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Theology and the Palestinian Uprising: a Jewish Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Some years ago, in an essay outlining Christian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust and the future of Christianity in light of that complicity, the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz wrote: ‘We Christians can never again go back behind Auschwitz: to go beyond Auschwitz, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only together with the victims of Auschwitz.’ When first read this statement strikes one by its boldness, and later by its depth. For Metz, the Jewish victims of Christian triumphalism and power stand before the Christian community, challenging the past but also serving as the key to the future. Of course, Christian and Jew had travelled together on a tortuous and bloody road for almost two millennia before the Holocaust; the present calls for a radically new way of journeying together, one of trust and ultimately of embrace.
Over the past months, as the twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has erupted in a veritable civil war, Metz’s statement had assumed a new relevance in a different context. For on the other side of power, the Jewish people have assumed a new and unaccustomed role in relation to the Palestinian people: that of oppressors. As some Christians continue to have difficulty in admitting their complicity in the suffering of Jews, the Jewish people find it almost impossible to admit to their own complicity in the suppression of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish empowerment, mandated by the suffering of the Holocaust, should be affirmed as a good, the present impasse in Israel and Palestine cannot be addressed outside the most obvious, to some the more contradictory, of options: solidarity with the Palestinian people.
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- Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Metz, Johann Baptist, The Emergent Church: The Future of Christianity in a Postbourgeois World, trans. Mann, Peter (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 19Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of this new way of journeying together see Ellis, Marc H., Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1987), pp.67–90Google Scholar.
2 For an extended discussion of Holocaust theology see Ellis, Jewish Theology, pp.8–24.
3 On the interaction of Israeli policy and the Palestinian people see Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York: Times Books, 1983), pp.219–288. For the relationship of Israel and South Africa see Hunter, Jane, Undercutting Sanctions: Israel, the U.S. and South Africa (Washington, D.C.: Washington Middle East Associates, 1986)Google Scholar.
4 Goldstein, Ezra and Hurwitz, Deena, ‘No Status Quo Ante’, Agenda 24 (Spring 1988); 1, 3Google Scholar; Lerner, Michael, ‘The Occupation: Immoral and Stupid’, Tikkun 3 (March-April 1988): 7–12Google Scholar; Mann, Theodore R., ‘We Must’, Moment 13 (March 1988): 18–22Google Scholar.
5 See Ellis, Jewish Theology, pp.110–122.
6 For the shift of power within Jewish institutional life see Greenberg, Irving, ‘The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History’, Perspectives (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1981), pp.32–33Google Scholar. On the altering of perspectives relating to this shift see an analysis of Greenberg in Ellis, Jewish Theology, pp.26–37.
7 Ibid., ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity After the Holocause’, in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Fleischner, Eva (New York: KTAV, 1977), p.22.Google Scholar
8 Ibid., ‘Some Lessons from Bitburg’, Perspectives (May 1985), p.4. For Greenberg's political positions see ibid., ‘On the Third Era in Jewish History: Power and Polities’, Perspectives (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1980), p.6Google Scholar and ibid., ‘Power and Peace’, Perspectives 1 (December 1985): 3, 5Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., ‘The Ethics of Power’, in publication (March 1988).
10 For an extended discussion of Holocaust theology see Ellis, Jewish Theology, pp.7–24.
11 An example of liberal Christian Zionism is found in the work of Paul M. van Buren. See A Christian Theology of the People Israel vol. 2 (New York: Seabury Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For my discussion of developing a critical solidarity see Ellis, Jewish Theology, pp. 119, 120. This analysis points to a new ecumenical dialogue based on solidarity in the struggle for liberation rather than the status quo of Christian and Jewish institutional life.
12 The strains of this highly problematical and emotional relationship have increasingly come to the surface in recent years. Witness the upheavals in North American Jewish life relating to the Lebanese War, the massacres at Shabra and Shatila, the Pollard Spy Case and now the Uprising. My point is simply that the relationship between Jews in Israel and Jews outside of Israel cannot remain as it is without ultimately dividing the community at its very roots.
13 This ability to discuss the issue of Jewish self‐identity assumes the possibility of moving beyond the typical epithet of being a self‐hating Jew.
14 For Hannah Arendt's prophetic understanding of the choices facing the Jewish settlers in Palestine see a collection of her essays Hannah Arendt; The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Feldman, Ron H. (New York: Grove Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
15 Michael Lerner, ‘The Occupation’, p.7
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