The Institute for Middle East Peace and Development: 2004
Institute activity in the year 2004 focused on the question of how a peaceful relationship between the US and the Arab world, and between Israel and its neighbors could be constructed. Could the US focus its attention on building relationships of confidence and trust between Americans and Muslims? Could American civil society? It would be particularly important to do this so that a new leadership would emerge in both sides, intent on peace and cooperation rather than on the defeat of one another through military means. Could the United States accomplish this in the Arab world?
The War of Ideas
The Institute has long discussed the importance of the war of ideas. This war could determine whether the younger generation in the Arab world, the 50% of the population under the age of 25, would see itself as a generation of globalization and building dignity through educational growth and creativity. It could also lead to the intensification of a generation who sees dignity coming only from confrontation with the US and Israel; therefore a generation devoting its young energies to a fundamentalist revolt against traditional Arab regimes and a radical attack on emerging American dominance in the Middle East. Will this next generation of emerging religious teachers and leaders teach and preach about their counterparts of the other faiths in a idiom that shows contempt for the other society and religious traditions? Or can they be given the tools and helped to develop the motivation to preach and teach mutual respect and the basic empathetic understanding of the Other’s societies and their faiths?
The role of the Institute in the Public Education for Peace:
Beginning in January 2004 Stephen P. Cohen, the Institute President, added to his teaching as Visiting Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University in Bethlehem Pennsylvania. He taught also at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he was visiting professor of Jewish history. The combination of the two universities provided an excellent opportunity to see how the Middle East was understood both by a general American liberal arts student population, and also by the very particular perspective of students in a Jewish rabbinical school and other students emphasizing Jewish studies as the core of their educational curriculum.
The courses showed the intense interest of young Americans in the conflict into which the US had entered to deeply, a conflict that was at the center of the contemporary experience of the Jewish state of Israel. Students were struggling not only to discover what they themselves believed about these conflicts, but whether there was anything constructive that they, as young citizens, would be able to do. They sought to optimize either American performance in the Middle East or Israeli chances of reaching a peaceful agreement. The students at the Jewish Theological Seminary had never before had the chance to study these issues objectively at a mature level. The Lehigh students struggled to come to terms with how the US had become so embroiled in a part of the world in which the US had so little prior involvement and so little at stake at the time the US exploded on the world scene in the last years of WWI.
B) Media: We continued to appear frequently on television and in newspapers discussing, analyzing, interpreting, and predicting events of Middle East contemporary history. However it became clear, both from these more ephemeral media experiences and from the more serious encounter with the minds of young people, that it was time to lay out a more comprehensive view of the issues. This could be achieved in the writing of a book. A contract was agreed to with the publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux, the leading American trade publisher on contemporary events. President of the Institute devoted his time intensively to research in the libraries of Columbia University, New York University, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Lehigh University in order to prepare the materials for chapters on the relationships of the US to the major players and countries in the ME from WWI through the year 2000.
Practicing what we Preach
While serving on the US Presidential Commission on Public Diplomacy, we discovered that American relations with the young people of the Arab and Muslim world had become terrible. We further discovered that a core part of the problem had lodged itself in the heart of Islamic preaching and religious education. It was striking that the sole American institution that retained a very positive image among these young people was the American educational system. To many youth of the Middle East, education seemed like the only window of escape from a disappointing life; a life filled with anger at others. We sought to replace tendency to construct blame with the possibility to construct a positive, well-rounded life.
So the questions became: How could we construct new ties between young Americans and young Muslims? Could we do this especially in the Arab world, which would benefit from the positive valuation of American education? Could we work to replace the destructive hostility towards the United States in the eyes of these young Arabs and other Muslims?
We decided to embark on an ambitious effort at interfaith dialogue, engaging the leading seminaries of the Islamic world with the leading seminaries of American Christianity and American Judaism. These religious institutions are repositories within group education that develop self-advocacy and self-promotion attitudes. They do not yet, however, inculcate deep respect for the Others and for other religious traditions. Such an addition to their educational agenda would help to move our world toward the chances of more peaceful interaction among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
The Summit for Interfaith Respect, held in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts in November and December of 2004 broke barriers of interfaith misunderstanding. Our Summit was successful beyond all expectations and we are continuing to take this ambitious project to the next level.
