Our new era of Jewish-Muslim relations

Reactions to the recent passing of F.W. de Klerk transported me back to my childhood in South Africa. The horror of apartheid was a frequent topic of conversation in our family. My uncle’s law firm, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, pioneered the employment of black people and gave Nelson Mandela his first job as a clerk, in defiance of the accepted practice at the time. My mother was the principal of the only training college for black pre-school teachers and my father, a rabbi, made pastoral visits to Robben Island. We were all-too-aware of the urgent need to dismantle the structural racism that plagued the country. When de Klerk and Mandela worked together to do exactly that, the joy was tempered by the knowledge that it had taken far too long. For many, understandably, de Klerk remains the embodiment of a society built upon prejudice and hatred, but I found him to be a man of courage and sincerity. How many leaders today would be ready to act as he did, forming a government with a sworn political opponent? In our ever-increasingly polarised world, it is populists who are often rewarded at the ballot box rather than those who stand ready to compromise. Perhaps one aspect of de Klerk’s complicated legacy is the reminder that, in politics, the ability to make radical concessions need not always be considered a weakness.

I would never have thought that I’d be giving several addresses to Muslim majority audiences, including one at the Seventh Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace, which operates under the auspices of Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah of the UAE, one of the defining voices of contemporary Islamic scholarship. As anyone engaged in striving to improve Jewish-Muslim relations will know, this year has seen an unexpected sea change following the signing of the Abraham Accords in August 2020.