Israel and Palestine out of the Ashes The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century by Marc H. Ellis (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002. 198 pages.)

Abstract

During the more than 37-year brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza, the numbers of North American Jews voicing their opposition
in public have been dispiritingly small. Since the outbreak of the second
Intifada in September 2000, however, Jewish anti-occupation activists
have become a visible political presence in Jewish politics in the United
States and Canada. Such groups as Brit Zedek V’Shalom, the Tikkun
Community, and Junity (Jewish Unity for a Just Peace) have spawned
dozens of regional chapters across North America. Local groups such as
Not In My Name (Chicago), Jewish Voices against the Occupation
(Seattle), and Jews for Global Justice (Portland, Oregon) have sprung up
spontaneously in almost every major North American city. Numerous ad
hoc responses have emerged as well. For example, an “Open Letter from
American Jews,” proclaiming opposition to Israeli government policies in
the Occupied Territories and bearing 4,000 signatures, has appeared as a
full-page advertisement in The New York Times as well as in a dozen more
American and British newspapers.
While very few of these groups would identify themselves as religiously
observant, almost all have invoked a Jewish ethical tradition of
social justice, derived from Jewish texts and rabbinical tradition, to make
their political point. In his most recent book, Israel and Palestine out of the
Ashes, Jewish theologian Marc Ellis posits a more deeply consequential
connection between Jewish history, Jewish ethics, and the occupation.
According to Ellis, Director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies
at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), Israel’s displacement and dispossession
of the Palestinian people constitutes such a fundamental transgression
of Jewish ethics and morality that it threatens to render Judaism, a religious ...