Some recent events should remind to each person in good faith the absurdity of antijudaism and antisilamism nd their derivatives, anti-Zionism and hostility to the creation of a Palestinian State. They could even show that our civilisations’ future will play out in the pacifist and constructive dialogue between the three monotheisms.
The election of a former French minister, of Jewish and Moroccan origin, with irreproachable expertise, and the daughter of a very respected advisor of the King of Morocco, as director général of the UNESCO against several arab candidates, ridicules the United States and Israel concomitant decisions to withdraw themselves from this international institution, under the pretext of its opposition to the actual policies of Israel government and its recognition of Hebron as a part of the World Heritage of Humanity.
As if Israel could be reduced to the policy of its actual government. As if Hebron wasn’t, obviously, in Palestine and a major site of the history of humanity, for Jewish, Christians and Muslims.
This confusion of feelings shows that only those who know nothing about History can’t understand that Judaism and Islam are fundamentally mixed up, and both of them dialogue and nourish themselves from their philosophies since their meeting in Arabia, at the time of the prophet Mahomet. Continuing by the wonderful exchanges in Cordoba between Muslim and Jewish philosophers, who rediscovered the Greek thought, which has then been seized by Christian Europe; nothing is more important, in particular, than the dialogue between Ibn Rushd and Maimonide to understand today. This meeting kept on over the centuries, and only ignorant or those who want to hate, will not recognize the beauty and the deepness of these judeo-muslim exchanges, despite all the drifts and fantasies.
And today, the trial of the Merah family reminds us where those can lead.
Judaism and Islam need each other :
Today, nobody has more interest than the Israel State in the existence of a free and thriving Palestinian State, in the long term, it is even the condition for its survival: what would become the Hebrew State if the Palestinians gave up on their dreamed State, to ask for the fusion of the occupied territories with the Israel State, with equal rights for all the citizens of this new State ?
Similarly, nobody has more interest than the Jewish communities of Europe and America in reminding their own exile and in decently receiving, to integrate them, those who come, forced, temporarily or permanently, from the lands of Islam to fulfil their hopes in Europe and to live in democracy, therefore in secularism.
The Jewish and Greek Occident is the root of the monotheist idea, and with it the root of ideas of freedom and democracy. The rabbis called “god” what philosopher called the “first engine”, concepts that then gave birth to Christianism, and, after that, to our modernity and the Enlightenment.
Judaism, Christianism and Islam, whether they agree or not, do have a linked destiny; their dialogue is the condition of the Occident prosperity, and with them, of the liberty and democracy. Their division would dig the grave of our civilisations, in front of Asian ones, which arise in the world front rows.
Many people do understand that. Many dialogues begin. May the international institutions give the example. May the Churches follow. May each of us, at its own level, make the effort, without any concession to extremisms or to fundamentalisms, to understand the thought of the other, to be fed by it, to be amazed by it and to welcome, with humility, jubilation and empathy, the various attempts to find one of the countless keys of the Kingdom.