Weapon-Free Jerusalem - The First Step

A Week of Prayer

The programme could be launched with a world-wide interfaith Week of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem*. Ideally this would be endorsed by the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the various Chief Rabbis and Imams. Christians might be invited to pray in mosques and synagogues; Jews and Muslims also in alternate places of worship.

Subsequent religious holidays involving Jerusalem, e.g. Isra’-Mi’raj, Easter, Tisha B’Av, might be encouraged to incorporate some support for the initiative. This would develop into an international campaign to persuade and press world statesmen to declare the Old City of Jerusalem a weapon-free area for a trial period of twelve months.

^*A Quaker initiative on these lines would not be unprecedented. In 1948, fearing warfare in Jerusalem, Rufus Jones launched an ecumenical petition appealing for a Truce of God. It was signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of the Church of Norway, the Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church and other leading churchmen, and welcomed by the Chief Rabbi of Israel and by Muslim clerics in Jerusalem. Quakers can do it again!