The Movement for Reform Judaism

It must be because I work in North West London. Whenever I call a cab, the driver is either a Jew or a Muslim. Either way, the driver wants to talk. If he’s Jewish, he will want to discuss communal politics and put me right. If he’s Muslim, he will be most interested that his passenger is a beardless, plain-clothed rabbi.

So I became engrossed in a conver-sation with a middle-aged Indian Muslim from Wanstead. The conversation developed into a mutual complaint about sections of the political leadership of our respective communities and about extremism. We share so much, he pointed out, from the importance of family to the desire to integrate into society. Why do we have to be portrayed as being at odds? The vast majority of us simply want to get on with each other, and not just to live and let live. He went on to tell me about the work his wife does in building relationships and understanding between Muslim women and Jewish women in his area.

I also spent two days at the large and impressive Islamic Centre at Markfield on the outskirts of Leicester. Over lunch, I was introduced to a young Imam trained in the West Midlands and to a young member of staff at Markfield. Within two minutes we got on to the subject of football – with me blaming them, tongue in cheek, for the pathetic performance of Midlands football teams.

One of them confessed to supporting Walsall – and Manchester United. I responded by sharing my undying faith in West Ham. The Imam immediately picked this up and spoke enthusiastically about West Ham giving a lead by being the only Premiership club not only to get out into a local community with many Muslims but to permit girls to play football whilst retaining their head covering. His colleague then asked me why it was that so many Jews support Tottenham. I had no sensible answer. We swapped cards and agreed to meet again and see whether soccer offered a way of getting Jews and Muslims together around a shared faith, as Bill Shankley once said, “more important than life and death”.

I was at the Islamic Centre for the annual residential meeting of the Sternberg Centre Jewish/Christian/Muslim Dialogue Group. Our host, a long-standing member of the Group, was Dr Ataullah Siddiqui. As well as being part of the leadership team at Markfield, Siddiqui heads the Markfield Islamic Higher Education programme which is accredited by Loughborough University. He teaches on BA, MA and Doctoral programmes and edits an important international Islamic journal ‘Encounters’, devoted to interfaith dialogue.

During the course of the Residential, Dr Siddiqui made the point that Muslims in Europe are part of the modern Western world – “whether they like it or not”. Islam, he said, “has contributed far more to European life and modern Western culture than is usually acknowledged. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe”, he added, “have the same aspirations as Jews and Christians”. At another point in the dialogue he said: “Of course Israel has the right to exist. The United Nations granted Israel that right in 1948. The issue is not its existence, only its borders”.

People who rely on anecdotal evidence are infuriating – one friendly taxi driver, an Imam and a young Islamic Centre manager, and one leading academic do not make a valid sociological survey. But all three believed – I asked them – that they were representative of the majority of Muslims in the UK. I believe them.

But I also believe something else Ataullah Siddiqui said. He had just returned from an extended visit to India and was deeply concerned. Ten years ago, he said, he never encountered anti-Semitism there. Jews were Jews, Israel was Israel and America was America. A decade on all has changed. He witnessed crowds demonstrating against the Danish cartoons, pouring hatred on the American-Zionist conspirators, and denouncing Jews. When he questioned people, no-one had ever met a Jew.

He was shocked and it lead us into a discussion of the immense problem caused by the disparity in numbers. There are two billion Christians in the world, 1.2 billion Muslims and fourteen million Jews. “How do we meet face to face?” he asked. How do we engage family man to family man in a cab and affirm our shared values? How do we share a passion for football and puzzle over why so many apparently sane people support Tottenham? How do we meet and dispel the image of the Jew as the evil conspirator when so much of the globe is bereft of Jews? It is a question that the Jewish world has to face.

Another member of the group picked up this elision of Jew, Israel and America. I pointed out that more then 80% of the Jewish world lives in either Israel or America and that without American support there would be no Israel. Ataullah traced the beginning of the elision back to the invasion of Kuwait. Then, one of my closest and most trusted Christian friends confronted me with something extraordinarily painful.

He opened up the issue of the neo-Cons in the United States, those who have supported the Bush administration in its foreign policy, and how many of them are Jews. I became defensive and then hostile, pointing out that only some were Jewish, that the Southern Baptists backed Bush but that did not mean that all Christians backed Bush, and that the idea that the Bush administration was either a front for a neo-Con conspiracy or had bought someone else’s philosophy wholesale had all kinds of overtones that made me shudder. My friend understood but sent me material about the Project for the New American Century established in the Spring of 1997.

“[The United States must conduct] a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities”, it declares.

In a letter to President Bush: “We want to commend you for your strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism. As a liberal democracy under repeated attack by murderers who target civilians, Israel now needs and deserves steadfast support”.

Both documents had many Jewish signatories.

Is it possible that, in our desperate desire to protect Israel, some of us have backed a problematic horse? Could it conceivably be that in our terror of Muslim extremism, we have unwittingly made it hard for ordinary Western Muslims to love us? And how on earth do you build relationships of love when there are huge expanses of this country, never mind the world, where there isn’t even a single scared and prickly Jew to love?

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