A Jewish exchange

Christian Century, Jan 17, 2001

AS A JEWISH reader of the CHRISTIAN CENTURY (and a former contributor) I question the various theses of Marc H. Ellis on the Israeli-Arab crisis ("Jews vs. Jews," Nov. 8). Although the term "deconstruction" is viewed with caution, its tools are quite applicable to the assumptions and silences in Ellis's text.

Ellis's bias, like most, shows at the outset when he has the Israelis "seeing" themselves backed to the wall and the Palestinians as witnesses (a very Christian word) "for people who have been denied the basic need for dignity and statehood." The end result is obvious. The Israelis are simply seeing themselves in an erroneous way, but the Palestinians, Ellis says, have been denied their rights.

Ellis knows better than to assert that he and Michael Lerner are part of a "sizable minority." They are a tiny minority whose myopia is all too plain to the vast majority of Jews.

Ellis refers to Palestinian "self-defense" without noting the ferocity of the new intifada and its calculated manipulation to avoid admitting that Arafat demands total capitulation, not negotiation, or else he would have had some kind of response to Barak's offer, even a ludicrous one.

What is "the extended military campaign to form a state and expand it at the expense of the Palestinians"? This profound silence omits the origins of the struggle 53 years ago. Ellis speaks as if all the military initiatives were on the Jewish side, without noting the seven-nation Arab aggression against Israel in 1948. He goes further when he suggests "the real sharing of all of Jerusalem, east and west." West Jerusalem was never Arab in any sense. Ellis's language becomes downright opaque when he writes of the "actual sharing of Jerusalem, as a broken middle of two straggling peoples." What exactly is a broken middle? Has anyone ever lived such a political life? Even the Palestinians do not speak of that goal, at least when they address the West; to their own people in Arabic they do not speak of sharing, only conquering all of Jerusalem.

Harold Ticktin

Cleveland, Ohio

Marc H. Ellis replies:

Harold Ticklin is welcome to his misinformation about Israeli proposals and Palestinian rejection. In this obdurate ignorance he represents most American Jews and certainly Jewish leadership. I hope he visits, on a regular basis, the rabbis who lead congregational services and deliver sermons recalling our suffering in the Holocaust, trumpeting our innocence and issuing pleas for Jewish unity, while helicopter gunships rain rockets down upon defenseless Palestinian towns and cities. I for one reject this majoritarian view. It buries the center of the Jewish ethical tradition; it demeans us as a people; it brings our history to an end.

I am not alone in this view. Michael Lerner, among many others, hold views strikingly similar to mine. I applaud these people for their courage and their sensibility. They have opposed the Constantinian Judaism that has developed in our time, a Judaism that assimilates Jewish life, study and intellectual acumen to the state and to power. Ticklin seems to be a devoted follower of this path.

I repeat Michael Lerner's haunting plea: "We want the world to know that in this dark time there were Jews who stood up and proclaimed their commitment to a Judaism that would fight for a world in which every human being is treated with the respect and the sense of sanctity that are central to a spiritual vision of the world."