Israeli President Hosts Quiet Meeting of Muslim and Jewish Leaders

JERUSALEM — The guests who arrived at the Israeli president’s home on Thursday evening were an eclectic mix. They included the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, the president of the Sharia Court of the Palestinian Authority and two rabbis from a West Bank yeshiva.

The highly unusual meeting was intended, according to organizers, to forge a joint effort against religious violence, and to promote peace and coexistence.

But, underscoring the fissures that have made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so durable, the Palestinian religious leaders refused to be photographed, so there was no visual documentation of the meeting, and all but one refused to have their names appear in the official statements.

They seemed to be hoping the whole event would remain below the radar, and hours afterward it appeared to have gone unreported in the Palestinian news media.

Still, the host, President Reuven Rivlin, described the meeting in a statement as “important and significant— perhaps the most important meeting that could be held during these days.”

Another statement put out on behalf of the participants said: “We believe the deliberate killing of or attempt to kill innocents is terrorism, whether it is committed by Muslims, Jews or others. In this spirit, we encourage all our people to work for a just peace, mutual respect for human life and for the status quo on the holy sites, and the eradication of religious hatred.”

The gathering was originally supposed to have taken place on Monday but was postponed after a Palestinian gunman from East Jerusalem went on a shooting rampage the day before, killing an Israeli grandmother and a special forces police officer. Mr. Rivlin spent that day visiting the bereaved families instead.

Sunday’s attack, though largely nationalistic at core, also had a religious motif, like much of the violence over the last couple of years. The killer, a supporter of Hamas, was well known for his activism around the contested East Jerusalem holy site known to Muslims as the Aqsa Mosque, or the Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount. Palestinians had nicknamed him the “Lion of Al Aqsa.”

In a reflection of the fierce competition over ownership of the site, the Jerusalem meeting coincided with the passing of a resolution by Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization, condemning Israeli actions in and around the holy compound.

The resolution, promoted by Arab parties and similar to one adopted a year ago, stirred outrage in Israel because its wording appeared to negate any historical Jewish connection to the sacred mount, revered in Judaism as the location of the two ancient temples. It also seemed to question the Jewish connection to the Western Wall, a retaining wall of the mount and the holiest place where Jews can pray.

“To say that Israel has no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall is like saying that China has no connection to the Great Wall of China or that Egypt has no connection to the pyramids,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a broadcast statement. “By this absurd decision, Unesco has lost what little legitimacy it had left.”

Mr. Rivlin also denounced the resolution earlier in the day. The Palestinian leadership welcomed it.

The meeting of religious leaders at Mr. Rivlin’s official residence in western Jerusalem resulted from months of negotiations and dialogue begun by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy based in the United States.

“When we see a complete impasse at the political level we’re looking for ways to have an impact on public opinion on both sides,” said David Makovsky, a scholar at the institute who helped lead the initiative. “Religious figures might not have the power but they have enormous influence,” especially in the Middle East, he said, where “religion and nationalism are intertwined.”

Mr. Makovsky emphasized that Thursday’s encounter was just a beginning. “No one meeting is transformative.” The hope, he said, was to have a follow-up meeting in the Palestinian Authority’s administrative capital of Ramallah in the West Bank.

Sheikh Mahmoud Habbash, the head of the Sharia court who also serves as the Islamic affairs adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas, was the lone Palestinian leader to allow his name to be mentioned in the statement. But he refused to comment on it when reached by telephone after the meeting, saying that he would not go beyond the statement, in which he was not directly quoted.

Sheikh Habbash, a native of the Gaza Strip who used to belong to Hamas but left the movement in the 1990s, has sounded less than conciliatory in some sermons broadcast on Palestinian television in recent months. In one in June that was recorded by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli monitoring group, he dismissed the claim that there had been a Jewish temple on the site of Al Aqsa as a myth.

“The problem between us and them is not is not a problem of religious or historical narrative,” he added. “The problem is that they are thieves. The problem is that they are thieves who stole the land, and who want to steal the history.”

Aware of those remarks, Mr. Makovsky said, “If there wasn’t a problem here we wouldn’t need to bring people together. You make peace between people who come from different perspectives.”

Sheikh Habbash, in the telephone interview, said he was not referring to Jews in that sermon. “We have no problem with Jews as Jews,” he said. “The problem is with the Israeli occupation.”

“Under the circumstances of the occupation we will continue our struggle until we achieve our independence,” he added. “Of course, the Palestinian leadership declared many times that our resistance will be by peaceful means, without any kind of violence.”

Among Mr. Rivlin’s other guests on Thursday were Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, who is the chief Sephardic rabbi, and the two rabbis, who belong to the Har Etzion yeshiva in Gush Etzion, a group of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Har Etzion, known as a prestigious and intellectually moderate yeshiva, offers a so-called hesder program where students combine Torah study with army service.