event, Walter, a veteran journalist for Israeli and Jewish newspapers who had covered the ups and downs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, took the position of Muslim-Jewish Program Director at the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, under the direction of the eclectic Orthodox Rabbi Marc Schneier. Walter launched the Weekend of Twinning; an initiative linking mosques and synagogues and Muslim and Jewish students, women’s and young leaders’ groups in cities across the US and Canada. Fifty such Muslim-Jewish twinnings took place in 2008, more than 100 in 2009 and 150 in 2010.
The content of each twinning event was decided locally and took different forms in every city; with some focused-on discussions of commonalities in the two Abrahamic faiths, others on joint holiday celebrations and others on taking part in social service together such as feeding hungry and homeless, visiting the sick and elderly and holding health fairs together. Over the years, FFEU also began to facilitate similar twinning events across Europe, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Arab countries like Morocco and Tunisia.
The unexpected success of diverse expressions of Muslim-Jewish dialogue was due to factors both idealistic and practical. Many in the two communities were drawn together in the wake of the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in search of an alternative path to reconciliation and to help ensure that the hatred and violence in the Holy Land did not spread to America. Once they had encountered each other, Muslims and Jews found themselves fascinated by unexpected similarities in the two faiths: prayers, dietary laws, customs and moral precepts such as shared commitments to tzedakah/sadaka and welcoming the stranger.
While attending a Muslim community event in late 2007 honoring Hassan Askari, a young Bangladeshi immigrant hailed by both Muslim and Jewish communities as a hero for jumping into the fray and defending several young Jews accosted by anti-Semitic skinheads on the New York subway, Walter found himself amazed to hear a Muslim leader state from the podium that, through his brave action, Askari had upheld the Quranic precept that if a person saves one life, it is as though he saves all of humankind. Prior to that Walter had no idea that ‘If you save one life’, a core principle in Judaic ethics, could be found in the Quran as well. Sabeeha had no idea it was a Jewish maxim as well—a mutual ignorance they shared with virtually every other Muslim and Jew they knew. Learning that the other faith community prominently upholds the same core moral precept was electrifying for many in both communities.
At the same time, it was evident to Walter that the blossoming of the Muslim-Jewish movement happened because clear-thinking leaders in both communities understood that the building of such an alliance was very much in their own community’s interest. American Muslims felt deeply vulnerable in the wake of 9-11, a period during which many Muslims were arrested and held in incarceration for extended periods in violation of their civil liberties. In that time of crisis, Muslim leaders looked to Jewish organizations as potentially powerful allies who could afford them an increased level of protection. For their part, the more liberal part of the Jewish community saw extending friendship and support to the Muslim community as a way of challenging the narrative among many Muslims that the Jewish community was inveterately hostile to them, and thereby to help deter young Muslims from becoming radicalized and lashing out violently against the Jewish community.
Speaking up for each other
There were inspiring examples in those early years of Jews speaking up for Muslims and Muslims for Jews. In 2009, Dr. Sayyid Syeed, then national director of ISNA startled the government of Saudi Arabia by stating that ISNA and other America Muslim groups would boycott an international interfaith conference they were sponsoring in Madrid, if they insisted on featuring Rabbi Dovid Weiss a notorious anti-Zionist Chasidic rabbi who had participated in the Tehran conference casting doubt on the truth of the Holocaust. In response, the Saudis dropped Weiss from the program and for the first time, mainstream western Jewish leaders participated in a Saudi-initiated interfaith event—the harbinger of closer relations to come.
Meanwhile, prominent American Jewish leaders denounced efforts by conservative political leaders like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin to whip up fear of Islam and American Muslims and spoke out at zoning boards across the country to ensure that applications to build mosques received the same non-discriminatory treatment as applications to build churches and synagogues.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict – “The 800-pound Gorilla in the Room”
From the beginning, leaders of the burgeoning Muslim-Jewish movement were keenly aware of the potential for the ongoing and ever-worsening Israeli-Palestinian conflict—what Muslims and Jews alike termed “the 800-pound gorilla in the room”—to disrupt efforts to find common ground. Most organizations involved in Muslim-Jewish dialogue adopted a simple formula: to focus on strengthening Muslim-Jewish relations in their local communities while agreeing to disagree respectfully on Israel-Palestine and avoid discussing the conflict as much as possible. The Sisterhood of Salaam-Shalom, a national Muslim-Jewish women’s movement, with more than 140 chapters across the U.S., had a long-standing position that its chapters should not discuss Israel-Palestine for the first eighteen months of their existence. In his position at FFEU, Walter urged synagogues and mosques holding twinning events to begin with rabbi and imam praying together for peace and justice in Israel-Palestine, but once the prayer was complete, facilitators would inform participants that discussion of the Middle East was henceforth off the table. The premise was that working together to improve Muslim-Jewish relations in their respective hometowns was too vital for all to allow Israel-Palestine to destroy the dialogue.
That formula worked most of the time, although far from perfectly. Every time there has been a major outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, usually involving mass bloodletting in Gaza (2009, 2014, 2018-19 and 2021), we have seen temporary setbacks to Muslim-Jewish coalition building in the U.S. At the same time, we have weathered polarizing ancillary disputes related to Israel-Palestine such as efforts in state legislatures and Congress to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and an ongoing lashing out between the pro-Israel community and a small group of pro-Palestinian Muslim-American congresswomen like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib whose attacks on supporters of Israel sometimes are often perceived to have anti-Semitic connotations as well. The Israeli-Palestine issue continues to bedevil Muslim-Jewish relations on university campuses, where efforts to build lasting ties between Hillel and Muslim Student Association groups have often come apart due to sharp disagreements over the Middle East.
Yet each time violence in Israel-Palestine has led to a fraying of Jewish-Muslim ties in the U.S., leaders of the two communities have articulated the need to prioritize coming together here in America and have quickly returned to engagement. That record makes clear that both communities perceive our continuing cooperation as so important that we cannot afford the luxury of allowing the conflict to tear us apart. Also, as Muslims and Jews have gotten to know each other better and trust each other more, it has become possible for them to hold heartfelt discussions on Israel-Palestine that would have been impossible in the early years. These conversations often led to a strengthening of ties rather than the ruptures many had feared. Trump and the rise of Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism.
In 2015, the premiere Jewish defense organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee, which initially had declined to get involved in the Muslim-Jewish movement over dubious claims that, decades earlier, ISNA had been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, changed course and began dialoguing with ISNA. This was a classic case of establishment organizations accepting reality and embracing a movement they had once eschewed and served to solidify an enhanced alliance in support of strengthening Muslim-Jewish relations. This breakthrough came at a critical moment, just as presidential candidate Donald Trump put forward the claim that “Islam hates us” and vowed to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. In 2015 and 2016, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic hate crimes both began to rise sharply while prominent Jewish journalists began receiving overtly anti-Semitic hate mail after writing articles critical of Trump.
In January 2017, only days after Trump took office, large numbers of American Jews, including prominent rabbis, took part in demonstrations against the new Administration’s rapid-fire implementation of the Muslim ‘travel ban,’ and rushed to airports in droves to protect Muslims arriving on planes from being immediately shipped back to their countries of origin. FFEU held a rally in New York’s Times Square entitled ‘Today I Am a Muslim Too’ to get across the message that Jews, and others stood with American Muslims in their hour of peril.
Leaders of the Muslim community reciprocated that year by speaking out against a rash of attacks on Jewish cemeteries across the U.S and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars through crowd funding campaign to restore the desecrated cemeteries. Then on October 27, 2018, after awakening to the horrifying news that a neo-Nazi gunman had slaughtered 11 Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, members of the Islamic Society of Pittsburgh rushed to the synagogue; standing outside police lines, declared their solidarity and love for members of the congregation. Again, donations to the Tree of Life flowed in through Muslim crowds sourcing and large numbers of Muslims showed up at synagogues across the U.S. the following Shabbat to express their outrage at the attack and solidarity with their Jewish neighbors.
In January 2022, when a British Muslim stormed into the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, TX, a suburb of Dallas, and held the rabbi and several congregant’s hostage, the leaders of the Dallas area Muslim community spoke out immediately to denounce the attack, and in consultation with other faith leaders, liaised with the police who were eventually able to kill the gunman. Thus, the ironic effect of the attack was to strengthen Muslim-Jewish ties in Greater Dallas and beyond.
Standing Together Against White Christian Nationalism
Today, national Muslim and Jewish organizations stand together in opposing the rise of White Christian nationalism in America, which most of both communities see as a deadly threat to minority faiths in this country. The violent attack on democracy at the U.S. Capitol, and ongoing agitation from the Trumpist movement to remake America into an explicitly Christian country is anathema to Jews and Muslims alike.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision by the U. S. Supreme County this June, which struck down the constitutional right to abortion, it was striking to see Muslim and Jewish religious scholars making media appearances together during which they pointed out that neither Judaism or Islam accept as dogma the Evangelical and Catholic position that life begins at conception, Therefore, they argued, allowing states to outlaw abortion, violates the religious freedom of Muslim and Jewish women to control their own bodies.
After 15 years of hard work and sustained mutual engagement, there is a palpable sense that our two faith communities—the largest minority faith communities in America—need each other more than ever. Despite ongoing strains over Israel-Palestine, the Muslim-Jewish alliance in the U.S. is an established fact that will not be easily uprooted.
Lessons for our friends in Israel-Palestine
But what lessons can be learned by our friends in Israel and Palestine pushing for peace and reconciliation? We should start by acknowledging that much has been achieved in Israel-Palestine as well, including the building of a vibrant coalition of more than 100 peace and reconciliation groups within the framework of ALLMEP (The Alliance for Middle East Peace).. Those of us active in Muslim-Jewish relations in the U.S. certainly don’t purport to be better or wiser than the brave and determined Palestinian and Israeli peace activists. Instead, we honor their work and stand in awe of their courage and fortitude.
Obviously if Israel-Palestine conflict divides us in the Diaspora, it pulls apart our counterparts in Israel-Palestine infinitely more intensely. Yet ultimately the way to peace and reconciliation is quite similar: bringing grass roots Israelis and Palestinians together to embrace their shared humanity and common interest in creating a future of peace and security for all. None of us know what the final dispensation will be in terms of borders, Jerusalem, one state or two. Yet however the political solution plays out, Israelis and Palestinians will need to go on living alongside each other and interact peacefully in a tiny space the size of the U.S. state of Maryland. Therefore, the focus must be on building lasting ties of communication and cooperation with the aim of improving living conditions inside Palestine. A cardinal lesson of the collapse of Oslo Accords is that without the building of a vibrant and sustainable movement for Israeli-Palestinian mutual engagement on grass roots level, no political framework reached between the two governments will work.
Therefore, it is imperative to build a movement focused on bringing together Israelis and Palestinians on a person-to-person level while working to improve the quality of life in Palestine in areas like health care and education with direct involvement by activists from both sides of the wall.
The lesson from the Diaspora is that it is possible to bring together Muslims and Jews in a vibrant alliance, based on recognizing and celebrating our shared humanity and working together for the well-being of all. Despite the manifest physical and psychological barriers, the same may be achieved over time by Palestinians and Israelis. All of us, whether in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Jerusalem or Hebron, have a moral obligation to come together to end the dangerous conflict between our peoples, and thereby to offer our children and grandchildren a future based on peace, justice and security for all. To quote the immortal words of Theodore Herzl offered in another, but not unrelated context, “If we will it, it is no dream.”