Ralph Seliger writes:
If my feelings about Iraq were so centered on Israel, wouldn't I have continued to support the invasion even after the UN Security Council had voted against it? To me, the nightmare scenario is defining the Israeli-Arab conflict as
part of a religous war. There are well over one billion Muslims in the
world and a mere 15 million Jews. The last thing I want is any policy
that makes the struggle against Jihadi extremists seems like a war on
Islam, yet that's what the war in Iraq coupled with Bush's passivity regarding Israeli settlements has done.
Phil Weiss writes:
Has Israel, the Jewish state, played any part in the process of producing religious war in the Middle East?
Seliger: Of course Israel has, by its policies in expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in not consistently working for peace and coexistence. But the concept of a "Jewish state" is meant to refer to the Jewish people and not to a religion. Israel is not a theocratic state in the ways that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even Iraq and Afghanistan (among others) are explicitly Islamic. Meretz USA and our friends in the Meretz party in Israel (please
note that Meretz USA is not a "branch" of this political party)
advocate a complete separation of religion and state.
