Is Peace Possible in the Middle East?
Perspectives on the Future of Israel, Palestine, Judaism and Jewish Life

Marc H. Ellis
University Professor of American and Jewish Studies
Director, Center for American and Jewish Studies
Baylor University, Waco, Texas

A Lecture for the Book Launch of Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes; The Search for Jewish Identity in the 21st Century, November 17-21, 2002.

I am very glad to speak with you tonight about an issue which is close to my heart and perhaps to the heart of the world - the Middle East and, in particular, the future of Israel and Palestine.  When the heart is involved, commitment is paramount and emotion hovers around the edges.  At times commitment and emotion are essentially rational or, perhaps better stated, a certain kind of rationality dominates.  Other times, commitment and emotion overwhelm the rational or another kind of rationality, a rational irrationality, pervades. 

It is within these limitations that I address you tonight.  I will try to present an understanding of the crisis in Israel and Palestine that comes from my heart but is not dominated by it.  I will present to you part of my own vision but one compromised or perhaps enhanced - depending on your own perspective - by a vision of possibility in the world.  At the conclusion of my presentation, I will offer some thoughts on the future of Israel and Palestine and the consequences of that future for Judaism and Jewish life in Israel and America.

A Complicated Historical and Emotional Subject

When we come to the discussion of the future of Israel and Palestine it is always difficult to know whether a committed and emotional rationality or an irrational rationality will predominate.  In my experience lecturing on this subject I sense that the audience brings both of these understandings to the discussion and I do as well.  For as a Jew, could I pretend to a disinterested objectivity, to a commitment that is only rational?  If this were so, the Middle East would be one among other issues in the world, no more or less important to me than any other political issue.

Those of Christian background are drawn to the conundrum as well.  The Holy Land looms large in Christian history as well as in the Christian imagination.  Jerusalem especially is vital here, for it is in this city that the man whom Christians worship as the messiah and God held forth, was arrested and was executed.  The biblical narrative of Jesus’ ministry is read daily by millions of Christians around the world; Jerusalem is the center of that narrative, as are the Jews.  It is difficult for Christians to read the New Testament, or for that matter the Hebrew bible, the Christian Old Testament, without being drawn to or repulsed by the Jews.  Whatever the evolving Christian interpretations of Judaism and Jews  - whether Jews are consigned to hell for the rejection of the messiah or embraced as the chosen people whom God has never forsaken - there can be no neutrality toward Jews.  The contemporary drama in the Middle East - as well as the tragic reality of the Holocaust almost always figuring into this drama - only accentuates what is a perennial theme in Christian history: how the new Israel relates to the old Israel.

The involvement of the United States in the region again accentuates the centrality of Israel and Palestine for Americans of Jewish and Christian background.  There are few examples in world history where a superpower like the United States has expended so much material and moral energy with so little to show for that effort.  Or perhaps more accurately stated, the Middle East, at least since the demise of the Soviet Union, has largely become an American playing field where difficulties abound but where temporary solutions allow the smooth flow of oil and the backing of governments beholden to American military and economic support. 

The most disrupting factor in the region has been the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Though to a large extent shaped by the politics of America and the Arab world, the conflict has been difficult to resolve.  The very unpredictability of the conflict has led to other unpredictable factors, not the least being the issue of terrorism, so painfully evidenced in the attacks of September 11th, the subsequent war in Afghanistan, and the threat of war in Iraq.

The stakes are high on many levels, and this is to leave unmentioned other issues, such as the historic confrontation between Christianity and Islam, the seemingly intractable Palestinian refugee crisis in the Arab world, the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States that features the fascinating alliance between the Jewish establishment and evangelical Christians, and the current leadership of both Israel and the Palestinians.  In this season of war, a continuing and escalating war between Israel and the Palestinians is in evidence.  And it may deepen in the coming months.

The Elusive Search for a Middle Path

So without pretense of objectivity and without being able to completely separate the rational and irrational, I want tonight to ask the question: Is there a middle ground?  Can we come to a sensibility of a middle position where Israel and Palestine can, for the moment, survive each other and, over time, flourish together?  Is there a midpoint between those Jews in Israel and America who want all of Palestine and those Palestinians who want all of Israel?

For some years that midpoint has been seen within the context of a two-state solution, Israel within the borders of the state as it was before the 1967 war, alongside a Palestinian state comprising East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.  It is important to point out that this midpoint is actually more and less than that: it does not grant Palestinians a full equality of land within historic Palestine or envision a state of Palestine with the sovereign rights of any other nation-state. 

In most understandings of this two-state solution, Palestine is without a military and their borders are to be controlled by international and Israeli forces.  Refugees outside of Palestine are restricted in their aspirations to return to their homes within what became Israel and it is widely understood that East Jerusalem will only have symbolic Palestinian control.  It is also understood that the Jewish settlements that ring Jerusalem and effectively make Jerusalem a Jewish city will remain and even grow.
 
So the midpoint settlement is one where Israel, though constrained from a complete victory, is dominant and where Palestine, though short of a complete surrender, accepts a historic and final loss of its continuity and completeness.  Of course this settlement, which has been a matter of international consensus for over three decades and remains central to the stated foreign policy of the United States, contains possibilities of further movement between the two nations as trust is built and the complex details of geography and demography are worked out.  This was the hope of Oslo and the handshake on the White House lawn in 1993.  But that agreement and handshake seem so ancient today, almost unreal.  If Oslo represents the midpoint as described above, with its limitations and possibilities, it also seems that its implementation today would be little short of a miracle.

If the midpoint is no longer in view then the task is to either devise a path where the parties can be brought back to the midpoint or abandon the previous consensus and move toward a new one. The former seems, at this point at least, almost impossible.  If we leave aside the moral and ethical questions, what politics or military power can bring the situation back? 

Though Israel has a contentious political debate within its borders about domestic and foreign policy, the present Israeli administration is bent on establishing a new understanding of the final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. 

Exactly what the contours of that settlement are in the mind of Prime Minister Sharon is difficult to know exactly.  But if his past understandings and present policies are an indication, then the extent of Palestinian hope for a real state in the West Bank and Gaza, with even a foothold in Jerusalem, is negligible to non-existent.  According to the maps outlining Sharon’s positions on the final settlement that have surfaced over the last years and his actions since becoming prime minister, the most the Palestinians will receive is a non-contiguous and unempowered autonomy in Palestinian population centers on the West Bank and Gaza, surrounded on both sides by the Israeli army and fragmented by Jewish settlements.  Nothing is envisioned for Palestinians in Jerusalem. The speculation about how far Sharon might pursue his vision during a war on Iraq increases daily.  Some Jewish Israeli commentators have even gone so far as to predict a new expulsion of Palestinians into Lebanon and Jordan.

The Blame Game: Plenty to Go Around

Though it is easy to blame Ariel Sharon for this situation or to label him as an extremist, previous prime ministers of Israel also had similar, though less drastic, maps of the final settlement with the Palestinians.  The Oslo agreements signed by Prime Minister Rabin designate areas in the West Bank to be controlled by Palestinians, areas to be jointly controlled by Israel and the Palestinians, and areas to remain under the control of Israel.  It seems that the final settlement envisioned by Rabin under Oslo would combine the Palestinian autonomous areas and the jointly-held Israeli and Palestinian areas to form the Palestinian state.  But the third area would be part of an expanded Israel: this area included Jerusalem, most large Jewish settlements in the West Bank, security corridors and bypass roads connecting the settlements, and security buffer zones on the west bank of the Jordan river and outside the 1967 borders of Israel. 

As we know now, Rabin’s ultimate successor, Prime Minister Netanyahu, was closer to Sharon then Rabin, and Netanyahu’s successor, Prime Minister Barak, was closer to Rabin than Sharon.  However, if the maps that each proposed are examined rather than the rhetorical difference between Labor and Likud, the similarities should be emphasized.

The Arab world certainly cannot challenge Israeli power over the Palestinians and in some ways they simply compound the weakness of the Palestinians themselves.  The Palestinians are divided into many factions and their own inability to create civil and democratic institutions after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority under Oslo and transform their society to develop a politics of engagement and compromise with Israel is the subject of scholarly and popular discussion within Palestinian circles and indeed around the world.  The Arab world is not only weak; it lacks, aside from rhetoric, a desire for a real, empowered and democratic state of Palestine.  That kind of Palestine might be an example to their own citizenry and thus challenge their own legitimacy as autocratic and often dictatorial regimes.

The United States has interests in the region well beyond Israel and the Palestinians.  For the most part, oil and the proximity to the Soviet Union guided America’s support of Israel during the Cold War era.  The new relationship with Russia contains elements of the old but without the high stakes of nuclear war.  The collapse of the Soviet Union has had profound effects on the Arab countries, forcing them under the umbrella of the United States.  Moral considerations of Jewish suffering in the West and Christian biblical understandings of the return of Jews to their homeland also play their part, so America’s support for Israel is not only geo-political.  Coupled with the domestic concerns of Jews and other supporters of Israel, United States foreign policy has tilted against Palestinians for these reasons and others. 

It seems that the consensus among the actors in the Middle East policy world in the United States and abroad is to develop and implement a policy of containment vis-à-vis the Palestinians.  None have a desire to grant the Palestinians a real state but all are wary of the ability of Palestinians to destabilize the region.  Therefore attention needs to be given to Palestinians but primarily for the support of other interested parties - Jewish, Israeli, Arab and American.

Is There a Way Forward?  Some Guidelines

The way forward can be defined in many ways depending on one’s background and perspective. In the following points I outline some places from which the discussion of a future should begin.

• Surely the existence of Israel can be argued from the exigencies of Jewish history.  Zionism arises within a European context that will soon empty itself of its Jewish 
  population, and though most Jews who had a choice came to America during and after the Holocaust, the need for a secure place and refugee gathering point for other Jews after such a tragic event hardly needs arguing. 
• At the same time, the expectation that Palestinian Arabs, or the Arab world for that matter, should welcome an organized Jewish polity as part of its own obligation or on behalf of the world is an expectation that few people or other areas of the world, including ourselves and our nation, respond to in the affirmative. 
• That the Arab world had its own concerns and rivalries as well as its own limitations cannot be used as an argument for the creation of Israel or its lack of acceptance in the Arab world.  Those who suffer are innocent as a people regardless of their background, societal structure and political intrigue.  No one today would argue that the Jews of Europe should have been oppressed for any failing that they might have and no one, then or now, should argue that the rescue of the Jews should have been dependent on any aspect of Jewish qualities or lack thereof.
• The claims of the Palestinians that they were displaced by the hundreds of thousands are not disputed in the scholarly community in Palestine, the United States, or Israel.  While the necessity of the creation of a Jewish state for Jews after the history of Jews in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, can be debated by Jews, Palestinians or other Arabs, the claim of displacement and the wrong of that displacement for the people involved cannot be circumvented.  Jews have been refugees in the world; Jews in what later became Israel have created a Palestinian refugee population.
• What the Arab world did and did not do vis-à-vis this refugee population, indeed what it could and should have done, as well as what the Palestinians could have and should have done over the years can be debated on all sides.  The reality remains on the ground that millions of Palestinians within Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza are either under or profoundly affected by Israeli occupation, and a substantial Palestinian refugee population exists uneasily and mostly in a precarious situation in the Arab world
• Israel is recognized within the international community and by the United Nations as a nation-state, with all the rights and responsibilities of such an entity.  There can no longer be an argument about Israel’s status in this regard.  However there can be a debate about the shape of Israeli society and nationality, and Israel must be held, as are other nations, to standards of behavior and responsibility within and outside its borders.  Criticism can be made and a fundamental transformation of Israeli society can be discussed, even the transformation of a Jewish state into a secular democratic state of Palestinians and Jews, but that transformation would have to come through the evolution of a consensus within Israel and between Jews and Palestinians.  It would have to happen democratically.
• Obeying international law is always selective.  International law is created by the powerful in dialogue with the less powerful.  The powerful and less powerful invoke that law when it is supportive of their goals and neglect or violate that law when it is injurious to their self-interest.  International law can enhance justice as well as impede it.  Thus the argument from international law or United Nations resolutions should be listened to and taken seriously, while being neither definitive nor univocal.  Israel, like the United States, and like the Palestinian Authority, upholds and violates aspects of international law and United Nations resolutions.
• The Palestinian refugees have the right under international law to return to the land that was taken from them in the creation and expansion of Israel.  Israel does not have a right to the annexation of Jerusalem or the expansion of Israel in the West Bank.  However the power of Israel and the recognition of Israel’s pre-1967 borders by the international community make a Palestinian return and a complete withdrawal from East Jerusalem and the significant parts of the West Bank almost impossible to imagine.  The sloganeering by Palestinian activists about the right to return and by Jewish and Israeli activists about the complete end of the occupation are therefore counterproductive, mouthing words that inflame the situation and present unrealistic hopes for an embattled population.
• The idea that the only “Jewish” response among Jews in Israel and beyond should be silence or unity or a further militarization is also counterproductive.  The litmus test for being Jewish is far too narrow and self-defeating.  Those Jews who identify conscience and justice as central to Judaism and Jewish life have every right, indeed a moral obligation, to speak on behalf of Palestinians and therefore on behalf of what they see as the essence of Judaism.  The attempt to censor this speech and the speech of others on college campuses  - college campuses playing a historically vigorous role in promoting free and open debate - as anti-semitic is wrong and should be opposed. 
• Israel functions as a nation-state but it also claims to be a representative state, indeed a beacon of hope, to and for the Jewish people historically and in the present.  Jews around the world support Israel in this dual role.  Navigating statehood and Jewishness is difficult, perhaps impossible, but support for the state as a home for a displaced people and as a hope for the survival and flourishing of the Jewish people among Jews and non-Jews around the world was crucial for the establishment and survival of Israel.  Without this special status among Jews and the world, Israel could only have been seen as one of the last colonial ventures of the Western powers in the third world.  
• Israel’s legitimacy and long term support is dependent on retaining the claims that Israel itself made at its founding and continues to make today.  The moral dimension of statehood cannot be lived perfectly and the amount of divergence illustrated by the reoccupation of the West Bank ultimately undermines the raison d’etre of Israel.  This does not mean that only Israel is wrong or worse than other nation-states in its exercise of power; it means that the peculiar circumstances of Israel’s founding and support demand a reflection on issues that most political entities are free to ignore.
• The Palestinians are not free of blame in this situation.  Their leadership, a leadership that was sponsored by Israel in their return to the Palestinian territories under the Oslo accords, is often lacking in ability and ethics.  Like Israeli leaders, especially Ariel Sharon, Palestinian leaders have not shied from using violence as a form of political resistance and engagement.  In a war for dominance and survival ethical conduct is difficult to enshrine as a principle of combat.  Palestinians have a responsibility to control military resistance against Israel and its population when, and only when, a path toward real statehood is agreed upon and the timetable for reaching that state is announced, confirmed, monitored and followed.  The use of the word “terrorism” and its association with September 11th is false.  If we employ the term terrorism, than we engage in a cycle of discussions on state terror as well.  Without the terror of occupation, the terror of resistance is delegitimized.  Then terror can be judged unacceptable and liable for punishment. 
• The United States has not been an honest broker, first and foremost because it has perceived its interests in the region to be tied to Israel and to Arab governments that provide access to the resources that the United States desires.  As a global power, the United States can act this way, but other claims that it makes about these policies should be jettisoned.  The United States has also tilted toward Israel for reasons of domestic politics, which includes Jewish voters and campaign contribution support and the negative view that many Americans of non-Jewish background have about Arabs and Islam.  We can have those views and create foreign policy to serve those understandings, but we cannot have it both ways: if Jews and Arabs in the Middle East are equally worthy of our concern, as recent political and public rhetoric would have us believe, then Israel must be forced back to its borders and a real Palestinian state must be created with American support.
• Because of the history in the region, including the weakness of the Palestinians and the Arab world, America would have to back this up with policies that reward and penalize both parties as the goal of a two-state solution is pursued.  That means the use of aid monies to Israel and the Arab world as a penalty/reward arena and ultimately the decision to either abandon the parties to themselves or introduce American troops along the borders of these two states in the making.  Without this explicit possibility of American military intervention, the honest broker image will be judged by the world, correctly in my view, to be an illusion, a cover for other designs in the Middle East.

                                           The Future
A Divided Israel and the Development of Evangelical Judaism in America

In its most obvious sense, the future of Israel and Palestine is in doubt.  The forces against the two-state solution are enormous.  The forces to compel a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem are extremely weak.  If a state of Palestine is created in the next decades, it will be a state in name only, its contours limited by a mapping of boundaries that are more or less similar to those proposed by the previous Israeli prime ministers of both parties.  In this way the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank will be redrawn to comport with those boundaries while at the same time becoming permanent.  Israeli control of Jerusalem will likewise become permanent and the settlements will continue to thicken until the cities and villages of Palestine, surrounded by an ever-expanding Israel, become holding sites of cheap labor and areas of underdevelopment.

On the Palestinian side, the question is no longer nationality or slogans but survival.  On the Israeli side, the question is not about victory but its costs.  Victory, on the one hand, brings expansion in land and economy to Israel and even a sense of increased security.  The enemy defeated and in disarray is certainly preferable to one that is strong and self-assured.  On the other hand, the victory of Israel, like all victories, has other consequences, mostly unforeseen.  

The struggle for survival releases a traditional culture from its own mores and from the inhibitions that characterize the majority of any society, thus the appearance of suicide bombers.  The desperation of the situation also allows a slow acceptance of defeat which may lead to quiescence and a normalization where populations begin to interact and co-mingle in more natural and ordinary ways.  Victory for Israel may therefore erase the strict division of Jew and Palestinian both within and beyond the 1967 borders of Israel.  Over time, assimilation of populations in close proximity is the norm.  Will it be any different among Jews and Palestinians?   

So a future comes into view that may baffle the experts and the contemporary trajectory and power relations we are experiencing today.  Here are possible aspects of that future.

• Israel’s territorial consolidation is essentially completed.  The expansion of Israel into East Jerusalem and the West Bank continues.  A limited Palestinian autonomy is allowed, mostly in Palestinian population centers.  The thickening of the settlements continually decreases the areas growing Palestinian population would naturally expand into.  The decrease in territory and the inability to struggle successfully against Israeli power eventually deprives Palestinians of their ability and will to resist.  The Arab world is torn between the rhetoric of support for Palestinians and Palestine and the desire to get on with their own development and flourishing.  Thus the acceptance of “autonomy” is forced upon the Palestinians by their own situation itself and by the Arab world.  The United States helps to broker this deal as the “best” for the region and, of course, for American interests.  The steady depletion of world oil reserves, coupled with their concentration in the Middle East, makes this solution seem to be in the world’s interest as well.
• A triumphant Israel leads to a normalization of life in the Middle East.  With an ordinary pattern of life, a majority of Jews in Israel become more and more cosmopolitan in their interests and identity.  A distinct minority of Jews become more and more parochial in their sensibilities and insist on a Jewish religious state.  The divide in Israel between secular and religious Jews accelerates until an uneasy truce between the two communities becomes a dividing line which citizenship can no longer bridge.  In the meantime, the Palestinian minority within Israel continues to grow, becoming 30% or more of the Israeli population.  Their struggle is for an equality that their citizenship promises but the Jewishness of the state does not allow.  The Palestinian civil rights struggle within Israel becomes more active and successful, arguing alongside more and more secular Jews, and over against the religious Jewish community, that citizenship is open to all and defining in terms of responsibilities and privileges. Within Israel proper the trend toward citizenship increases, but in East Jerusalem and the West Bank Jewish exclusivity is emphasized.  Thus the division between Jews and Palestinians, once clear and irrevocable, becomes the only one of multiple divisions in Israeli society, and, at least on some issues, the least important.  Within Israel proper an expanded sense of Israeli identity - which will include the Palestinian citizens of Israel - is developed as the expanded parts of Israel become more militant vis-à-vis secular Jews and the Palestinians in the West Bank.  Conflicts of ideology, land and resources will on the one hand drive militancy, and on the other hand accentuate the process of accommodation and assimilation.
• American Jews are busy at home continuing to expand their success in the American free enterprise system.  Jewish institutions continue to function and flourish, at least in the economic sense and in the public realm.  An intellectual elite is educated Jewishly, but the mainstream of American Jews, recently mobilized by the Holocaust and Israel, drift.  The questions of God and Jewish particularity, once bracketed and overwhelmed by the Holocaust and Israel, become non-questions.  There is no way to pick up where the Jewish world left off, and besides, that history belongs to a different era.  The need for Jewish pride and assertiveness remains, but the fuel of anti-semitism and empowerment are spent.  The drama of Jewish life is no longer felt as an existential reality. What takes shape is a new kind of Jewish religiosity, a hybrid of the Hebrew bible and a renewed Christianity containing elements of progressive and evangelical Christianity.  The Vice-Presidential candidacy of Joseph Lieberman is the expansion and development of this new kind of Judaism, an evangelical Judaism that is peculiar to the American spirit.
• The future of Jews and Judaism is thus tripartite: within the 1967 borders of Israel the creation of an ordinary life, primarily secular, within an expanding sense of citizenship which over time includes Palestinians; Jerusalem and the West Bank become overwhelmingly and militantly religiously Jewish with an expanding and subservient Palestinian population; and an evolving and increasingly evangelical Judaism in America.   Thus the understanding that Jews are dividing into two distinct communities - American and Israeli - is actually more complicated.  Obfuscating the picture further is the minority communities within this tripartite division: religious Jews and Jews of conscience within the pre-1967 borders of Israel; secular Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank; Jews traditionally religious in America as well as Jews of conscience who dissent on domestic and foreign policies embraced by evangelical Jews. 
• Jews of conscience are particularly important here, though their numbers are few and their future bleak.  These are Jews in Israel and America who dissent from the accommodations that Jews and Judaism are making in Israel and America.  Though mostly secular, they combine a secularity and a Jewishness that is peculiar in Jewish history and has been the fuel of social justice movements in the West for almost a century.  In some ways they are already a spent force, birthed in Europe and the earlier immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States, spawned and defined by traditions within Judaism that no longer exist.  Yet in another way they may be a bridge to a Jewishness and Judaism that moves beyond the future divisions or at least provides a subversive element to each.  

Predicting the future is always risky.  There could be breakthroughs on a variety of fronts.  Though the Israeli occupation will continue indefinitely, it is possible that it will be more limited than in the scenario above.  The cost of occupation in lives, economy and political capital may become too great for Israel to bear.  The Arab governments could reform and with that reform speak more credibly to the world community about the plight of the Palestinians.  The Palestinians themselves could, in the context of a general surrender, regroup, reform and develop an internal strength that forces Israel to take notice of a possible alternative relationship with the Palestinian people. 

The United States could change the direction of its foreign policy.  Practical matters such as stability and oil might suggest that without some justice, the Middle East will remain unstable and may even become hostile to American initiatives.  Moral considerations may play a role if Israel moves beyond its occupation to another expulsion of Palestinians into Lebanon and Jordan.  Israel itself might wake up to the international consensus that Palestinians have a right to be free in their own homeland.  Jews and Palestinians within Israel might link together to support Palestinian aspirations in the West Bank.  This connection within Israel might also reach out to a new coalition of diaspora Jews and Palestinians in America, thus pressuring Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world and American foreign policy to change its direction.

While various scenarios are possible, the needed changes in all directions make an alternative future highly unlikely.  Political rallies and sloganeering will continue but the bottom has dropped out.  They are being shouted into a void.

The idea that, because of its policies and divisions, Israel will self-destruct, is fanciful.  So too the warnings about anti-Semitism  Though anti-Semitism is alive and well in the world, this ideology will be confined to the sidelines and to those who are losing the struggle for Palestine.  Terrorism will remain in the world after all; in its state and freelance forms, it is a constant feature of human history.  But the idea that terror on behalf of the Palestinians, whether solicited, approved of or not, will reverse the Israeli-Palestinian situation, is an illusion. 

In many ways the Palestinian people are fated, at least for the foreseeable future, to exist in an apartheid-like situation in the West Bank, as refugees in the Arab world, with a virtual home in Jordan though without Palestinian nationality, and as successful citizens in Australia, Europe, Canada and the United States. 

Gaza is a symbol of that fate, the uncontested place where Palestinians congregate and where the world has little interest.  There, Palestinians will be free but under the constraints of geography and resources, surrounded by Israel and Egypt and the sea.  America is also a symbol of the fate of Palestinians, an open society to refugees as long as they assimilate to America and eventually leave behind their homeland in identity and politics. 

The transition of Jews to evangelical Judaism is instructive here.  As part and parcel of Jewish assimilation to the American Christian view of the world, Palestinian Muslim and Christians must embark on that journey as well.  The assimilation to American values and hope is to distance oneself and the community from the old world and its decadence, in this case, the Arab, eastern Christianity and “fanatical” Islam. 

What is amazing about the Jewish shift to evangelical Judaism is that Jews in America have brought Israel and its Jews into the American mainstream.  If it is true that the Holocaust has been Americanized - hence the prominent United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. commemorating an event in Europe that happened to European Jews - so too Israel.  Though reference to Israel as the 51st state of the Union is too strong, its prominence in American foreign policy and the rhetoric that speaks about the glory and importance of Israel to America signal a transition that is significant in American history.  With Arab Jewry safely assimilated into Israeli society and with the remnants of European Jewry prospering in the United States, the old world and more derogatory imagery of Jews have been removed.  Jews in America are to be celebrated and all Jews everywhere are in a sense honorary Americans.

Few Jews will pause and ask about the cost of this transition.  For before this transition the toll in Jewish life was too high.  Should Jews now think about the cost to others, the Palestinians, as also a cost to Jews?  In the realm of ethics and morality it is difficult to argue that Jews in fact are different than others and in the future that task will become impossible.  The celebration of empowerment is long overdue in Jewish history, but it is doubtful that the center of Jewish history, the covenant and the prophetic, can survive this transition.

America is a country and a state of mind where history drops from the equation and the dawn of the new morning, where empire is praised in the name of innocence, is defining.  So it is with America and so it is with evangelical Judaism, the future of Jews, the fate of Palestine. 

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