This volume follows closely on the heels of Gopin's first Oxford University Press book, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking (2000), revisiting some of the themes covered there, but now focused on the three Abrahamic religions and their relevance to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Anything on the relevance of religion to conflict, the "holy war" of the title, is not exactly news. More newsworthy is the second part of the title, and Gopin's contention that the three religious traditions (particularly Islam and Judaism) are also relevant to conflict resolution and peacemaking.
In many respects Gopin is hardheaded and pragmatic. He never denies religion's historical role in conflict, and its proven ability to rationalize (that is, sacralize) extreme and sometimes mass violence. He does not claim (in the manner of so much writing on these matters) that religious peacemaking can rely solely on interfaith dialogues and the spirit of ecumenicism. Indeed, he writes, the "clarion call" of Western liberal pluralism - religion privatized and subordinated to individual rights and liberties - "is fundamentally jarring and even loathsome to the ears and hearts of those Abrahamic faithful who are in search of the good society" (p. 61). It is these faithful who must be engaged. How to engage them forms the core of the book.
First, Gopin asserts, it is important to recognize that most conflict resolution processes (especially official, "track one" efforts such as diplomacy) privilege rational, cost-benefit, interest-base thinking, and fail to address the consequential affectively charged roots of deep religious or identity based conflicts. Such matters need to be addressed in their own terms - religious terms - and not reduced to ciphers of Machiavellian or neo-realist realpolitik, ready for bargaining.
Secondly, when emotion, identity, or meaning in their religious senses have been introduced in peacemaking efforts, there is often a not-so-subtle Christian bias to the proceedings. This bias reveals itself in several ways, for instance in the freighted parsing of "forgiveness" and "repentance" (say, over "justice"); or in the privileging of words and talk, as in dialogue encounters, over ritual and symbolic action, that is, over deeds - which may well be more powerful agents of transformation in other, non-Christian traditions. Privileging Christian discourse makes the whole invocation of religious sentiments highly problematic when the parties are not all Christians.
Third, the hard work of engaging the orthodox believers cannot proceed by ignoring or suppressing those aspects of their religious beliefs that are in fact and practice conflict generating. This means one cannot invoke only those texts that bless the peacemakers, recommend turning the other cheek, or welcoming the stranger, while ignoring the harder texts wherein (for example) jihad is extolled or the cities of Canaan are razed and their inhabitants put to the sword. To ignore the conflictual and violent faces of orthodox beliefs and to disregard the actors who hold them is to invite failure, since it is those very actors, so-called fundamentalists, who are usually themselves critical of the work of secular diplomats who negotiate only with religiously suspect governing elites; who are furthermore mistrustful of the reformist strains in their own religious traditions that usually comprise the peace camp's interlocutors; and who therefore have every reason to subvert or reject the peace processes and treaties that ensue.
Throughout this study, Gopin discusses the considerable resources possessed by orthodox readings and rituals in Judaism and Islam in particular, that support prosocial, rather than violent, relationships with religious others. In the book's last two chapters Gopin outlines religiously meaningful ways to de-escalate the conflict and move the parties toward a new relationship. All of these plans and steps involve bringing the most fundamentalist, conservative, or orthodox of religious actors into the peace process by inviting them to engage in legitimate but alternative readings of their traditions. These are readings that open up religiously indigenous opportunities for peacemaking and nonviolence. Then, after the readings, one aims to encourage the kinds of deeds that serve to instantiate values of peace and nonviolence. One moves, both in readings and in deeds, from within religious communities and between them, toward what Gopin calls a "hermeneutic transformation" of lived religious traditions.
So-called realists and those committed to machtpolitik usually find such arguments hopelessly naive or utopian. Gopin counters that to ignore the resources for peacemaking provided by the Abrahamic religions is the larger naivete; and to think that the religiously faithful in the Middle East can be ignored or suppressed as peace treaties are negotiated and signed by elites, is to leave "realism" (and reality) behind altogether.