Opinion: In Israel, I heard eerie echoes of an old Irish joke about religion
By Megan McArdle Megan McArdle Columnist Bio Follow Columnist May 14 at 8:05 PM Last week, I spent some time in Israel and the Palestinian territories, talking to people about religion, ethnicity and identity. Which of course made me think a lot about an old Irish joke.
“I think I understand,” he says. “But tell me, is it the Catholic or the Protestant God that you don’t believe in?” In short, religion in Northern Ireland is as much an identity as a faith, and it is an identity loaded with centuries of angry history. That also describes historical Palestine, except the disputes are older and more numerous. For that matter, viewing faith as integrally tied to your place and your ancestors and your history is probably more common worldwide than the modern American and Western European view of faith as a personal choice.
But Israel’s religious minorities don’t all necessarily resent that in the way Americans might expect. I spoke to Shadi Khalloul, a Maronite Christian activist in the Galilee who is working to revive Aramaic as the daily language of his community. He doesn’t want his community’s children to attend a separate school system for Arabs, true, but that’s because he wants a separate school system for their own identity.
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