New Interreligious Group to Back U.S. Support of Peace Conference

The formation of an American interreligious organization to advocate a greater U.S. effort toward convening an international Mideast peace conference was announced here Wednesday.

The newly created U.S. Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East includes among its officers Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, vice president of the World Jewish Congress.

“There is a growing opinion — moderate, middle-of-the-road opinion — in the United States which feels that the Jewish-Arab conflict has to be settled by some form of partition,” Hertzberg explained in an interview. “I am here because I don’t want this stream of opinion to be taken over in an anti-Israel direction.”

The rabbi said his role in the group will be to “keep it on track.”

The organization had been in the works for more than a year, and held its founding meeting last June in Arlington, Va.

Its executive director, Ronald Young, was Middle East representative of the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers, from 1982 to 1985.

Besides the international conference issue, Young said the group’s other basic tenets include the rights of Israel to live in peace and of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Young said the committee has held meetings in 15 cities, and that members of Congress have said the group filled a “moral vacuum.”

Hertzberg, professor of religion at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., said the group will not judge past Israeli or Palestinian actions. “Otherwise the group would fall apart,” he said.

The rabbi noted that the group’s several hundred supporters include Imam W. Deen Muhammad, the son of Malcolm X, whom Hertzberg called the “legitimate heir to the Black Muslims” now headed by Louis Farrakhan. Hertzberg said “it’s terribly important that a Black Muslim says ‘I’m here’ — to be among the moderates.”

Rabbi Eugene Lipman, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform rabbinic organization, is on the committee’s board of directors.

Endorsing the organization are a number of prominent rabbis including Balfour Brickner and Marshall Meyer of New York and Harold Kushner of Natick, Mass.

Other endorsers are Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative rabbinic organization, and Rabbi Alexander Schindler and Albert Vorspan, president and senior vice president, respectively, of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Reform congregational organization.

‘GENERAL TERMS’

In an interview Wednesday, Vorspan said that for the group to remain together, it must continue “talking in very general terms and not getting in the blame business.”

Vorspan stated that the group decided early not to define certain issues specifically, such as who should represent the Palestinian people at a peace conference.

“The Palestinians are people, too. They’ve got to be dealt with,” Vorspan said. “I’m giving it a shot because of a terrible sense that something different has to be done.”

Hertzberg, in his JTA interview, discussed his current thinking on Middle East peace formulas.

He said he supports the concept of Palestinian self-determination in the territories. “I’ve said since the Six- Day War (in 1967) that if we hang on to the territories they will ultimately destroy either the democratic or the Jewish character of the State of Israel.”

He said he has always favored an international peace conference and emphasized that the Camp David accords were achieved not bilaterally, but as a result of a “massive amount of American cajoling” of Israel.

Hertzberg said that on the issue of an international conference, “I have every right and obligation in the world to support the views of (Foreign Minister Shimon) Peres and not those of (Prime Minister Yitzhak) Shamir.”

The rabbi contended that should the PLO recognize Israel’s existence and renounce the use of terror, it would have the right to belong to the peace process.