Interreligious Dialogue and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: An Empirical View · 299commentaries, he illustrates the essence of a “federalist” approach to
society and stability as opposed to a strictly “statist” approach. These
distinctions, described as follows by Elazar, are significant as we describe
our applications of his thought to conflict resolution efforts.
It is no exaggeration to say that the contrast between the statist and
the federalist approaches to political life reflects the difference be-
tween the systematic and prismatic approaches to understanding
civil society. The systematic approach seeks to define everything
precisely, to set boundaries that cannot be crossed; hence the statist
approach emphasizes questions of sovereignty as a means of defin-
ing ultimate boundaries. The federalist approach, recognizing how
all of God’s universe is interconnected, seeks rather to establish sep-
arate cores and to understand how each core has to be responded
to differently from different perspectives. Boundaries need not be
so clear. Interaction is more important than definition [emphasis mine],
which explains the federalist emphasis on multiple polities related
to one another, united yet separate.^30Applying Federalism to the Middle East
Elazar tried to apply federalist principles to helping to ameliorate the
Arab-Israeli conflict. He often reflected that the nation-state framework
was not indigenous to the Middle East given the trans-state identity of
the Arab world, along with what he regarded as the ambivalent attitude
of traditional Judaism toward unbridled state sovereignty.^31
He believed, for instance, that given the clear conflict of interests of
the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, solutions could more pro-
ductively be sought in orientations that de-emphasized crystal-clear
solutions of definition and sovereignty and instead emphasized modes
of informal sharing in line with federalist thinking. Also significant was
the fact that he recalled the millet arrangement of the Ottoman Empire.
This potentially was a most viable precedent, which allowed for cultural
expression and identity in the framework of a larger whole, whose con-
ceptual essence Elazar believed still had relevance for the contemporary
Middle East, and in a sense, for our discussion of interreligious dialogue
within it.^32 In his important work, Two Peoples One Land, in which he ana-
lyzed the dynamics of and possible approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian