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The Ongoing Nakba and the Jewish Conscience
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Edited Transcript of Remarks by Dr. Marc Ellis
Transcript No. 328 (27 May 2010)
To view the video of this briefing online, go to
http://www.palestinecenter.org
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
27 May 2010
Dr. Marc Ellis:
Thank you very much for that introduction. I see many old friends and some former students. This is my third time speaking at the Palestine Center, so I’m very glad to be back. I have many good memories of my times here. Thank you for your invitation to speak at the Palestine Center. I spoke here many years ago and have fond memories of that time. But of course they are shadowed by the continuing and increasing desperate situation in Israel-Palestine. I have been saying that things would get worse and worse, over the years, and they have. I’ve been accused of being too despairing and that I should bring a message of hope. But hope can only come from reality; without reality hope is false. Jews and Palestinians are in a terminal condition, realistically speaking. And though vastly different in experiences, we Jews and Palestinians share the same sinking boat. We will be rescued together or we will go down together.
Today I am addressing the ongoing Nakba and Jewish Conscience. I will address these questions, partly through sum events that have occurred since I was invited to speak here because, I believe, they open the question of the ongoing Nakba and the Jewish Conscience in a relevant way. I’ll also refer to a recent important lecture here by Professor [John] Mearsheimer where he referred to Righteous Jews, a category I will discuss in a few moments. But I have to make an immediate disclosure – he did not include me among the Jewish notables he lists as Righteous Jews. I may have been included in the “among others” category. Now I don’t mention this because I am hurt or surprised. I doubt has ever heard of me. I mention it because it is telling for what he and others leave out. What is often left out of the discussion about Jews and Palestinians is an understanding of Jewishness that I believe forms a substantial component of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and a substantial component of a life beyond that impasse. The “something” that is left out is a crucial aspect of the war between Israelis and Palestinians and the internal war among Jews over the question of Israel-Palestine. That “something” often is not recognized by Palestinians either. To this “something” I will return. But first two recent articles in the press that illustrate this missing understanding.
The first, and I’m sure you saw it, is the recent paid piece by Elie Wiesel on Jerusalem that was, I believe, in the Washington Post but certainly in The New York Times – his open letter to [U.S.] President [Barack] Obama on Jerusalem – that Jerusalem is beyond politics. There was also an immediate response of some dissenting Jewish Israelis and I think this back and forth is worth listening to. So some quotes-Weisel:
“There is no more moving prayer in
Jewish history than the one expressing our
yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many
theologians, it IS Jewish history, to many
poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to
the Jewish people and is much more than a city,
it is what binds one Jew to another in a way
that remains hard to
explain.”
“Today,” he goes on, “for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines. And, contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city. The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real state but about memory.” This is Elie Wiesel. He later had lunch with the president. I’m awaiting my invitation.
In an open letter published in Haaretz, Yosse Sarid stated, “Someone has deceived you, my dear friend. Not only may an Arab not build “anywhere,” but he may thank his god if he is not evicted from his home and thrown out onto the street with his family and property. Those same jealous Jews insist on inserting themselves like so many bones in the throats of Arab neighborhoods, purifying and Judaizing them with the help of rich American benefactors, several of whom you may know personally.”
Writing in The New York Review of Books, a group of 100 prominent Israelis wrote:
“…Your letter troubles us, not simply
because it is replete with factual errors and
false representations, but because it upholds
an attachment to some otherworldly city that
purports to supersede the interest of those who
live in this worldly one.”
Now the second article, and I’m very aware of this because my little guy, he’s not so little anymore, just took one of these tests-an Advanced Placement test-he’s in high school. And this was in English. And they quoted from the Palestinian-American, as he was described, Edward Said. Any of you seen this article? One of the Jewish takers of the test was very upset that a Palestinian would be featured on the test. She said, “I was really startled to see that quote.” - it was a quote on exile which I’ll read in a little while – “because the practice questions didn’t mention the writers’ nationalities. For me, this one had political implications.” She goes on, “I’m in a public school and most students here have the impression that Israel is the one attacking [the Palestinians],” the 17-year-old said. “To put a quote in like this subconsciously reinforces the idea that Israel’s the antagonist, the aggressor, the one in the wrong.”
These articles/responses are fascinating on a variety of levels. But first let me use an experience that happened to me in between Wiesel’s open letter and the use of Said’s quote on exile on the Advanced Placement test. Some weeks ago, I have a lecture at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I had been at the Rothko Chapel years ago, in the 1980s. Since then had I have become a fan of [Mark] Rothko – the artist – which the chapel is built around – giant murals of his, specifically painted and sized for the Chapel. Rothko was a Jewish artist, already famous, when he was approached by the Chapel patrons. He was sick and tired of the commercialism of art; he wanted to paint for a higher spiritual reason; but one unattached to any specific religious tradition. Though raised an Orthodox Jew, Rothko had rejected Judaism.
It is interesting though that in the 1950s his art suddenly and irrevocably broke with the representation of the human and nature; there would be no more representational aspects of any kind in his art. In the end it was colors only, blocks of colors that merged and divided, colors underneath colors, shades of colors. Rothko’s colors draw one in – they are haunting colors, colors that enlighten, colors that darken, mystical colors. Rothko was obsessed with non-representational art as a way of avoiding misrepresenting the sacred. Thus, refusing idolatry which is the oldest form of Jewishness linked with the prophetic. So Rothko broke with Judaism in the most Jewish of ways. Breaking with Judaism in the most Jewish of ways is a recurring theme. It is relevant to the question of Israel and Palestine, the ongoing Nakba and the Jews of Conscience.
Several weeks before my Rothko Chapel lecture, an advertisement appeared for my lecture via email. Scrolling down, I saw that there was to be a response to me, unbeknownst to me, two weeks later by – and this was how it was listed – “Three Rabbis from Houston.” The title of my lecture comes from a book that I am writing – Encountering the Jewish Future – and their response was, “Three Rabbis form Houston Respond to Marc Ellis’ Encountering the Jewish Future.” I immediately thought of the Three Tenors. So I had a discussion with the Rothko Chapel. I was actually quite angry about this unannounced response. We are living in the Golden Age of Constantinian Judaism, where some Jews intent on enabling empire, collude with other powers to keep everything as it is – how they want it– and therefore every voice who counters that view has to be brought low. If you remember Constantinian Christianity from your history books, the fourth century transformation of a marginal, and sometimes discriminated against religion that followed a crucified Jew as the messiah became the state religion. Christianity was privileged. Anyone outside of it was, in a sense, outside the state. This is where Christianity became powerful and global, being blessed by empire, blessing empire. Think of Judaism in America and Israel in that Constantinian framework. If you’re Christian or Muslim you know this feeling as well, and have experienced it in your own community because there are Empire Muslims. There are Empire Christians. There are Empire Jews. And yes, there are Empire Palestinians. Constantinian Judaism, Constantinian Islam, Constantinian Christianity. But for Jews, you don’t have to be a majority to bless empire and be blessed by it. There are those in every community who conform to power for what it brings them and their community economically, politically, socially, ideologically. There is the illusion that the empire always wins. That this or that particular empire will never fall. Of course, empire is always seen by empire folks as redemptive and innocent. This is why that high school senior was shocked to see the word “Palestinian” mentioned on her exam and to see the word exile in the quote from Said. As if a Palestinian can be an authoritative source for students in general. How could that be? And for her, as a Jew in particular, how could a Palestinian be such a source? And a Palestinian in exile. As if the exiled Jews wanted to end by creating the state of Israel, has engendered another exile that Jews might be culpable of. How could that be? Such a thought is unimaginable to her and unsayable to those who would respond to me at the Rothko Chapel.
What they have heard in the background throughout her entire life is Elie Wiesel’s open letter on Jerusalem, or variations of it. They have not heard the Palestinian argument and don’t want to. But they also haven’t heard the response of Jewish Israelis either. And they don’t want to hear that. Could a Jew really say what these Jewish Israelis said to Wiesel? It’s unimaginable, unsayable. Therefore, it can’t be real. Some years ago I wrote an essay on Edward Said’s writing on exile. I took it an entirely different way as a challenge on all fronts and as a solidarity. Aren’t Jews who oppose Constantinian Judaism and many of its positions regarding Israeli policies toward Palestinians, aren’t they also in exile? I am talking here about Jews of Conscience whose exile deepens daily.
This is what Said wrote and this was a quote on the Advanced Placement test:
“Exile is strangely compelling to think
about but terrible to experience. It is the
unhealable rift forced between a human being
and its native place, between the self and its
true home: its essential sadness can never be
surmounted.”
I paraphrased that and apply it to Jews in this way:
“Exile is strangely compelling to think
about but terrible to experience. It is the
unhealable rift forced between a Jew and her
people, between the Jewish self and its true
home, the prophetic: its essential sadness can
never be surmounted.”
In meditating on Said’s experience on exile, I asked myself about the Jewish prophetic in our time; its explosive reemergence under the most extraordinary pressure. How could that be?
The Jewish notables that Professor Mearsheimer wrote about represent the rebirth of the Jewish prophetic voice in our time. And this to me is quite different than calling them, as he did, Righteous Jews, which they are. Righteous Jews makes and misses the point. There is something deeper and more profound at work here than righteousness. So when one Righteous Jewish notable, Noam Chomsky, was recently turned away at the Israeli controlled Palestinian border and refused entry and just the fact that he was only this time going to speak at Palestinian universities, in terms of Jewish history, this means much more than the obvious political significance that Chomsky and the event itself carries.
Chomsky’s Jewish background, which is never discussed, is telling. And I quote here from an interview some years ago about this. He was asked about his background. “My father,” he says, “was professionally a Hebrew scholar, and worked with Hebrew grammar. And my mother was a Hebrew teacher. My father sort of ran the Hebrew school system in the city of Philadelphia and my mother taught in it. He taught in Hebrew College later. But they were all part of what amounted to kind of a Hebrew ghetto, Jewish ghetto in Philadelphia -- not a physical ghetto. It was scattered around the city, a cultural ghetto.” My point about Chomsky, whose first name is Avram, [is that] his “universalism” is a form of Jewishness. That’s his Jewishness. There is no way to understand Chomsky outside of this Jewish reference.
So let’s go right to the Jewish civil war I have been circling around for some time now. There are three groups within Jewish life who are battling over this question. The first, Professor Mearsheimer called the New Afrikaners but I call them Constantinian Jews. The second group is Progressive Jews. Professor Mearsheimer called them Righteous Jews. And the third group, Jews of Conscience; Constantinian Jews.
Constantinian Jews are power elite of the Jewish community in America and Israel. They are government officials, business leaders, rabbis, university intellectuals, officials of Holocaust memorials and the like. Employees of Jewish institutions.
In Constantinian Judaism, the state of Israel is held high as the fulfillment of Jewish destiny and identity. The Holocaust is ever-invoked. In this view of Jewish particularity, the Holocaust grounds the state of Israel, which itself is the culmination of more than a millennia of anti-Semitism. In Constantinian Judaism, Jewish identity is fashioned around anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the state of Israel.
In Constantinian Judaism, Palestinians are mostly absent. When they are present they are primarily seen as menacing Israel and Jews in particular. Most often they see Palestinians as terrorists or as the new Nazis. In the post-September 11th era, Constantinian Jews link the American and Israeli experience of terrorism.
But it would be wrong to characterize Constantinian Jews as only wrong or without a point. Deep within Jewish history and in light of contemporary history, Jews have a deep fear of powerlessness. Without power, Jews are vulnerable to other powers. That’s part of our historical journey. After the Holocaust, there was a sense that without power there would be no future for Jews and Judaism. The leadership of any community is first and foremost responsible for the survival of the community they represent.
Progressive Jews uphold the reality of contemporary Jewish life as revolving around the Holocaust-Israel axis. Progressive Jews see the Constantinian Jewish establishment as using the Holocaust to support policies of the Israeli government against Palestinians, thus perverting the lessons of the Holocaust toward power in their estimation. For Progressive Jews, the Holocaust remains at the center. Because of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, Jews need an empowered state of Israel. Within that empowerment, Palestinians have a right to their own state alongside Israel.
In the Progressive Jewish mind, the imperative placed on Jews for an empowered state is also imposed on Palestinians. Because of historic Jewish suffering, Palestinians must embrace the Jewish need for a Jewish state. Once that acceptance is signaled and practiced, Jews can render justice to the Palestinians within that limited framework. Progressive Jews recognize that this isn’t complete justice. But within the context of Jewish needs, this is what is available.
Despite its “opposition” to Constantinian Judaism, there’s a civil war as they see it, Progressive Jews actually protect the Constantinian Jewish establishment and function as an enabler of both the establishment and the state of Israel. They do this by reflecting criticism to the left of them as anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic and as examples of Jewish self hate. Progressive Jews have functioned as a Left-wing of Constantinian Judaism. And here I include Tikkun -- Rabbi Michael Lerner, Peace Now and Rabbis for Human Rights. You can add your own.
Jews of Conscience challenge Constantinian and Progressive Jews in a new and bold way. After the Palestinian uprising in 2000 and the construction of the apartheid wall, more and more Jews saw the possibility of a two-state solution diminished, if not foreclosed altogether. Any claim to Jewish innocence and redemption, trumpeted by the Constantinian Jewish establishment or guarded by the Progressive Jews was impossible to maintain. So Jews of Conscience left this civil war.
My own way of imaging the predicament of Jews of Conscience is that of a very small group of intensely committed Jews traveling into exile, carrying the Jewish covenant with them. They carry the traditional covenant, the indigenous prophetic, the foundation of Jewish particularity and contemporary aspects: the Holocaust and the birth and expansion of the state of Israel. Their task is to disassociate Jewish identity from the violence that permeates it, a violence now associated with empire, colonialism and imperialism.
On the question of Israel-Palestine, just to make clear, Constantinian Jews see Israel as a remarkable and innocent flowering of Jewish history. Progressive Jews see Israel as a remarkable and innocent enterprise that has gone wrong. Jews of Conscience go further than Constantinian or Progressive Jews, back to 1948 as the war for a state of Israel that ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population. An ethnic cleansing that has continued under various guises since the formation of the state of Israel and continues apace today.
In light of this tripartite division of Jewish life, I want to make the following points. And I’ll get through as many as I can before I have to stop. Notice that I have dropped the third part of the Jewish world that Professor Mearsheimer cites – the part he thinks that the New Arifkaners, what I call Constantinian Jews, and Righteous Jews, what I call Progressive Jews, will appeal to and seek to win over. He calls them the “great ambivalent middle.” I don’t think that the reality of Israel’s power is only political thus, depending on lobbying for example. I also don’t believe that the majority of Jews are of great importance to Israel’s military and political might. For years, local/ordinary Jews have been backing off of their support for Israel, not visiting Israel, forcing national and local Jewish organizations to spend more of their money at home, for example. And it hasn’t change anything politically. For local/ordinary American Jews, Israel functions as a way of asserting their Jewish identity; their American Jewish identity. The Holocaust functions for American Jews in a similar way -- as a virtual, vicarious identity. This doesn’t mean that such a virtual vicarious identity is without meaning or merit. It may be even more important to those who have these identity structures than those who actually live it out in reality. Therefore, remember Wiesel’s open letter -- a virtual vicarious reality. The Jewish Israelis are saying, ‘but we live here. It’s all going down the tubes’. It has no impact at all on that virtual vicarious identity. The struggle isn’t about winning over the great ambivalent middle. Rather, it is a struggle within the Jewish world between three minorities: Constantinian Jews, Progressive Jews and Jews of Conscience and the non-Jews, including those with political calculations and meaning structures of their own that either link with Israeli policies or oppose them.
All of these Jewish groups, including the great ambivalent middle, are Jews. They all come from within Jewish history. They all make sense within Jewish history. To read any of these groups out of Jewish history is simply part of a civil war that takes no prisoners. It is symbolic, an expression of anger, an assertion of power. We should look at the Jewish world as if it was a boxing match with different rounds, blows, blows landed, blows deflected; knock downs, knock outs, matches in the future, retirements, medical side-effects from a life in the ring, even deaths in the ring. Interestingly, the great Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, used the boxing analogy when he referred to the Jewish prophets. He said the Jewish prophets practiced an asceticism “like the training of a fighter.”
Palestinians quite rightly decry the Jewish civil war as defining of their struggle. Why should Palestinians be concerned or even have to hear about these Jewish struggles? They’re tired of it, understandably. The Palestinian struggle is about Palestinians and Palestine. My own view is that Palestinians should do whatever they want with the internal workings of Jewish life, including ignoring them. But they should understand that the state of Israel represents a concrete and symbolic expression of Jewishness in the world. Though Israel operates within the nation-state system, it also perceives its destiny as outside of it. Thinking only the political with regard to Israel or as an arena for the struggle of universal human rights has been and continues to be a huge mistake. For Jews inside and outside of the state, Israel represents a primal marker in the world. It has little to do, in the Jewish imagination, with universal human rights. I agree that this primal marker must be negotiated with in many ways, including with the disguised universality of our Jewish notables, like Avram Chomsky, that helps contain some of the most virulent aspects of Jewish particularity. But we also need to recognize that this disguised universality is also a primal marker of Jewishness. So, that on the Jewish side, the defense of Palestinian human rights is about human rights on the surface. More importantly for Jews, it is about that something else about being Jewish.
The idea that the question of Israel and Palestine is a competition between a violent Jewish particularity and a benign Palestinian universality is wrong. First off, not all of Jewish particularity in Israel is violent. And the argument of a Palestinian universality is an absolute need for a struggling Palestinian particularity. Like our Jewish notables, the universality is a needed and important cover for a quite beautiful, insightful and yes, also flawed, Palestinian particularity. This point occasions my story about Edward Said at a one-state conference last summer. I spoke at three of them last spring and summer though I am a confessed and sometimes lapsed two-stater. I was listening to Palestinian and Jewish universalists throughout the conference and I was a little bit upset because I believe that they’re disguised particularities. And I want a particularity discussed also. And at lunch with a Palestinian universalist who was quite close to Edward Said, I broached this question which of course he couldn’t understand about Jewish particularity. So, I spoke about Said and how he felt he was a Palestinian particularist, not a universalist. Although all of Said’s work is about identity, how Palestine isn’t really important but he happens to be a Palestinian. How universal human rights was the only thing he was interested in. And the person who knew him well said, ‘yes, of course’. And then I asked him why Said was so upset about [The] Oslo [ Accords]. Why he went over-the-top about Oslo and why he went ballistic about Oslo. And my interlocutor said because he thought it was wrong. And I said no. Said believed that Palestinians were different. And he was deeply upset about Oslo because Said certainly know intellectually that all movements have corruption, shortsightedness. There are people in every movement for justice that sellout. He went ballistic because he believed Palestinians were different than other Arabs and that they would chart a new course in Middle Eastern history. And when he concluded that that was not the case in his estimation, he couldn’t take it, which is exactly what’s happened to so many Jews. You see, Jews also, including myself first and foremost among them, although not a notable, romanticized my people and our tradition of ethics and our tradition of intellectuals; everything. Of which we have much. So did Said. And it’s interesting that Said’s closest friends, many of them were Jews, also universalists, of course fit.
Particularities are primal. They are tribal. However universal we become, they remain. They anchor us. They give different flavors to our universality. Particularity is also the great offender of universal values. It’s often dangerous and violent. So particularities are diverse. They are the spice of life. They are the end of the world. The question is what we are going to do with the particularities in the world and within us. How are we going to manage them? What kinds of negotiations will we have with them? There has been an ongoing negotiation of particularities between Israel and Palestine and within each community; the Palestinian and Jewish community. The only civil war that I know of which matches the Jewish civil war in its intensity, beauty and combat, is the Palestinian civil war. Recognition of particularity cuts both ways. Jews have to recognize our own particularity -- with its beauty and culpability. Jews also have to recognize the particularity of Palestinians. But most Jews cannot acknowledge a Palestinian particularity. It’s a particularity that confronts us as Jews. Yet if Palestinians don’t also present themselves as such, as a particularity, can they also be recognized in that way? Of course, the Palestinians are in a dilemma arguing their case in the West, since the West itself doesn’t recognize the particularity of non-Western peoples, except in an Orientalist and negative way. And since Jewish particularity is for the first time being heralded in the West, how could a Palestinian particularity ever compete in that arena in the West? Better to argue universalities which the West thinks it embodies. And, of course, the West is another disguised particularity.
We need now a negotiated settlement to these particularities, Jewish and Palestinian, and the civil wars and not so civil wars between them. Otherwise, the Palestinian Nakba will continue and the destruction of Israel somehow, sometime, someway is assured. We have two choices on that negotiation; now or then within the catastrophe that is or after a deeper and more enduring catastrophe occurs in the future. Those outside the Jewish and Palestinian particularities have played their role for better and worse and will continue to play their role, for better and worse. Think of Egypt as its own particularity. Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United States, France, United Kingdom, Russia; they all have their own interests. There is no universal disinterested justice. There are no universal disinterested brokers in anything including on the question of Israel and Palestine.
The two-state solution is one form of internal and external negotiation of various particularities. A one-state solution is another form negotiation. Both have possibilities. Both have drawbacks
Jews of Conscience are one form of Jewish particularity – a particularity within a particularity. In our day they represent the Jewish prophetic come alive. I think of the prophetic in this way: Through the prophets, ancient Israel bequeathed the prophetic to the world: it is the greatest gift to the world. Without the prophets there is no meaning in the world. There may be no meaning in the world. The prophet embodies the possibility of meaning in the world. The prophet is doomed. The prophetic voice is always being reborn. The prophet and the prophetic walk a path that is itself a hope.
What is the Jewish prophetic of our time? The Jewish prophet asserts that each individual is meaningful and within the context of a broader society must be protected and uplifted. The Jewish prophetic believes that individual and collective particularities must be enhanced and reconciled with other individual and collective particularities. The Jewish prophetic believes that justice and peace are possible if the hard choices are made and that these hard choices include confession and forgiveness and reconciliation. That becomes possible when a new path that emphasizes justice and compassion is sought and walked. In Israel-Palestine, this is what I have called “revolutionary forgiveness” which could begin in Jerusalem when Jerusalem is recognized as the “broken middle” of Israel-Palestine. And here I will end with these to visions which I have written about in the 1980s and nineties and which are impossible and which one day will happen.
Revolutionary forgiveness in Israel-Palestine begins with a confession by the Jewish people. The confession is simple. What we as Jews have done to the Palestinian people is wrong. What we as Jews are doing to the Palestinian people today is wrong. With that confession, we agree to begin to walk the path with Palestinians towards justice and equality. As that path begins to be walked, the memories of each people, broken by history, remain. But as that path is walked, new memories begin to be created. As those memories of justice and equality are created, they begin to dominate the history of both peoples until in the end an injury against one is an injury against all. Revolutionary forgiveness; confession, justice at the center. In the broken middle of Israel-Palestine which is Jerusalem. Wiesel is right in this case, Jerusalem is important to Jews. Of course, [it’s] important to Palestinians [as well]. It’s the center of Israel-Palestine; cultural, intellectual, spiritual. If in Jerusalem, Jewish and Palestinian life can be shared at all levels -- government, policing, education, garbage collection, shopping malls – invest both in ordinary life. As that investment increases, the religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – which have been militarized because of the political militarization are demilitarized, then a message from Jerusalem goes out to the world about the possibility of reconciliation, justice and forgiveness and among the world’s religions.
Now for many years, I stopped talking about revolutionary forgiveness and the broken middle of Israel-Palestine because it was too distant; and now today, even more distant. In the end, now or then, this vision will come true. It will be a renegotiation of a shared life between two particularities, Jewish and Palestinian, deeply flawed, broken, beautiful, engaging and also universal. Thank you very much.
Dr. Marc Ellis is Professor of History and Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.