topic by
Lynette
7/16/2002 (10:00) |
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Lyn Gallacher: While arguments about who is more indigenous than whom continue, lives are lost. Many of them Palestinian lives. Marc Ellis is an American Jew who’s decided to speak out, and he says that if Israelis are going to continue to kill Palestinians, then they’ve forfeited their moral right to play victim. Marc Ellis is Professor of American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University in Texas.
Dr Ellis, thanks for joining us. We’ve been talking about the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful movement; what do you think of this group, considering that you’re on record as saying that Zionism is only a small part of Judaism?
Marc Ellis: Well Zionism has become almost a belief within the Jewish community, although most people don’t call it Zionism, so I can’t say Judaism and Zionism are completely separate. And the Temple Mount people are coming out of this kind of aggressive Judaism which has evolved, a militarised Judaism which is filtering through the whole Jewish community. But I don’t want to get on those people who seem to be extremist. The people who built the settlements and the people who legitimate those settlements here in Australia or in the United States, are mainstream, mainline Jews, often liberal on every other issue, people of status and affluence in our societies, they’re not right-wing zealots.
Lyn Gallacher: So it’s the actual, mainstream, the liberal ones that frighten you more?
Marc Ellis: Because they have built the State of Israel. And most Jews have been part of the problem, and I am a Jew, and so I identify with what we’re doing and I oppose it, because I believe that the militarisation of Jewish life and the displacement of Palestinians, even their humiliation as a people, is gutting the centre of Jewish history, the ethical guts is being ripped out of us so that we have power now and very little ethics.
Lyn Gallacher: I guess one of the obvious questions for an outsider is that are Jews persecuting the Palestinians in the same way that Jews themselves have been persecuted over the millennia?
Marc Ellis: Well I don’t need to make comparisons on a case by case basis to say that we know from history what it means to be persecuted. And we are persecuting the Palestinians. Each case is different, but there is no question that we have dislocated, we have expropriated Palestinian land, we have jailed, we have beaten, we have murdered and we are humiliating the people. That’s the important thing.
Lyn Gallacher: So is violence in the State of Israel a violation against Judaism? Like when you talk about Judaism being ethically gutted, is that violence part of the ethical gutting of Judaism?
Marc Ellis: Sure, not only the violence but the silence about violence, and the pretending that there isn’t violence. And the assertion that the violence only comes from the other side, because there’s something wrong with them, they’re evil, they’re bad, Islam, all of these sensibilities which are so foreign to the Jewish heritage, especially when we knew and should know that persecution comes because persecution comes. The violated are not asked to account for their violation. The powerful account for the violation, and today we as Jews are powerful, violating another people. But the question is, is this our future? Are the boundaries of the State of Israel, which now stretch from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River, are they the boundaries of Jewish destiny? Now if we wanted to be, let’s admit it, let’s say those are the boundaries, we want it, we didn’t have power, now we have power, we’re not answering to anyone. OK. Stop talking about the Holocaust. Stop talking about what people owe us. Stop all that rhetoric about Jews being special. I challenge my own community. If we want helicopter gunships to define us as a people, say it, but don’t pretend that helicopter gunships are not defining us.
Lyn Gallacher: If you’re asking people to stop talking about the Holocaust, that’s a big ask. I mean I can’t imagine the number of people you’re going to offend if you ask them to forget about the Holocaust, because that’s what Jews are supposed to do in this day and age: remember, remember, remember.
Marc Ellis: If we are going to use our power to permanently conquer another people, stop talking about the Holocaust. If we are going to define ourselves with helicopter gunships, stop talking about the Holocaust.
Lyn Gallacher: Are you saying that Holocaust theology is hypocritical?
Marc Ellis: Not in its origins. But as it is being used today, sure. How can we talk about our suffering, our innocence in that suffering, and then talk about our empowerment in Israel as if that is innocent too? It’s unfair. We need to speak if we can about the Holocaust, in the face of those whom we have displaced, and when we see those faces, and I’ve met many around the world, including in Palestine, I can’t talk to them about the Holocaust. Not because the Holocaust didn’t happen, not because the Holocaust isn’t important, in many ways it’s the centre of my life. I can’t speak about it in front of them, because we have used that and the status it has given us, and the unaccountability it has given us, to displace them, and now to humiliate them.
Lyn Gallacher: And I guess one of the obvious things is that the Palestinians aren’t allowed to remember their own acts of violence that have been committed against them, there’s instances of towns that have been wiped out and yet no memorial exists, and yet all over the world we see Holocaust museums and memorials.
Marc Ellis: And there is a silence about the catastrophe the Palestinians find themselves within, and we as Jews should break the silence. Palestinians speak, but who listens? And we have this overwhelming memory of the Holocaust which we want everyone to remember. In fact we demand that everyone remember it. But now we are making silent another catastrophe which we have caused. This is hypocritical. And you can’t forever speak about the suffering when you cause another people to suffer.
Lyn Gallacher: One of the other stunning claims that you make is that universities are also active in silencing the debate. Now Professor, I’m just wondering if you aren’t implicated here.
Marc Ellis: Not me, but absolutely. The proliferation of Jewish Studies and Holocaust Chairs, mostly financed by the Jewish community have for the most part become guardians of this silence. They are in general, especially in the United States, enforcers of silence on what’s happening to Palestinians. Now does that mean that everyone who holds a Chair in Jewish Studies or Holocaust Studies actually –
Lyn Gallacher: Should you resign?
Marc Ellis: No. I don’t think that every person who holds the line on dissent himself or herself thinks that Israel is doing right. But publicly they want to make sure it’s not discussed. Listen, I think learning about Jews and Judaism is very beautiful. I help people learn about it, but I want to point out that most of these people are guardians against the word of truth being spoken, and we have to face that fact. They are like policemen on campuses.
Lyn Gallacher: You’ve even said that this kind of Holocaust theology means that you read the holy text, the Torah, in terms of the Holocaust, is that right?
Marc Ellis: Right, because the Holocaust was such a powerful, formidable event that it challenges received tradition, including the revelation at Sinai. Where was God in the Holocaust? If God promises to be with us as a people in the Biblical witness, where was God at Auschwitz? Now this is the power of Holocaust theology, these are real questions, but what they didn’t see, these Holocaust theologians, like Elie Wiesel and Emile Fackenheim, was the Palestinians. They were silent on Palestinians, and if they spoke about Palestinians, Palestinians were those who were thwarting our return to the land, maybe our redemption from the Holocaust. But for Palestinians, their pain for European sins against the Jews, there’s no reason for them to pay that price, and there’s no reason for us to make them pay that price. And Holocaust theology there missed the next question. We have suffered, we have many questions about that suffering, but we don’t want to cause another people to suffer, there must be another way.
Lyn Gallacher: Now I just want to get back to one of those asides. You believe that religious language has become thoroughly compromised?
Marc Ellis: Isn’t it interesting that Jews of conscience are almost all secular. Not religious, almost all secular. I believe there’s another God, but I’m a religious Jew.
Lyn Gallacher: I was going to ask that, are you a secular Jew?
Marc Ellis: No. But I agree with 99% of their critique.
Lyn Gallacher: It would be absolutely, well ironic, if atheists were providing a way for the future for religious Jews.
Marc Ellis: They’re not only providing a way to the future, they’re carrying the covenant with them into exile, which may be the last exile in Jewish history. So it’s not only paving the way for a language, it’s carrying this covenant, this ancient covenant which can no longer be with our establishment, because the covenant cannot consort with injustice. The covenant is not with us, not the way Christians said, because when Christians were beating us over the head, guess what? the covenant wasn’t with them either. The covenant travels. It travels with people who are working for justice, who are struggling in solidarity. The covenant is not with us today, it is travelling with these Jews of conscience, going into exile, and it can only be found for Jews, amongst Palestinians today. Not because Palestinians are perfect or romanticised Palestinians, but because that’s where the injustice is. We need to move into solidarity with the Palestinian people in order to recover what it means to be Jewish.
Lyn Gallacher: Now you’ve been talking about these issues for a number of years now, to a number of very important people such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey; how have you been received, are people taking up your message, or are they giving you death threats?
Marc Ellis: Well I spent an hour in Lambeth Palace with the Archbishop. He’s read some of my work, and very sympathetic to at least what I have to say, and I find actually people in private quite sympathetic, and knowledgeable, including in the foreign services that I travel around the world to speak to, I always lay out the map of Israel, Palestine as I see it and ask them since they have so much more information including secret information, whether that map is the right map. And almost all of them, at a very high level, say I understand this to be right. And then I say, OK, what are you going to do about it? The answer? Nothing. And the Archbishop is there too. I like him personally.
Lyn Gallacher: But the answer is Nothing.
Marc Ellis: But the answer is Nothing. And you know, this is a second humiliation. It’s not only that Palestinians have lost, it’s not only that Palestinians have to live with helicopter gunships hovering over their cities, towns, villages and refugee camps, but their voice is not heard, and the people who know what’s happening to them, they don’t speak. This is another humiliation, it’s complicity. It’s the ultimate complicity of silencing the story, the truth, when you know it.
Lyn Gallacher: So more people will die.
Marc Ellis: More people will die, and the ultimate dignity that even in surrender you can have, by speaking the truth and letting it be heard, is forsaken. The Palestinians are on the other side of history and those of us who know, especially in high places, who don’t speak the truth now, it’s a crime. What we owe each other now in these sort of final days of the conflict, when anything can happen, when a million Palestinians could be driven out tomorrow, I’m not predicting, when a war could break out and under cover of that war we owe each other at least the truth. For God’s sake, speak the truth before it’s too late, otherwise we bequeath to our children as Jews, a lie, a hypocrisy.
Lyn Gallacher: Well I think we’d better leave it there. Professor Mark Ellis, thank you very much for joining us on The Religion Report today.
Marc Ellis: Thank you.
www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s342846.htm
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