"There are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to live together," says Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Jerusalem.

Look back at excerpts from our conversations with reporters over the past 10 years on religion and its changing role in the world.

How Palestinians and Israeli settlers share water resources is "critical to the peace process."

Watch Farah Pandith, the US State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, discuss the status of relations between the US and the Muslim world.

Rami Elhanan and Mazen Faraj are members of the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a grassroots group that unites bereaved Israelis and Palestinians who have lost immediate family members to the Middle East conflict. Together they promote a message of dialogue, reconciliation, and peace.

"Criticism of Israel indicates engagement with Israel. American Jews should be worried when their children stop criticizing Israel," says Professor Steven Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry on the faculty at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.

Read more of the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly interviews with American Jews about Israel.

"People never thought they would stay so long, for 60 years," says Olfat Mahmoud, director of the Women's Humanitarian Organization. There are some four and a half million Palestinian refugees. Many live in the West Bank and Gaza, while others took refuge in Arab states such as Lebanon.