PULASKI, Tennessee - There will be peace in Israel and Palestine, Professor Yehezkel Landau - a founder of a joint Jewish-Palestinian-Christian peace initiative in Israel - told a small group of Middle Tennessee religious leaders during the first evening of a three-day conference, Our Muslim Neighbor Initiative. But religious leaders must be part of building that peace. Landau spoke Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014, at Martin Methodist College in Pulaski, Tenn., which is hosting the conference of the Nashville-based Faith and Culture Center. The conference is part of a nationwide Our Muslim Neighbor Initiative of the Religions for Peace USA. "I'm very, very pessimistic, in the short term, but very, very optimistic in the long term for justice and peace in God's holy land," Landau said. "And part of my hope comes because of networks for peace in Israel-Palestine. The political leaders - locked in a pathological cycle of violence between Hamas and the government of Israel - are way behind the people. The future looks good - we just have to get through the next five to 10 years, holding things up, and those leaders will be replaced." But peace in the Holy Land, a term for the area of Israel and Palestine that Landau used to emphasize his point, will come only with the support and leadership of Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious leaders to change the dynamic of the political leaders - who are, he said, "Stuck in a dance of death and destruction." "We need spiritual remedies for our political pathologies," Landau said, underlying the point by calling that statement his "sound byte" for the evening. Landau, now a professor at the interfaith Hartford Seminary, helped to found Open House in Israel. Open House occupies the home in Israel where Landau's former wife grew up with her family of Bulgarian Jewish refugees of the Holocaust. As a child, she had been told the house had been built by Palestinians who simply ran away after the war of independence in 1947. In 1967, at 19, she opened the door to a knock to meet a Palestinian man who told her about being forced out of the house at gunpoint when he was 7. Together, the two families, along with a Christian neighbor, transformed the house ...      Read more