Egypt and Israel Share--and Can Solve--the Same Problem

As Egyptians went to the polls for the first truly democratic election in Egypt's history, news reports and commentators raised the specter of an increase in the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood--a religious party that both Nasser and Mubarek suppressed.

After the turmoil and anticipation of the Arab Spring, many fear that religious leaders opposed to modernity will win the popular vote and send the country backwards--away from engagement with modern economies and modern culture.

Ever the optimist, I recall an interview that a young Egyptian gave during the protests in Tahrir Square last spring in which he assured a TV journalist that, having finally freed themselves from the secular tyranny of President Mubarek, Egyptians were hardly going to turn themselves over to the religious tyranny of the mullahs.

We don't yet know how the final voting will turn out, much less how the halting progress towards modernization and democracy will evolve. But one thing we can predict with certainty is that this process will involve a struggle between religious and secular leaders--neither willing to give up their positions of authority voluntarily. How, then, to proceed?

There is a model for this, invisible to Egyptians, yet staring them in the face. Its democratic neighbor, Israel, has struggled since its creation by the U.N. in 1947, to find a workable balance between these same two forces.

David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, thought he'd solved the problem by making an "unholy" alliance with the religious parties of a nascent Israel.

He established an entente in which the religious leaders (or, rather, their political stand-ins) were given total authority over "religious" issues--religious identity, marriage, death, Sabbath and holy day observance, regulation of kosher kitchens in public buildings, etc.--while all the rest of governing was given over to the secular government.

It didn't work. Firstly, Judaism does not know of a distinction between secular and religious law, so the bargain resulted in an unfortunate distortion of Judaism in which religious values are applied only to ritual while secular values are applied to everything else.

Secondly, the religious parties, ever since being given this limited role in government, have sought to expand their influence. So, for example, if a hotel has for use a normal elevator on the Sabbath, the Rabbinate will declare its kitchen un-kosher.

Perhaps worse, they have turned an archaeological site, the Western Wall, into an Orthodox synagogue--severely restricting access. Yet on the other hand, a Jewish state without a Jewish religious presence in public life also makes no sense.

Much the same can be said of an emerging democratic Egypt that is primarily Muslim. Egypt can learn from Ben Gurion's mistake.

I propose that the two nations create a joint conference in which interested parties--both governmental and NGO--meet to share their experiences and their expectations and that they then seek to create solutions that will work in both countries--removing religious coercion (which is not religion at all) while fostering a secular government responsive to the highest religious values of its people--in all areas of public life. 

During such a conference Israel, in the process, would have an opportunity to reassess its own unfortunate alliance with its ethnic Orthodox religious parties. Egypt and Israel could become models, as partners, in solving a problem that plagues emerging nations around the world.