This review appeared in the Jewish Quarterly in the spring of 2003.  Deborah Maccoby is on the executive of ICAHD UK, a signatory of JfJfP and lots of other things besides ...

 

 

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REVIEW OF " ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: OUT OF THE ASHES" BY MARC ELLIS

 

 

Deborah Maccoby

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: OUT OF THE ASHES
The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century
by Marc Ellis, University Professor of American and Jewish Studies and
Director of the Centre for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University

Pluto Press, London, and Sterling, Virginia, USA. 2002. 182pp .£15.00


What do we mean by "a Jewish State?" Do we mean a theocratic state, ruled
by orthodox rabbis according to Jewish ritual? Do we mean "a state of
Jews", an ordinary state inhabited by people who happen to be Jewish? Or do
we mean a state based upon Judaism's universal moral values of justice,
equality and peace? If the phrase has this third meaning, what happens when
the Jewish State becomes a state based upon nationalism and military power
alone and abandons all aspirations towards universal morality? How does this
affect mainstream Jewish Diaspora communities around the world, all of whom
feel a close identification with Israel? What does it mean for Jewish
identity? How does it affect Judaism as a religion?

The outbreak of the second intifada, the breakdown of the Oslo peace process
and the rise to power of Ariel Sharon, the embodiment of nationalistic
militarism - now elected as Israeli Prime Minister for a second time, in a
big victory for his Likud party - have given rise to much political analysis
and argument; but very few people have discussed the theological
implications of the crisis. Religion generally seems to enter into the
debate from the angle of Jewish and Islamic religious fundamentalism, rather
than - as Marc Ellis puts it in this book - "the side of each religion that
embraces harmony, peace, justice and inclusion".

However much people may argue about the causes of the present situation, it
is surely clear to many people that it is a tragedy for both Jews and
Palestinians; and we must ask ourselves what is happening when Ariel Sharon
is elected so resoundingly for a second time and his policies of military
force are supported by the majority of Israelis and Diaspora Jews, because
they despair of any alternative. In this time of desperation for both Jews
and Palestinians, it is of vital importance to consider the deeper and wider
significance of the current disaster and to look beyond the present
short-term arguments and narrowness of vision.

For years, in many books and articles, the American-Jewish theologian Marc
Ellis has been warning that Judaism has become what he calls "Constantinian
Judaism" - a religion which has accommodated itself to state power, just as
early Christianity accommodated itself to the state power of the Roman
Empire. .The present dire situation seems to be proving his warnings right.

Ellis is not against state power and Jewish empowerment as such. He does
not hold the view that any kind of empowerment necessarily corrupts. Rather
he is pointing out that the establishment of the Jewish State involved (as
Israeli historians have uncovered) a major injustice to the Palestinians -
the displacement and in many cases expulsion of the majority of the Arab
inhabitants of the newly-created Jewish State. And he is pointing out that,
after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967
war, an "expanded state of Israel" came into being. Despite all the talk of
a two-state solution, he claims that the policies of Israeli governments,
both Likud and Labour - as has been apparent in the expansion of settlements
under both parties - have been to keep possession of this expanded Israel.
And the Jewish communities of the world have since 1967 been increasingly
"mobilised and militarised" in support of this injustice by the Jewish State
- a support which has deeply affected the nature of Jewishness and Judaism.
Not that Ellis argues that there has been no hope at all in the peace
process. It is true that he points out the many and deep flaws inherent in
the Oslo peace process and - along with many others - he stresses that
Barak's so-called "generous offer" at Camp David was "less than generous":
he quotes Sara Roy, Research Associate at the Center for Middle East
Studies at Harvard University: "As for the Camp David proposals, Roy
concludes that they lacked the following crucial elements: contiguous
territory, defined and functional borders, political and economic
sovereignty and basic Palestinian national rights...for Roy the problem
began long before Barak as occupation was the structural and policy
cornerstone of the Oslo Accords." However, Ellis also states that the
handshake between Rabin and Arafat was nonetheless a genuine facing of "the
other" which created a real dynamic for change:

"The facing of the 'other' - the new 'other' of Jewish history - was
recognised as a rendezvous in Jewish history. Such a facing of he 'other'
should be seen in the context of the Holocaust and the 1967 war as the
possibility of ending a cycle of suffering and violence which the Jews have
endured and now have perpetrated. When Rabin spoke of ending that cycle,
one felt an opening toward a responsibility grounded in history and hope."
With Rabin's assassination and the complete breakdown of Oslo, however, it
seems that the drive to complete Israel's conquest of the Palestinians is
about to be openly realised, with the support and complicity not only of the
majority of Israeli Jews but of most of the Jewish Diaspora. Ellis's point
is that this is not a sudden collapse, out of the blue or something which
can simply be blamed on right wing and religious extremists; it is the overt
expression of the "mobilising and militarising" of Jewish life over decades.
And Ellis's essential message is that this complete destruction of the
Palestinians as a people must also entail a complete destruction of the true
meaning of the Jewish people and Judaism. Both peoples are in "the ashes":
"In the destruction of Palestine, the Jewish tradition as it has been known
and inherited - a tradition that emphasised ethics and justice - has come to
an end."

Ellis defines true Judaism in terms of the tradition of the covenant with
God by which the Jews dedicated themselves to become "a kingdom of priests
and a holy people" committed to upholding the spiritual values of morality,
justice, equality and peace in a world of power and injustice. This
dedication can be summed up in these words from the Prophet Zechariah: "Not
by power, nor by might, but by My spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts". In
turning to power and might, the Jews have lost their essence as a people.

In analysing the reasons for this turning of the Jews and Judaism towards
power and might, Ellis - as is clear from the quotation about the
Rabin-Arafat handshake above - lays great emphasis upon the Holocaust (and
part of the meaning of the title "Out of the Ashes" is the ashes of the
Holocaust) He is virtually the only Holocaust theologian to link the
Holocaust with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. For this, he has
been vilified by critics who seem to believe he equates the two national
tragedies in terms of scale. Ellis does not in any way equate the Holocaust
and the 1948 Nakba -"catastophe" (and continued destruction of the
Palestinian people) in terms of scale; his main arguments are a) that,
impossible though it is to compare them in terms of scale, these are both
national tragedies, destructive of the ordinary life of both peoples; and b)
that the Holocaust has been used to "mobilise and militarise" Jewish life
and Judaism in the service of state power and to justify Israel's expulsion
of and continued oppression of the Palestinians; as he writes in his
Preface:

"It is ironic that the safe harbor of Jewish life, the claim to uniqueness
and innocence and thus special privileges, has been and increasingly will be
an event of such horrific suffering that, despite the repetitive images and
public memorials, the mind remains unable to accept its horror. This safe
harbor, however, is one of assimilation to the state and power, to
dislocation and atrocity, and therefore to every lesson that the Holocaust
is supposed to warn against"

Ellis analyses with respect and even with sympathy the work of Holocaust
theologians like Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Irving Greenberg and
Elie Wiesel, but has a major criticism of all their work - the entire
absence of any mention of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians: he writes:
"in fact, one way of defining Holocaust memorial culture as it has evolved
is the ABSENCE of Palestinians". All these theologians see Israel as an
answer to the Holocaust, a means of revival for the Jewish people and
Judaism; Greenberg, for instance, sees Israel as a means of reconstructing
the broken image of God. Ellis points out that Greenberg entirely ignores
the Israelis' destruction of the image of God in their treatment of
Palestinians; Greenberg's book was published in 1988, at the same time that
"news media images showed Israeli soldiers beating and killing unarmed
Palestinians..."

It should be pointed out here that Israeli oppression in the second intifada
is far worse than in the first intifada, as Ellis stresses; once again, he
quotes Sara Roy: "During the six years of the previous uprising, 18,000
Palestinians were injured. In the first four months since the current
uprising began, over 11,000 Palestinians have been injured. The Palestinian
landscape has withered, wrenched of hope, suffused in rage and devoid of
childhood...." Since the publication of "Out of the Ashes" this oppression
has got even worse. Is this really a reconstruction of the broken image of
God?

To return to the Holocaust theologians - Ellis's most complex, sympathetic
and interesting analysis is of the Holocaust theologian Richard Rubenstein,
who actually taught Ellis himself in the 19'70s, when Rubenstein was a
professor and Ellis an undergraduate at Florida State University,
Tallehassee. Part of the fascination of "Out of the Ashes" is that it is
partly a personal, autobiographical statement. Ellis writes with great
admiration about Rubenstein, whom he sees as a Jewish prophet wrestling with
God and the agonising problems posed by the Holocaust and God's abandonment
of His chosen people - problems which Rubenstein felt that most Jewish
theologians had fudged. Essentially Rubenstein's message is that after
Auschwitz, he no longer accepts the terms of the covenant and believes that
the only solution lies in power. Rubenstein thus articulated the Jewish
despair of the covenant after the Holocaust which led to the Jewish turning
towards state power.

The young Ellis saw Rubenstein's person and work as a great challenge and
problem - from which he was rescued by meeting another university teacher,
William Miller, a Catholic historian who led Ellis towards teaching in the
US Catholic missionary college of Maryknoll and travelling to Latin
American, African and Asian countries, where he worked among the poor and
encountered Catholic liberation theology, which seeks to attain justice for
the poor and oppressed. Ellis writes of William Miller:

"In some ways, Miller was the polar opposite of Rubenstein....where
Rubenstein had a brusque and definitive manner, so that there was no
question of whom you were addressing and where you stood in his universe,
Miller had a graciousness and openness that allowed a freedom in his
presence...There were no answers from Miller..."

Ellis points out that liberation theology is a protest against Constantinian
Christianity and a return to Jesus and the Jewish prophetic tradition:
"Christianity of empire has been challenged from the beginning by
Christianity of community, primarily through the prophetic line featured in
the Hebrew bible and in the figure of Jesus himself." What is needed among
Jews today, Ellis argues, is a Jewish liberation theology.

Ellis's own message that the Jewish covenant with God, and therefore the
whole meaning of Judaism and the Jewish people, is finished is, of course,
very bleak and pessimistic. He offers little hope of change for the
foreseeable future. And yet there is, paradoxically,a great message of hope
in "Out of the Ashes". The two peoples are in the ashes together, but, Ellis
argues, they can come out of the ashes together, to form together something
new which is also a continuation of the old. It is as though only through
the full, courageous realisation of the end of the Jewish tradition -
devastating though this realisation is - can hope of a revival of that
tradition emerge.

Ellis writes that the Jewish covenant with God can only be renewed by
turning towards the Palestinians, acknowledging the injustices committed
against them and sharing the land equally with them: "Could that covenant,
promised to and accepted by Jews, a covenant carried throughout a long and
difficult history, now be renewed by sharing it in the promised land with
another people?...The new challenge of the covenant is to find Jewish
chosenness within and among those who share the land often called holy".
Ellis argues that Jerusalem should be "demessianised" - that is, freed of
its fundamentalist Jewish messianic symbolism - but he envisages a true
though secular messianism in which Jerusalem, belonging to and uniting the
two peoples, can be a genuine embodiment of peace and justice: "the new
Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of light and justice, of peace, fraternity and
sorority, in short the peaceable Kingdom so often referred to in the
scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam."

In this idea Ellis himself, as he points out, is reviving an old Zionist
vision of binationalist Zionists such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and
Hannah Arendt; as he writes: "Few Jews know that Judah Magnes, the first
president of Hebrew University, Martin Buber, the great biblical scholar and
theologian, and Hannah Arendt, the philosopher of the mind and the human
condition, were all binationalists, opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine.
They argued instead for a cooperative federation of Jews and Arabs."

Since mainstream Jewish life, both in Israel and the Diaspora, has become
militarised and has lost the essence of Jewishness, Ellis envisages a
community of marginal Jews, exiles from mainstream Judaism and the Jewish
community, who cross over into solidarity with the Palestinians and in this
way paradoxically regain the true meaning of Judaism and what it really
means to be Jewish. It is an example of the complexity of this book that
Ellis also envisages a group of Palestinian exiles fleeing from
fundamentalist Islam - Constantinian Islam, the Islam of power - and from
the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and joining with this community
of Jewish exiles:

"Those who seek to call the community back from oppressing others are
themselves oppressed and often exiled from the community even as it presumes
to speak in the language of God and the covenant. Those in exile become
mute, often inarticulate on the deeper issues of the community they flee,
even as they carry the values of the community into exile. Romanticising
indigenous communities can lead in the same direction: those who dissent,
especially when the community gains some semblance of power, are themselves
exiled. This is the fate of many Jews AND Palestinians within the expanded
state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority that exists within and under
that state."

Though Ellis has supported a two-state solution in the past, he argues in
"Out of the Ashes" that this has now become unworkable; as he writes:

"Anthony Lewis, a Jewish columnist for the New York Times, recently came to
the same conclusion that the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said came to
some years ago: that the process of Israeli settlement of Palestine has gone
so far as to make separation of Jews and Palestinians impossible. Even the
declaration of a Palestinian state would be in name only...Lewis quote Meron
Benvenisti: 'All of Palestine is a binational entity, even though politics
demands a different reality. It's one space."

Ellis proposes a unitary state founded on equal citizenship, no longer on
ethnic or religious identity - though he argues that this would not preclude
a sense of identity and peoplehood on the part of Jews and Palestinians. He
sees the community of exiles gradually growing over the years and creating a
new community underneath the mainstream communities until in time it can be
ready to bring about this unitary state. He is vague, however on the actual
workings of this state - and here we come to what seems to me the book's
only real flaw - a flaw which is also a strength.

Like William Miller, Ellis does not give any answers. In his concern to
avoid the dogmatism and rigidity that so troubled him in his teacher
Rubenstein (even while he admired it and even felt it to correspond to
something in himself) Ellis is open-ended, dynamic, complex, paradoxical.
The flaw of this strength - as well as the lack of any definite account of
how a unitary state would actually work in practice - is a very difficult
style. In his analysis of the meaning of the prophetic and the covenant, he
writes about the danger of the prophetic and the covenant becoming "sealed"
- that is, smugly codified, so that they lose their inner meaning. He shows
how again and again the covenant and the prophetic become institutionalised
and how again and again this institutionalisation is broken through with a
new genuine expression of the covenant and the prophetic. In this concern
not to become "sealed," Ellis's style sometimes suffers from lack of clarity
and can at times be too wordy, as though he is afraid of his ideas becoming
too frozen and encapsulated in clear, succinct expression, and is also
afraid of betraying the full complexity of the issues. Nonetheless, for all
his complexity and subtlety and open-endedness, underlying the book is a
deep and powerful conviction and faith in the essence of Judaism and a
determination to define and revive this essence - indeed, it is his struggle
to convey this essence with complete honesty which leads to such a difficult
style. Despite this style, the book has a compelling quality; once started,
it demands to be finished - and re-read.

Thus it is itself a prophetic voice which is vitally needed at the present
time and to which everyone - but particularly Israeli and Diaspora Jews -
must listen.