There is only one main opponent on the current battleground – Islam. It is therefore necessary that Jewish intellectuals and Muslims in Germany engage in a new relationship, writes the philosopher Almut Sh. Bruckstein Coruh in her essay
Avi Shalev swapped the Israeli army for classes conducted in classical Arabic, surrounded mainly by young Bedouin women who educated him on another side of life in Israel
The walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt during the reign of Sultan Suleiman I, between 1537 and 1541. Photo: Lodo flickr.com
It is common to hear the opinion that Israel is the sole democracy in today’s Middle East. Indeed, since the founding of this polity in 1948, the cycle of parliamentary and presidential elections has
never been delayed or breached in Israel, whatever the circumstances. On the contrary, each other country in the region has either been an autocracy (for example, Egypt), absolutist monarchy (for instance, Saudi Arabia), a theocracy (Iran) or a republic where coups d’état and civil wars have repeatedly subverted democracy (for example, Lebanon or Turkey). Perhaps the Israelis were capable of achieving and maintaining their democracy due to the fact that most of them either came or stemmed from Europe and the United States, where the system of modern democracy originated. Between the late 19th century and the 1920s, this system of governance spread across Centra