By David A. Sargent,Special to the Sun Journal

AUBURN – Two speakers described grassroots peace-building programs in Israel at a Sunday morning talk at Temple Shalom.

Professor Yehezkel Landau, faculty associate in interfaith relations at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, said, “People are psychologically crippled or paralyzed and cannot envision a different way of life. The older you are, the more experientially impoverished you are, and that’s why it’s important to deal with young people so they can be the change agents.”

A key to achieving peace is to eliminate “us versus them” attitudes, he said.

He described Israeli and Arab young people living together in a demonstration project called Open House. Landau is co-founder and co-director of the Open House Center for Jewish-Arab Coexistence in Ramla, Israel.

It is all part of a search “for the spiritual common denominator in a land we all call holy,” he said.

“Terror doesn’t target just Jews,” he told the audience. “Social pathology is rampant in both societies.”

Landau said the Palestinian society is going through “spasms of instability” and he expressed a sense of foreboding about the next five years but “optimism for the next generation.”

Landau told the group, “We all know it’s a volatile situation there, but it also can change for the better overnight.”

In discussing the roles of government, he said, “they took religion out of the equation, and that has come back to haunt us.”

It led to minority factions of 30 to 40 percent that have been large enough to sabotage peace efforts, Landau said.

“Democracy doesn’t just mean majority rules. It’s a real challenge when a large minority of the Jews in Israel, according to polls, would like to disenfranchise the 20-percent Arab minority.”

He told the group, “The majority needs also to be educated that minorities have rights in a democracy.”

Landau said the Bedouin population in Israel is growing rapidly and social problems related to that group threaten to increase dramatically in coming years.

Landau is an author, a former director of a religious Zionist peace movement in Israel, and he lectures internationally on Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations. He coordinates an interfaith training program for Jews, Christians and Muslims called “Building Abrahamic Partnerships.”

Tamar Miller, co-director of the New England regional office of the New Israel Fund and a consultant to Middle East groups engaged in social change and peace efforts, said, “We’re trying to create a peace virus.”

She talked about “people-to-people peacemaking” through religious pluralism and tolerance as well as economic and social justice.

Among the organization’s successes, she said, are securing Israeli Supreme Court orders to reroute some sections of the country’s border security fence. She said the New Israel Fund does not take a political position regarding the fence. Rather, it seeks relocation when humanitarian considerations in a town can be served and security is not diminished, she explained.

There is also a program “to teach teachers how to teach democracy and active participation in a civil society,” Miller said. “You have to remember we are coming out of a socialist history, people are coming out of countries that are not democracies. This is all quite new to many.”

A lot of this education deals with developing environmental responsibility and community infrastructure rather than political activity, she said

Miller acknowledged that the Seeds of Peace Camp in Otisfield is also doing good work that meshes with the objectives of the efforts outlined by herself and Landau.

Copy the Story Link