{"id":1450,"date":"2013-04-30T19:46:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-30T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/religious-fundamentalists-could-hold-the-key-to-middle-east-peace.html"},"modified":"2013-04-30T19:46:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-30T19:46:00","slug":"religious-fundamentalists-could-hold-the-key-to-middle-east-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/religious-fundamentalists-could-hold-the-key-to-middle-east-peace.html","title":{"rendered":"Religious Fundamentalists Could Hold the Key to Middle East Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

Everybody knows that religious fundamentalists are part of the Middle East\u2019s problem. Everybody knows that Muslim and Jewish extremists make a hard situation harder, delaying the day Palestinians and Israelis find a way to live in peace. Everybody knows that the great Israeli writer\u00a0Amos Oz\u00a0<\/a>is right when he says that so long as the conflict is \u201ca battle over real estate\u201d it can be solved, but once it becomes a holy war only catastrophe beckons.<\/span><\/div>\n
But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong \u2013 or rather, what if it lumps together all religious hardliners too crudely, mistakenly including one group that might not be part of the problem at all, that might in fact be the key to the solution?<\/span><\/div>\n
The question arises because of one unexpected side-effect of Israel\u2019s\u00a0most recent elections<\/a>\u00a0and the new coalition that followed. For the first time in years the ultra-orthodox Jewish parties find themselves in opposition, sitting alongside Labour, the civil rights activists of\u00a0Meretz<\/a>\u00a0and the 11 members of the mainly Arab parties, representing Israel\u2019s Palestinian citizens. So long inside successive ruling coalitions, the ultra-orthodox, or haredi, parties are, for now at least, outsiders. That simple fact suggests an intriguing possibility.<\/span><\/div>\n
First, though, a word or two of definition. There are two parties involved: one,\u00a0United Torah Judaism<\/a>, that aims to speak for\u00a0Ashkenazi<\/a>\u00a0religious Jews and whose leaders still wear the distinctive garb of eastern European orthodoxy; and the other,\u00a0Shas<\/a>, that seeks to represent those Jews with a Middle Eastern or north African background. Different though they are from each other, the relevant gap is between them and the so-called \u201cnational religious camp\u201d, whose political arm,\u00a0Naftali Bennett\u2019s Jewish Home party<\/a>, surged at the last elections straight into government. Bennett is the champion of, among others, the religiously motivated Jewish settlers on the West Bank, those whose faith is inseparable from a muscular brand of nationalism.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everybody knows that religious fundamentalists are part of the Middle East\u2019s problem. Everybody knows that Muslim and Jewish extremists make a hard situation harder, delaying the day Palestinians and Israelis find a way to live in peace. Everybody knows that the great Israeli writer\u00a0Amos Oz\u00a0is right when he says that so long as the conflict […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nReligious Fundamentalists Could Hold the Key to Middle East Peace<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Everybody knows that religious fundamentalists are part of the Middle East's problem. Everybody knows that Muslim and Jewish extremists make a hard\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/religious-fundamentalists-could-hold-the-key-to-middle-east-peace.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Religious Fundamentalists Could Hold the Key to Middle East Peace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Everybody knows that religious fundamentalists are part of the Middle East's problem. 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