Marc H. Ellis, Jewish Theology and Palestine’s Liberation
By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES – While we watch livestreamed and direct the intensifying genocide the Israeli government is perpetrating on the Palestinian people in Gaza, those of us who defend human rights can’t remain on the fringes. We must organize ourselves to make critical voices visible everywhere, especially in the Jewish world, much of which continues being colonized by Zionism.
Let me say at the outset that while many Jewish organizations and people, and/or their descendants, have been denouncing for decades the atrocities the colonialist government of Israel has committed since the foundation of their nation and beyond, there aren’t many current voices offering a theoretical, intellectual, and theological look from the perspective of Judaism itself. Such a perspective could counter the hegemonic view that is leading an entire people to the edge of a cliff, and another one to their extermination.
One voice that’s fundamental for understanding the horror in Palestine and offering some response was that of Marc H. Ellis in his Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation (1987). That work provides an essential way to view these times of violence and despair, when the Israeli Government is not only advancing a plan for the destruction of the Palestinian people but is also bringing about the destruction of the Jewish grassroots themselves.
The thoughts of Marc H. Ellis, who died a year ago, offer us a very interesting perspective which can link the struggles for social justice and the oppressed derived from Latin American Liberation Theology, to the Prophetic Jewish tradition. It traces a road for all those Jews who see that what’s happening in Palestine is in complete contradiction to the basic Biblical principles of Judaism.
For Ellis, Zionism and the formation of the State of Israel represent a denial of the historical Jewish tradition itself and an instrument of oppression. The process is related to so-called Constantinian Judaism, where religion is united with state and imperial power, as happened with Christianity at the moment when Emperor Constantine transformed it into the official religion of the Roman Empire.
With the emergence of Zionism and the colonial State of Israel, Judaism became a religion of the empire, distancing itself from its most profound ethical tradition which empathizes and works in solidarity to end injustices and the suffering of others. Turning its back on this, it evolved instead into a nationalism and militarism closed in upon itself, which segregates, excludes and denies the other.
Ellis says the liberation of the Jewish people will only be possible to the extent in which the Palestinian people are freed. The memory of the Shoa or Holocaust should never be used to justify oppression, but – on the contrary – should serve to more easily identify with those who have suffered, such as the events of the Nakba [catastrophe] in Palestine, which brought displacement, death and dehumanization.
Having said that, Marc H. Ellis proposes the idea of Jews of conscience, in opposition to the imperial Constantinian Judaism, for all those Jews who look with horror on what Zionism and the Israeli government have been doing for decades in denial of Jewish ethics – perpetuating the same horrors on the Palestinians that Jews suffered as well in other historic times.
In truth, it won’t be easy to liberate and decolonize the Jews within such strong power structures, but it’s the only possible road to peace in Palestine. It’s also the only way that the Jew themselves can recover a deep ethics that leaves behind fear, rage, distrust and a complete disconnection with the pain of millions of Palestinians who continue being humiliated and deprived of the most minimal rights.
In conclusion, I offer a phrase from Ellis, taken from a conversation he held with Robert Cohen, and in which he points out the following regarding the current genocide in Gaza: “The injustice we have perpetrated upon Palestinians has brought us to the end of ethical Jewish history. The question for Jews, the only question, is what are we to do at this end?”