SEVILLE, March 21: Middle East politics intruded loudly and repeatedly on Tuesday at an international congress in southern Spain aimed at getting imams and rabbis to talk about peace. Muslim delegates stood up and shouted when a moderator tried to halt a Palestinian professor from the Gaza Strip, Ziad Abu Alhaj, who said life under Israeli occupation is like being in ‘a large prison’.

Most of the third day of the four-day meeting in Seville was dedicated to small workshops on issues like helping Jews and Muslims understand each other better. But in a prior, plenary session Muslim delegates said peace was impossible unless Israel ends its occupation of Palestinian lands.

“Unless we get to the core of the issue, we are pussyfooting around,” said Nazlin Umar Rajput, chairwoman of the National Muslim Council of Kenya. “It is a fight over ownership of land.”

The congress was organised by a Paris-based peace foundation called Hommes de Parole and has drawn some 250 imams, rabbis and academics from 31 countries of Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the United States.

Organisers abruptly changed the schedule of the meeting on Monday when a session that was to deal with family issues also turned political and heated, and they again rushed to calm tempers at Tuesday’s plenary.

Ari Alexander, an American Jew who works for a New York-based foundation that does Internet education projects for Muslim and Jewish children, said this kind of forum is so new that Muslim and Jewish leaders do not even really know how to talk to each other. “We are babies in this conversation. This is brand-new stuff,” he said in an interview.

The meeting is called the Second World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace. The first edition was held last year in Brussels. The workshop themes were decided on Monday in a brainstorming session in which delegates spontaneously jotted down issues they thought critical to ending antagonism between Muslims and Jews.—AP