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Yossi Klein Halevi once asked a group of Muslims, who had risked jail or even worse to visit Israel, why they took the risk. The answer he received made a lasting impression on the Israeli journalist: "Because we have to do something to stop this insane relationship between Muslims and Jews."

While Halevi acknowledged that this group represents relatively few Muslims, he assumes "that for every one of those heroes who steps forward, who is willing to take the risk to engage Jews and especially Israelis, there are many more people in the Muslim world who feel varying degrees of frustration or even shame with the way that much of the Muslim world treats its attitudes towards Israel and the Jewish people."

On Oct. 27 at Temple Sha'arey Shalom in Springfield, Halevi, an Israeli journalist and author, spoke about his encounters with his Muslim neighbors throughout Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza that were retold in his book "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land."

Halevi said that all of his encounters with Palestinian Muslims were with Sufi Muslims, a centuries old mystical sect that had become marginal among Palestinians due to the rise of a more nationalistic strain of Islam.

"I say this because I feel like I have the responsibility to make clear that the journey that I undertook only has limited significance in terms with our relationship with Islam in general," Halevi said.

The two aspects of Sufi religious practice that struck Halevi were the "extraordinary power of Muslim prayer" and "constant awareness of one's mortality."

Halevi sees these aspects of Islam as both a source of its best traits and worst.

"I see the Muslim power of prayer and surrender as at the same time the most energizing source of Islamic piety and also the source of the problems that we're having with a large part of Islam because when you're in a mode of total surrender you give up your individuality, it's very easy to be manipulated, and the same is true for the constant awareness of one's own mortality," he said, "The positive side of that is a deepening awareness of one's real place in the world, the negative side of it is, of course, the phenomenon of suicide bombing."

There are two major components in Islamic theology that impede Muslims' recognition of Israel, according to Halevi. One is the idea of "dhimmi" and the other is the separation of the world into the "house of Islam" and the "house of war."

The former concept, more commonly known as dhimmitude, is the vision of a Muslim world where Christians and Jews live as religious minorities under Islam.

The latter conceives of societies as either under Islamic sovereignty or not yet under Islamic sovereignty, especially those places once under former Islamic caliphates, such as Spain or the land of Israel.

These theological principles, he suggested, lead to the Muslim refusal to acknowledge Jews as a nation. Even moderate Muslims, according to Halevi, do not conceive of Jews "as a nation with a particular faith. And the reason we are a nation is because we always conceived our religious essence, our religious mission if you will, as being fulfilled through our national identity."

Halevi argued in his lecture that the only basis for reconciliation is the recognition of mutual legitimacy of each people as a nation.

A majority of Israelis, he said, began to accept this premise in the 1990s, while Palestinians have overwhelmingly rejected Jews' historically legitimate claims to the land.

"We began to see a real attempt in Israeli society to reach out, to rethink the conflict, and to call -- to use a phrase I would use -- to borrow Palestinian eyes," he said.

However, Halevi said that this attitude was not reciprocated, citing the Palestinian "culture of denial." This culture of denial includes Holocaust denial, the refusal to accept the existence of the Temple, and the belief that there was no Jewish presence in the land of Israel before the arrival of Zionists at the turn of the 20th century.

"A culture of denial actively nurtured by the Palestinian leadership was being promoted at the same time that many of Israel were trying to develop a more nuanced understanding of the conflict," he said. This denial, Halevi said, is the central impediment to any peace process.

"If you ask me why there isn't peace today, it is not because of settlements or borders or even Jerusalem, it is because of an inability of one side to begin the most minimal process of breaking down its most cherished, one-dimensional ideas about this conflict," he said.

Though Halevi said that a two-state solution is the only logical end to the conflict, he still feels torn in two contradictory directions.

"Most Israelis recognize that a Palestinian state is an existential necessity for Israel if we're going to preserve ourselves as a Jewish and democratic state," he said. "And at the same time, the Israeli right won the argument that a Palestinian -- certainly in the way Palestinian society appears today -- that a Palestinian state is an existential threat."