Book Reviews

Israel and Palestine out of the Ashes: The Search for
Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century

Marc H. Ellis
London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002. 198 pages.

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 reli-
giously 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 disposses-
sion of the Palestinian people constitutes such a fundamental transgression
of Jewish ethics and morality that it threatens to render Judaism, a religious



doctrine based on social justice, a theological impossibility. For Ellis, a ter-
rifying vision looms: the replacement of “the Torah scrolls … that focus on
Jews and God, justice and peace, with a helicopter gunship that speaks of
power and might without ethics or morality” (p. 1). 

The Holocaust, Ellis argues, must be the starting point for any exami-
nation of the contemporary politics of Jewish empowerment. Therefore, he
devotes a considerable portion of his book to critiquing such notable post-
Holocaust theologians as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel; Rabbi
Irving Greenberg, former chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum;
and the late Emil Fackenheim, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Their writings, among others, have enshrined a
contemporary theology, widely adopted by Jews and non-Jews alike, that
Israel’s establishment is a sign of redemption for a people who have faced
genocide. 

The problem, Ellis asserts, is that the Jews’ historical weakness contin-
ues to be understood as a present reality that renders Israel’s occupation
understandable as an act of resistance to annihilation, rather than as the
conquest of another people. Within this framework, the Jewish memory of
suffering must be channeled into unequivocal support for Jewish empow-
erment in Israel as a guarantee against any threats to Jewish continuity.
Ellis writes that this is a flawed politics of memory, because it demands a
simultaneous forgetting by circumventing any consideration of “the com-
plicated history of Jews and Palestinians as part of the collective memory
of the Jewish people” (p. 18). Such a politics of memory cannot heal the
Holocaust’s trauma, because it does not call upon Jews to apply its lessons
to present-day injustices. The Holocaust’s wounds can be healed, Ellis
contends, only by recognizing Israel’s role in the national disaster of the
Palestinian people and by struggling for justice in Israel/Palestine. 

Ellis does not confine his analysis to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict’s
theological dimensions. Deeply skeptical of the democratic potential of a
two-state solution, he lays out his own version of a bi-nationalism, in
which neither ethnic nor religious identity plays a defining role. Rather, he
sees the potential for peaceful coexistence in the abandonment of nation-
alism and the struggle for a “culture and politics that transcends particular
communities and creates a new loyalty that allows particularities to thrive,
evolve and be transformed” (p. 78). This can proceed, he argues, only after
acknowledging the historic wrongs done to the Palestinian people. This is
a broad and utopian vision, and the reader longs for a more detailed “road
map” to give it a more pragmatic grounding. However, given that this

Book Reviews 99



book succeeds in many ways on the ethical/moral plane, it is perhaps
demanding too much to require concrete plans for Ellis’ ideas.

In the last two chapters, Ellis develops his vision for the Jewish
prophetic tradition in the post-Holocaust era. Drawing on his earlier
work, he introduces the reader to key intellectual figures in Jewish life,
including Judah Magnes, the first president of Hebrew University, and
renowned philosophers Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt who, while rec-
ognizing the link between a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Jewish
continuity, opposed Israel’s creation, foreseeing a bitter and hostile future
for both peoples. This dissident political stance by important Jewish
thinkers has been largely obscured, and Israel and Palestine out of the
Ashes helps bring it to the attention of a wider audience.

For Ellis, these important historical figures, as well as those Jews work-
ing for justice in Israel/Palestine, represent the contemporary equivalent of
the ancient Jewish prophets who endured exile for speaking truth to power.
Like their Biblical counterparts, Jews who oppose the occupation are often
shunned by community and family alike. It is from this position of out-
siderness, Ellis argues, that Jewish dissidents and other people of con-
science can find common cause. This book should be read not only by those
who care about a peaceful future for Israel/Palestine, but by all those who
question the ability of nationalism to resolve this and other intractable con-
flicts, as well as those who believe, with Ellis, that “placing others into the
ashes does not heal us of the previous trauma” (p. 175). 

Sheryl Nestel
Department of Sociology and Equity Studies

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

100 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:2