Repentant Enablers: German Christians, the Holocaust and the resurgence of German power

This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

As I write, I am crisscrossing Germany and lecturing at universities at Bochum, Marburg, Heidelberg, Erlangen and Freiburg. I also spoke at a lovely retreat in Ulzen where the director studies Talmud, practices serious feminism and ecology and has also read my Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation.

As always in Germany, I am struck by how the Holocaust trauma remains. This is true among amongst German youth and those knowledgeable of the Palestinian situation. Germany continues to pay reparations for the Holocaust and arms Israel with weapons and advanced military technology as part of it historic responsibility.

Germans are caught up in the history of anti-Semitism and one of my lecture topics – Martin Luther – tells part of the story. Luther was one of the most vehement and articulate anti-Semites of all time. I picture Luther with Jews on his brain. In the end, Jews drove Luther insane.

This kind of insanity is in the air Germans breathe. So Jews remain remarkably present here – in their absence. Because of the elimination of German and European Jewry, Germans live in a void that is impossible to overcome. Still, Germans have to move on – but how?

Before coming to Germany, I wrote a long essay – Repentant Enablers. You can read it below. The overall theme is the connection between the Holocaust, the birth and expansion of Israel and Germany’s reemergence into the world of civilized nations after World War II.

I judge German repentance for the Holocaust to be real – and strategic. Without repentance, how could Germany show it was ready to begin again? Once readmitted to the world of nations, Germany has assumed its place as the central economic and political power of Europe. Without German money and military hardware, as well as its international political support, Israel would have a much more difficult time thriving and expanding.

Contrary to the Christian imagination, resurrections seem unlimited. Israel and Germany have been resurrected together.

That the Palestinians were sacrificed on the altar of German renewal seems beyond the point for most Germans. But this isn’t to say that many Germans don’t know what is going on in Israel-Palestine. My meetings with Germans, especially members of the German churches, show a surprising knowledge of the Palestinian situation and extensive contacts with the Palestinian resistance.

Unfortunately, mum’s the word for German Christians who know the score. If they speak what they know, the charge of anti-Semitism is lodged against them by the Jewish and Christian establishments. No one wants the anti-Semitism charge leveled against them, especially in Germany.

Besides, even the most conscientious German Christians are unsure of their feeling about Jews. This is because even German Christians who fight anti-Semitism are deeply ambivalent about Jews. But ambivalence about Jews is present around the world – including among pro-Israel groups and the BDS movement. My response to these ambivalent Germans is that they are not alone. What defines non-Jews in relations to Jews and Israel is what they do with their ambivalence.

So it goes on, anti-Semitism and Israel-Palestine, but my travel here isn’t only about issues. As an heir to European Jewish history, I feel the downplaying of the history of Europe’s Jews as is common today is a deep and unforgivable mistake. In many ways, European Jewry represented the flowering of Jewish history and its heirs, especially those who officially represent Jews in political, cultural and academic circles, have proved themselves unworthy of this inheritance.

Unworthy Germans. Unworthy Jews. So it is, as Palestine disappears.

Repentant Enablers

German Christians, the Holocaust and the Resurgence of German Power

Reflections from a Jewish Theology of Liberation

A reflection on the question:  Is the Jewish-Christian dialogue in Germany hiding (German and Jewish) empire in plain sight or is it simply trying to forestall the “No Rescue” Jewish prophets at the end of Judaism and Christianity as we have known and inherited them?

On the German Christian/Jewish Dialogue/Deal

So where shall I begin thinking about touring Germany, as a Jew of Conscience, at least trying to be one, anticipating the heavy atmosphere of a Germany still caught between the Holocaust and enabling an ever-expanding state of Israel?  I am not Judith Butler, whose fascinating and disarming philosophical discourse, a Jewishness that is so intertwined with its surroundings that at one moment it stares you in the face and the next moment disappears from view.  No, I have a more mundane and direct sense of Jewishness – as the carrier of the indigenous Jewish prophetic, the great gift to the world, the embrace of which is the only reason to be Jewish.  

A long introductory paragraph, frowned upon in literature, and without mentioning the many intersecting layers of German and Jewish history.  And here we are only beginning.

But, then, if we can avoid becoming stuck in history, where can we go from here?  What is behind us, what is today, what is before us – can we sort out the road taken and the road that beckons us?  

During my speaking tour in Germany, I will be making a variety of presentations, including one on Martin Luther and the Jews.  As a scholar of sorts, I should try to be objective on Luther but my gut has always told me to avoid Luther, to put him behind me as if he had never existed.  His treatise “On the Jews and Their Lies” makes Hitler, at least in his pronouncements, look like a child throwing sand in the face of an unsuspecting visitor.  If you think this is alarmist read Luther on the Jews for yourself.  I dare you.

Though I would love for this to my last dealings with Luther, the continuing revelations about Heidegger’s thoughts on the Jewish question in his most recently published Black Notebooks force Luther’s obsession with Jews to the fore.  There is no straight line from Luther to Hitler – this has been emphasized in the scholarly literature.  There is no a straight line from Luther to Heidegger either – this has to be said. Yet one cannot help but notice that there seems little escape form the Jewish question in the ancient and contemporary arc of German history.

Though German history shows a peculiar obsession with Jews, any Jew who has worked on the Issue of Israel and the Palestinians knows that hatred/ambivalence about Jews did not start or stop with Luther, Hitler or Heidegger.  There is plenty of ambivalence about Jews to go around before and after the Luther/Hitler/Heidegger threesome.  Nonetheless, ambivalence about Jews exists on all levels in Germany and among Germans, even those who have migrated to the United States, and among German political progressives and feminists alike.

I experience this ambivalence and understand aspects of it.  For Jews are in their primordial and present being deeply unsettling – at least I hope this is the case.  It is a long, long story that I have tried to explore, however inadequately in my writing.  This unsettling quality is about the ever subversive prophetic, the indigenous of the people Israel, coupled with the always unpredictable Jewish God.  

This foundational instability of Jewish life and Israel’s God leads to many reactions to Jews – even, of course, where Jews are not present except through the stability-seeking religions of Christianity and Islam.  One of these reactions is anti-Semitism which, though significantly diminished, is alive in a variety of forms, including in the Israel-Palestine discussions that abound on the literary and lecture circuit.  The other side of the story are Jews – especially Constantinian and Progressive Jews – who take this ambivalence about Jews as a license to deflect and demean Jews of Conscience and others who argue that regardless of the myths about Jews what Israel has done and is doing to Palestinians is wrong.  So ambivalence about Jews works both sides of the street.  It is used against Jews in a disguised way – in some critiques of Zionism – and is used by Jews as a disguise – in arguments that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.  Exposing these disguises involves risk.   

Anti-Semitism continues to exist.  But, then again, Israel continues to expand.  As Israel expands, Palestine disappears.  

Individual Germans stand on different sides of the new Jewish question or, depending on one’s point of view, the old Jewish question reborn.  Yet in the main, a repentant Germany stands for Israel.  A repentant Germany stands for the Jews they displaced and murdered. Yet by enabling Israel’s expansion and Palestine’s disappearance the idea that Germany is somehow repenting for its sins is increasingly challenged.  It’s ludicrous really, when the suffering of Palestinians is factored in.  How can the Palestine question not be so factored?

Repentance, of course, is always complicated.  It can be for the Other whom you have sinned against.  It can as well be for the sinner, as a humble confession. Yet a third function of repentance often comes into play – as rescue for sins, for getting back on one’s feet, for hiding the sins of the present.

Think of Pope Benedict at Auschwitz and the concept of repentance.  How did the Pope as head of traditionally anti-Semitic church, a German to boot and member, reluctant or not, of the Nazi youth movement, become the chief mourner of the victims of the Holocaust?  What did his presence at Auschwitz actually represent to Jews, to Christians, to Germany?

Confession and rescue are bound together and, in the mix of life, this is understandable.  Altruism is often connected to self-aggrandizement – doing for others we do for ourselves.  However, a time comes when the balance becomes unwieldy – what we do for others we do primarily for ourselves.  Coming to understand this amalgam is a sign of maturity.  What we do and refuse to do with our maturity defines our journey.

It is hardly a leap to apply this to the Jewish-Christian dialogue. Beginning in a renewed and serious way after the Holocaust, the dialogue was necessary and revolutionary.  Had there ever before been such a bold attempt to redress the power and theological imbalance of Jews and Christians?  Against great historical odds, it worked.  Revolutionary forgiveness was in the air, that is forgiveness with justice, rather than piety, at the center.  In the West, at least, where a majority of Jews live, and in the state of Israel, where an almost equal percentage of global Jewry lives, the Jewish-Christian dialogue bore fruit. Unfortunately, there were victims of the Jewish-Christian rapprochement – the Palestinian people.  Collateral damage?

No, it was not intended, there was no conspiracy among Jews and Christians in the West to ethnically cleanse, demean and ghettoize a people outside of Europe.  Yet, it was hardly a one-off proposition either.  Over the decades, the Jewish-Christian dialogue gave way to a deal where the Palestinian question was silenced and the Jewish question was solved once and for all.  “Solved” that is, outside of Europe as Europe often deals with its “problems” – on the backs of the Palestinian people. 

Has the state of Israel solved the Jewish question?  Perhaps for those who celebrate Germany as a rescued now re-empowered enterprise it has.  For those who see the Jewish question as solved in the state of Israel, it comes as a great shock that the issue arises once again.  For just when the success of the Jewish-Christian dialogue is celebrated, it arrives at a dead-end.  As over time the crimes against the Palestinian people became more known, many Jews became restless and indeed many Christians too.  Soon there was an explosion of the Jewish prophetic – in league with a renewed Christian prophetic.  This explosion, focused on the Palestinian question, is the other side of the Jewish-Christian dialogue become deal.

The “deal” aspect of the Jewish-Christian dialogue is simply put:  Christians repent for your sins, hold fast to Israel and be silent on the Palestinian question.  Silence on Palestinians is demanded, otherwise the accusation is that Christians have returned to their previously abandoned anti-Semitism.

No Jew or Christian in their right mind should want to return to the Christian/German ground of Luther and Heidegger.  But what Jew or Christian in their right mind wants to leave anti-Semitism behind only to involve themselves with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestine?  In the best of all worlds we could leave one ground without entering the other. However, just as the Holocaust and Israel are bound together, the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine are bound together, too.  To think that the Holocaust and Israel are bound together but the Palestinian issue is separate is a retreat from history.  Such a retreat is an evasion based on a practiced sleight of hand.  

Today there is no revolutionary forgiveness between Jews and Christians without the question of Palestine at the center.  In this sense, Jews have been displaced as the focal point of the Jewish-Christian dialogue/deal.  Without Palestine and Palestinians at the center, Jews and Christians in the West are talking in an increasingly hollow space – filled with unannounced prejudice and self-interest.

Here I reference the Jewish links with empire in America and Israel – these are obvious enough.  Did you notice that they are unspoken in the rarified atmosphere of the Jewish-Christian dialogue/deal?  I also reference the renewed German empire – again unspoken in the rarefied atmosphere of the Jewish-Christian dialogue/deal.  Though empire discourse seems inapplicable to post-World War II Germany with its limitations on military interventionism, Germany is again on the world scene as the most powerful nation in Europe, with all sorts of empire connections with American and NATO power, as well as an economic system that benefits from the unjust global economic order.  Business deals with this and that corrupt regime including Israel proliferate.  

You do not have to unilaterally militarily intervene and occupy other countries to be enmeshed in and benefit from empire.  Chastened by military adventuresome and its quest for empire in what became World War II, Germany uses the US, NATO and the European Union do pursue and leverage its affluence.  The German comeback/rescue from its defeat in World War II has been paid for by Germany, it is true, but with much help as well.  Repentance for the Holocaust has been essential.  How else could Germany demonstrate its (once again) civilized status in the global community after the Holocaust?

Does Germany think that its renewed affluence, political clout and status can proceed unnoticed by continually bowing before the Holocaust and the Constantinian Jewish establishment?  Paying billions in reparations to the state of Israel and arming it to the teeth with military hardware continues to be German state policy.  But the question must be asked:  Do the German political and economic elite think that repentance for the Holocaust and enablement of a conquering Israel forgives its past and present empire proclivities?  Yes and yes, perhaps.  So far, it has been working like a charm.

Here we move back into the theological arena.  Does Christian theology in the Jewish-Christian dialogue/deal especially in the West, America and Germany, pursue its reconciliation with Jews as a way of forgiveness and to hide its empire accountability in the present?  Obviously Jewish Holocaust theology does this empire-hiding for Jews, at least for now.  Like the Jewish-Christian dialogue, in the beginning Holocaust theology was an insurgent force overpowering the various orthodoxies of its time.  Now its concentration on the Holocaust is regressive.  Holocaust theology seeks to permanently discipline and banish Palestine and the Palestinians.  Likewise, it seeks to discipline and banish the Jewish prophetic exploding in our time. To hide Jewish empire in America and Israel?  

 The Holocaust as Nostalgia Enabling German and Jewish Empire

Is this our German-Jewish relationship of the future – hiding behind political and theological banners of forgiveness and survival while guarding each other’s empire present?  Or is there another way, respecting past suffering and addressing suffering in the present?

Paradoxically, at least in the German-Jewish encounter, attention to present suffering brings us back to the past – to the Holocaust.  But here it is not so much the history of the Holocaust, what really happened, but how the Holocaust functions in contemporary German and Jewish discourse.  This brings us as well to how the Holocaust functions in contemporary German and Jewish politics.  Because if anything is certain the Holocaust is not only a past historical event, it is employed in a variety of ways for political advancement and cover.  

Understanding how the Holocaust functions in German and Jewish discourse and politics is a gateway to how the Holocaust functions in Christian and Jewish theology and the Jewish-Christian dialogue/deal.  Having drawn lines from history to the present an alarming coda must be addressed:  However we judge the use of the Holocaust by Germans and Jews, the shelf-life for its use is rapidly approaching, if it has not arrived already.  Rather than analyzing the functionality of the Holocaust, we are now facing the end of the Holocaust as a viable agent on any and all fronts.  Over time the Holocaust is fated to disappear from public view.  The history of the world moves on. Thus the Holocaust is entering the twilight of its public existence, appearing now more as nostalgia for a world whose moorings were uprooted and, paradoxically, at least in the view from the present, more certain.

The Holocaust as nostalgia? Initially, this seems a shocking allusion, trivializing such a horrific event. But then over time the Holocaust has been trivialized by its very use to aggress against others, to be unaccountable and to disguise empire ambitions.  The Holocaust as nostalgia is more than remembering old times in a wistful and melancholy way.  It is reminiscing without critical thought, taking the sharp edges off massive suffering and using it for other purposes.  Thus in a relatively short time, perhaps by the 1970s, the Holocaust entered its terminal phase as a reminder of the dangerous memory of suffering.  Today the Holocaust too often functions as a bully, clearing out any and all that dare challenge the sacred Holocaust sphere established by German and Jewish authorities on diverse levels. 

This is the secret known all over the theological block, including in the Jewish-Christian dialogue/deal.  The last innovative writing of Holocaust theology was penned by Irving Greenberg in 1988.  Greenberg’s essay title was provocative and telling:  “The Ethics of Jewish Power.”  Its historical timing is likewise instructive, being written during the first Palestinian Uprising.  Greenberg sought to respond to the critics outside and within the Jewish community who were dismayed, even horrified, at Israel’s brutal crushing of the uprising.  

Greenberg, already a prominent Holocaust theologian, sought to respond to the challenge to Holocaust memory being raised in the brutality of Israel’s occupation.  He did this by addressing the sea-change in the Jewish condition – the movement of Jews from powerlessness to power.  In doing so, Greenberg signaled the end of Holocaust weakness and the emergence of a Jewish power that he thought essential but one that must be tempered by Jewish ethics.  With a Jewish state, Greenberg argued, that though difficult, the acceptance of power – with its inherent ethical compromises – as the new Jewish normal was crucial.  For Greenberg, Jews were moving through the difficult transition of normalization.  Jews might hold onto a sense of ethical difference in their behavior but that difference could only be marginal.  Greenberg was specific – the state of Israel could only be 10% better than other communities/nations.  Otherwise, the state of Israel would be found wanting or weakened to the point of collapse.   

Greenberg’s essay carried a stark warning.  Criticism of Israel that crossed a certain line could endanger Israel’s existence and thus throw the Jews of Israel into another Holocaust scenario.  In this Greenberg joined other Holocaust theologians, indeed the Jewish establishments in Israel and America.  Criticizing Israel at a certain level was akin to bringing on a second Holocaust. 

What did Greenberg fear as Jews went through this difficult phase of normalization?  Greenberg worried about the non-Jewish world judging Israel by a yardstick that no nation could survive with.  Even more, though, Greenberg worried about the Jewish prophetic that consistently and assertively judged other nations that perpetuated injustice.  If the outside world and the Jewish prophetic turned inward found Israel wanting, it was only a short distance from delegitimizing Israel’s very existence.

Interestingly enough, Greenberg only superficially addressed the issue that shadows his entire argument of Jewish normalization. The great fear that Greenberg expressed about the prophetic was broached without specific details.  Yet the Jewish prophetic, while thematic, has always been specific, especially when it turns inward.  Inward, that is within Jewish history, and specific, judging Israel in graphic detail, is the natural home of the prophetic.  Though held in abeyance for some time by the Holocaust in relation to the state of Israel, the explosion of the Jewish prophetic in our time represents a re-rooting of the primal and indigenous prophetic in Jewish history.  In retrospect, Greenberg was attempting to hold back what he must have subconsciously known was right around the corner – a homecoming of the relentless and primal Jewish prophetic.  Indeed, it was happening as he wrote.

The primal Jewish prophetic strips any pretense regarding Israel’s innocence bare.  Gone is the idea of innocence in Jewish empowerment – no matter how much suffering preceded it.  Gone, too, is any Holocaust justification for committing injustice against Palestinians.  Rather, the Jewish prophetic sees the expansion of Israel as a land grab and as a perversion of ethical accountability.  

The contemporary Jewish prophetic is wide-ranging.  It includes an expansion of Jewish covenantal obligation to include the Palestinians, albeit and perhaps necessarily in post-Holocaust/post-Israel secular language. The contemporary Jewish prophetic similarly includes admonishment of Christians who use the Holocaust to their own advantage, justifying Israel’s injustice to whitewash their own history and present.  As usual but not fit for the present times, the Jewish prophetic voice steers clear of Constantinian religion of any stripe, including and especially the new-found Constantinian Judaism or the remnants of Constantinian Christianity, even in its liberal incarnation.

So what does the Jewish prophetic do with liberal Christianity’s attempt to distance itself from Constantinian Christianity and to grapple with the Holocaust, especially in Germany?  Instead of honoring Christians for their struggle, the Jewish prophetic hammers away at German Christian guilt when it is used as a self-serving rescue.  As well, it cites German Christian discourse and material enablement of Israel as a no-go area for Jews and Christians of Conscience.  It focuses as well on German prosperity in the present.  Is that prosperity built upon the suffering of others? For using Jewish suffering in the Holocaust as a means of creating more suffering trivializes everything, including the very memory of suffering. Trivializing suffering, then or now, trivializes the rage against it.  For the Jewish prophetic, trivializing the victims of the Holocaust by creating more victims is the ultimate transgression against the prophetic – and thus the Jewish indigenous.   

Of course, some Jewish and Christian theological quarters seek to distance themselves from the Jewish prophetic by attempting to freeze it in its Biblical paradigm, thereby diluting its life’s blood and its continuing evolution as the internal critique of Israel.  How Jewish and Christian exegetes do this is a feat unto itself but the major thrust is quarantining the Jewish prophetic as if it has ceased to exist except as a Biblical memory.  The usual excuse is the acceptance of the rabbinic paradigm as the Judaism of our time, a paradigm which itself seeks to discipline and banish the prophetic.  Christian and Jewish theologians use the Holocaust/Israel axis to reinforce the rabbinic which, even though it is now entirely dependent the on Holocaust/Israel narrative framework for its existence.  The hope is to silence the Jewish prophetic with its focus on what has happened since the Holocaust in the creation and expansion of Israel. 

All of this is a last gap effort to keep the Rabbinic/Holocaust/Israel axis immune from the Jewish prophetic indigenous, thereby further stripping the evolving reality of both Jewish and Christian theology, the latter as well undergoing in some quarters a prophetic reinterpretation.  Is this common assault on the prophetic precisely because Jewish and Christian theologians fear that when Holocaust repentance and Israel enablement ceases to be central to Jewish and Christian identity there may be little left of Judaism and Christianity?

(Forgiving) Jews and Christians After the Holocaust and After Israel

At the end, we begin again, or so it goes in the realm of poetry.  Beginning again we see life from another angle, innocence filtered through experience.  Theology likewise seeks renewal by returning but, in the theological realm, it may too late.  The return to Jesus for Christians or the rabbinic era for Jews is misplaced.  Christians in Germany cannot return to Jesus through Luther, Hitler and Heidegger.  Jews cannot move back before the Holocaust or Israel.  In a strange way, then, German Christians and Jews are bound together in the present as they have been in the past.  Both come after the Holocaust and after Israel – after Israel meaning after what Jews – with German political, material and theological enablement – have done and are doing to the Palestinian people.

After the Holocaust – this was immensely difficult for German Christians and Jews.  After Israel – this may be more difficult.  This is so because both communities seek to freeze history as if both communities were just emerging from the Nazi era, even as both communities have left the Nazi era completely behind.  After the war years, Germany was once again experimenting with democracy, split in two and struggling to get back on its feet and survive the Cold War.  Jews were also getting back on their feet, emerging on the American scene with success and a new found positive status and, of course, the state of Israel was just being established.  In the early years after World War II few could have predicted Germany’s economic success and Israel’s prowess.  Fewer still could have understood how closely bound Germany and Israel’s success would be.  But, then, who would have predicted the culpability involved and how their very success would help blind them, unintentionally at first and then intentionally, to the costs of their post-Holocaust empowerment?

That being done – and hopefully exposed – what is the future for the Jewish-Christian dialogue after the Holocaust and after Israel?  Can German Christians disentangle themselves from Jewish empowerment?  Can Jews disentangle themselves from German repentance/enablement and Israel’s abuse of power over against the Palestinian people?

Obviously the current peace process brokered by the United States and Secretary of State John Kerry, whatever its fit and starts, nowhere addresses the needs of the Palestinian people or Jewish culpability in the creation and expansion of the state of Israel.  No Middle East peace process has.  Instead, like German Christian and Jewish theology, the various peace processes have served as a cover for Israel’s continuing expansion.  If there are any doubts remaining, think of what the latest peace process promises Israel – more or less all the Palestinian land Israel has taken plus a release from any and all historical claims against it.  Think, then, of what the latest peace process promises Palestine – more or less everything it has yet to lose and a bar against raising any and all historical claims against Israel for its crimes against the Palestinian people.  

But the peace process granting of immunity is more expansive than it seems.  The historical release for crimes against the Palestinian people includes Israel’s unannounced co-conspirators – Germany, the United Kingdom, Europe historically and the European Union more recently and the United States.  For the claims Palestinians have against others involve more than Israel.  They include Israel’s enablers historically and in the present.  Without them Israel may not have come into being and certainly would have had a more difficult road ahead after statehood was declared.

Did I leave out Christian anti-Semitism, the vital core of historic Christianity and the repentant variety of Christian Holocaust theology, as persistent and ardent enablers of the need for, birth and expansion of the state of Israel?  The Christian enablement list is extended through the various movements of Christian Zionism.  Taken together and with their influence on the politics of the enabling political entities, Christian enablement of Israel and disablement of Palestine may be the single greatest contributing factor to the dire situation that the Palestinians face today.

So if the Palestinian Authority signs on the dotted peace process line, the culpability that disappears is hardly limited to Israel.  Rather the release is multidimensional.  Broadly speaking, it involves the entirety of the West.  It also involves much of the Arab world who have postured for their own benefit and who have done little, if anything, for the Palestinian cause they call their own.  As a religion that claims universality, what does Christianity have to say about the Christian share of this culpability?  German Christianity holds special importance here, as part of the Western Jewish question historically, as purveyor of the Holocaust and as enabler of an empowered Israel.

So the Jews function as a rescue for German complicity in the Holocaust – through repentance and paying up in cash, economy and military hardware – and now the much criticized Americans help rescue Europe from its history of anti-Semitism and its support for the state of Israel that ethnically cleansed Palestinians in its birth and has disappeared Palestine in its continuing expansion.  If only Israel can be held back – from taking more than it already has taken – and if only Palestinians – will accept what is left over from Israel’s birth and expansion – then all will be forgiven.  The challenge to the West, to German Christians, to Israeli Jews and global Jewry who have also been enablers and to Jewish theology will be over as well.  If the present or future peace process takes hold the German critics of the German Christian establishment will be silenced and the exploding Jewish prophetic will be sidelined.  Will German Christians then return to the safe confines of grappling with Luther, Hitler and Heidegger as Jews return to the safe confines of the ancient rabbis now filtered through the disembodied tenure-seeking academic elite in Jewish Studies?  

On Committing Oneself (Prophetically) to No Rescue

It isn’t easy to commit oneself to the possibility, indeed the necessity of refusing rescue.  Obviously on the personal level rescue is essential.  To refuse to rescue a person in need is universally understood to be unethical, even inhuman.  Of course that rescue is refused everyday on the personal and, to be sure, on the communal level as well.  How else to explain the unjust economic global economic order which is continually justified and tweaked, with soaring rhetoric that, nonetheless, reaches out but fails to reach a considerable segment of the global population?  

Triage is the order of the day – medically, politically, economically and militarily.  Religion is hardly exempt in the triage area, affirmations of our common humanity notwithstanding.  Most often, religion offers up the millions – perhaps billions – to be prayed for, ministered to, and visited as the life of the affluent congregations – the already saved – carry on their daily lives as if injustice did not exist.

Even these disconcerting thoughts about the use of the Holocaust as a form of trivialized nostalgia serving as a cover for the crimes of Israel, Jews, Germans, Christians, and the West in general – can these really encourage those in leadership and those they “serve” to turn the corner of complicity into active engagement on behalf of justice?  Hammering home the sins of commission and omission – without leaving out my own complicity as a Jew – is hardly the soil from which national, political, congregational and seminary outreach is accomplished.  And if all is seen as corrupt, even and especially our confession and repentance, if all is hiding and the constant search for shelter from the storms of our history and desires, where is the place of turning?  This raises another haunting question:  Has my complicity as a Jew inadvertently confirmed the absolute fall that Luther preached so insistently and violently?  Shall my end – our end – lead us to Luther, the sinfulness of everything under Luther’s Two-Kingdom sun?

God forbid.   

Here the prophetic may seem simply an indigenous Jewish rescue within the corrupt world, with the additional perk of repentance as a return to right relation with God.  In the Biblical world, the refusal to respond to God leads to a suffering exile but then the bright light of return is held out and sometimes (provisionally) accepted by God.  Could the prophetic function as rescue for all the indicted earlier, including German Christians and Jews, who finally strip themselves of their (functioning) Holocaust fig leaves?

Standing naked – and repentant – before God.  Is there any gesture more humble and required than this for Jews and Christians?  Giving up injustice and moving toward justice – embodying a revolutionary rather than a pietistic forgiveness – if that is unacceptable what else is there to be offered?

But, then, after the Holocaust, what is there to say about God?  The question is even more difficult now.  What is there to be said about God after the Holocaust and after Israel?  After Luther, Hitler, Heidegger, Holocaust, Israel?  True, the additions of demonizing theology and militant atrocity are endless.  After Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo?  There seems no respite.

Nonetheless, both the Jewish and Christian canon is fixed on Jews, the people Israel, the Promised Land and the destiny of the Jewish people.  Thus simply limiting ourselves to the immediate canonical context of Jewish and Christian life, what can we say about God – after?

The Biblical prophets are directly linked to God, though this connection is troubled and troubling.  For after God’s initial call, the prophet is often left on his own.  So, too, the prophet’s mission to Israel is fraught.  In the main, God already knows that God’s call for repentance will largely go unheard.  The promise of return to God and right relation to one another and the land is fated.  Rescue is possible.  Rescue is out of reach.

Is that the plight of Jews today – and their sponsors – after the post-Holocaust Jewish return to the land has ended as a debacle?  One might hesitate, since we do not yet know how Israel will turn out.  Nonetheless, there is much evidence to go on already, beginning with the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians in the formation of the state of Israel.  Only a belief in rescue could see the state of Israel’s initial history and its subsequent course as redeemable.  Only a final covering over the cycle of violence and atrocity could, even if a just peace was somehow negotiated, justify what happened to the Palestinian people.

The Jewish prophetic cannot go the route of rescue, politically, the contemporary Jewish prophetic is too brutally honest. Neither can it go the route of rescue, theologically, today’s Jewish prophets would feel foolish calling on the Holocaust-absent God.  If anything is certain it is that the prophet – and the prophetic – is on her own.  God is not calling, commanding or accompanying the prophet, at least according to contemporary Jewish prophets.  

For some, this may seem an oversight, for how does a person sacrifice for justice absent a cause greater than self, one that is rooted in a transcendent reality?  Whatever the theoretical constructs, the contemporary Jewish prophetic does not solicit resources outside of itself.  For after the Holocaust and after Israel, how can one call on a God of justice without regressing to an infantilism that belies the struggle for a just world?  

So there is no return to innocence and no return to God.  Without either, however, does justice have a chance to be implemented and if so what kind of justice could that be?

There is no rescue for Christianity, German or otherwise either.  Yet the question remains:  Is Christianity a proper place for the Jewish prophetic to weigh in?  Christians might argue their separate religious province but, having used the Holocaust, the recovery of Jesus’ Jewishness, and the magnificence of the Hebrew Bible to their advantage, neglecting the contemporary Jewish prophetic “no rescue” critique would be returning to the historic Christian manipulative use of Jews for their own self-aggrandizement.  If because of their birth origins and theological claims on the Hebrew Bible, as well as the now negotiated sense of being the New Israel, Christian cannot help themselves with regard to using Jews to inform their own identity, then at least listen to the different sides of Jewishness and allow Jews be real rather than imaginary interlocutors.

Yet as we see with Luther, Hitler and Heidegger whose imaginary Jews loomed so large they were consumed by them, there is no more difficult task than disentangling Christianity from its use of Jews.  In fact, in the long arc of Christian history disentanglement from Jews, albeit mostly mythic constructs of Jews, has never been accomplished.  Admittedly, prophetic Jews stretch innocence and rescue to the limit. Even most Jews and certainly most non-Jews fear for their “normal” lives in their presence.  

Isaiah’s shelter from the storm is scarcely to be found in the Jewish prophetic, especially when the prophetic is separated from God.  Though, even when connected with God, the shelter the Biblical prophets’ promise is so terrifying that Jews canonized the prophetic writings.  Canonization of the prophets is a way of remembering by distancing the community from their traumatic force.  But, then, are the contemporary Jewish “without rescue” prophets really any harsher in their critique than the ancient “with the remote possibility of rescue” prophets were? 

Reading the Biblical prophets is a cautionary note when a Jewish contemporary prophet shows up on one’s doorstep.  So lauded in contemporary Christian discourse, the Biblical prophets are investigated, probed, with unparalleled linguistic and exegetical skills, in short they are taught and then preached – with computers whirring, pressed robes flowing and heads piously bowed – as a way of rescue.  How impertinent it is for a Jewish prophet today to disturb this flowering of Christian renewal – after – by announcing that this post-Holocaust embrace of Jewishness is itself deeply culpable.

According to the contemporary Jewish prophets, the culpability moves in at least three directions.  Toward Palestinians – enabling the destruction of Palestine and the ghettoization of the Palestinian people.  Toward Israel – enabling its continuing expansion and thus evolution into a fascist state.   Toward Jews – enabling the destruction of the Jewish ethical tradition.  Thus under the guise of reconciliation, German Christians enable Israel’s final assimilation to the Other Nations.  Is this, perhaps subconsciously, yet another, though more benevolent, attempt to diminish Jewish particularity by making Jews and the state of Israel more like German Christians and Germany?  

No rescue, no rest – for the wicked?  But that is hardly the point of the “no rescue” prophets who are themselves culpable – and know themselves to be.  For if anything clouds the picture or illuminates it most clearly is that many of these “no rescue” prophets are Jewish Israelis who have left Israel.  That is, they have left the Jewish (and Christian) state of Israel “rescue” because of the initial and continuing injustice they and their state have done and are doing to the Palestinian people.  

After their return, these Jewish Israelis have chosen exile, what perhaps is to be the last exile in Jewish history.  In their own minds at least, they have left Israel and, to boot, their Jewishness too, even as both are celebrated.  Obviously, though, one cannot leave one’s background.  Regardless of their self-understanding, even in their leave-taking, they remain Israeli and Jewish. It is best to see these prophets as Still/Former Jewish/Israelis.

These Still/Former Jewish/Israelis are a tough bunch.  They refuse the safe confines of a nuclearized Jewish ghetto and choose instead exile among cultures and nations that formerly persecuted Jews and remain profoundly ambivalent about them.  Moreover, by leaving Israel they transgress Jewish and Christian Holocaust theology that sees empowerment of Jews in Israel as the redemptive response to Jewish powerlessness that terminated in the Holocaust.  Choosing instead to wander within and among the Other Nations, they are also alienated by their experience and language from traditional Diaspora Jews.  Few Diaspora Jews want the real Israel at their doorstep.  Like German Christians, Diaspora Jews prefer, indeed demand, an idealized version of Jewishness.  Israeli Jews who have left Israel have little patience with the idealism vested in them.  They know what they have done.  They know what Israel has done.

These Still/Former Jewish/Israelis have been the Jewish boots on the ground.  They have returned to the Promised Land, served in the military, done the dirty work of occupation and expansion and now refuse the rescue of their embracing religious and national ethos.  This is because, unlike Jews who long to return to innocence, and their Christian counterparts who use Jews to return to their innocence, the Still/Former Jewish/Israelis know the score.  Jewish and Christian Innocence is culpability.  That culpability is endless.

On the German scene, one might think Dietrich Bonhoeffer a likely compatriot, a comrade in arms for these Still/Former Jewish/Israelis.  After all, Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and was executed for his part in the conspiracy.  He also thought through his Christian faith and appraised its enablement of Hitler and the Nazis to the point where the only future he envisioned for Christianity was severely chastened.  But the Still/Former Jewish/Israelis are too far gone even for Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer’s reflections on faith are far too traditional, too Biblical and too traditionally Christian.  After all, Bonhoeffer anticipates Christian renewal at another moment in history.  The Still/Former Jewish/Israelis aren’t going anywhere near Christian – or Jewish – renewal.

Is the “no rescue” Jewish prophetic, then, the last word on faith?  After all, these Jewish prophets carry forward a tradition that, at least in its origins, is based on God’s command.  It could be that the contemporary Jewish prophetic has simply internalized God’s command in a context where claiming God for prophetic witness seems unjustifiable, childish and, more, triumphalist.  Is it then inappropriate for another faith community to speak what the Jewish prophetic cannot?  

By interjecting various Christian liberation theologies that affirm critique of Christianity, work diligently for justice and retain a belief in God, can Christians who embrace this form of Christianity speak of their beliefs to today’s Jewish prophets?  Or should the Christian community, especially the German Christian community who has hid behind Constantinian Judaism as its rescue and its empire enablement, break with Constantinian Judaism, pursue justice for Palestinians and, in true repentance, be silent about God?  Perhaps decades of embodying the prophetic – without rescue – is the needed ingredient to clear the German injustice account so that German Christians might approach God again.

But know, too, that these belated events – the explosion of the Jewish prophetic and perhaps the awakening of some German Christians to how the Holocaust functions on their behalf – occur at the end of Jewish history as we have known and inherited it.  Unbeknownst to them, the Jewish prophetic can be viewed as a last gasp effort to retrieve Jewishness from the ultimate sin – to become like the Other Nations.  It goes like this: Constantinian Jews have wanted and pursued assimilation with a desperation so blatant that is impossible to miss.  Yet most of the world has missed what is obvious.  This is because Constantinian Jews have mixed their material ascent with a fascinating focus on Jewish suffering and morality.  However, anyone who observes Jewish post-Holocaust life from a dispassionate distance can see it for what it is – an interconnected web of ascendancy and power.  

Being on the other side of empire power for so long, who can criticize Jews for deciding that is their turn for power, even if it is at the expense of another people’s suffering.  After all, Germany has made the same decision after the Holocaust and with help from these very same Constantinian Jews who, in their own self-serving way, limit their critique to the German past.  And if the choice were theirs to make, who among the nations would choose any other route, regardless of the cost?   

As a nation among nations, once cannot expect anything more or less from Germany or from the state of Israel for that matter.  National leaders and their enablers, from business people to the intellectual and religious elite, make straight the crooked path to national power.  Through direct speech or silence on certain issues, they provide rationale, ethical green lights, and narrative structure to what otherwise would be seen as a naked grab for the holy grail of empire.  Is that why so many Jewish philosophers remain enthralled with the anti-Semitic, Nazi, Martin Heidegger?  

The cover provided by Jewish academics – in the United States, Israel and Europe, including Germany – for the state of Israel and, more recently, their attempt to deflect the larger BDS movement that seeks justice for Palestinians by economically disarming the state of Israel, place them in too close proximity to the intellectual class that supported and were promoted in the Nazi era.  For those who think this discussion is extreme, eliminate the death camps which Heidegger may have been ignorant of and perhaps would not have supported – though absent a confession from him in the post-war years, his opposition is conjecture. What is the difference between supporting a Nazification of Germany and defending/protecting an ethnic cleansing and continually expanding state of Israel which Palestinians experience as a form of racism – would they say fascism? – similar to the one experienced by Jews in the Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1938.

After this form of abuse of power, there is no future for an ethically-based Jewishness.  Paradoxically, this may be the impetus for the explosion of the Jewish prophetic in our time.  This explosion is not only for justice for Palestinians or even primarily so, though this is how most prophetic Jews would explain it.  Contra their explanation, it is more accurately viewed as a last ditch effort to thwart the ultimate assimilation of Jewishness to unjust power, for which there is no rescue.  Thus, as it turns out, the prophets are themselves entangled in rescue.  Their “no rescue” sensibility is plea, more demand, to stop before it is too late.  

The Jewish prophets thus embody rescue as they announce its impossibility. Do they at the same time embody God as they declare God’s absence?

What is to be done?

Now that the 2013-2014 American-led peace process is dead – whether (provisionally) resurrected or not – what have we learned?  

Though American-led, Europe in general, the European Union and Germany in particular were/are fully onboard with the 21013-2014 American-led John Kerry initiative.  Fully onboard for what?  The peace process was ostensibly mounted as a last ditch effort to save the possibility of a two-state solution, a secure Israel living side by side with a free and friendly Palestine.  Yet the devil is in the definitional details.  Kerry’s definition of two-states – one accepted and promoted by his European partners – has a peculiar sensibility.  It seems Kerry’s view of a Palestinian state is Israel’s left-overs. More or less everything should be given to Palestinians that Israel has not already taken.  

Look at Kerry’s map of Palestine.  One finds there: Jerusalem under Israeli control; the major Jewish settlements in the West Bank remain; Palestine’s borders to be patrolled by Israel, the United States and NATO.  Though unannounced but again awaiting only the signature of the president of the Palestinian Authority to be accepted by the European Union and Germany, Kerry’s peace plan leaves Palestine occupied by Israeli settlers and foreign troops, surrounding a permanently ghettoized Palestinian population.

But what a relief to the parties involved if John Kerry succeeds!  Kerry promises Israel, Jews and their friendly enablers, the end of all historical claims against those who caused/sponsored/enabled the original and permanent displacement of the Palestinian people.  Yet with all the goodies promised everyone on the victorious side, Israel balks.  Israel is unable to accept a final victory which solidifies its place in the international nation-state system, represents a victory guaranteed militarily by the still colonial West and, at the same time, buries the West’s post-Holocaust colonial history.

Why Israel refuses to accept the normalization Irving Greenberg wrote about in his 1988 essay – with all the land and resources it has taken since 1948 forgiven – is ripe for Jewish political and theological exploration.  Obviously the willingness of the United States, Europe and Germany in particular to sponsor, hope for and pressure Palestinians to accept a permanent ghettoization is similarly suitable for exploration.  But, for now, in the wake of this “Palestinian ghettoization as permanent” failure, the question remains as to what is to be done.  Because as the permanent aspect of ghettoization as a signed and internationally legitimate agreement has been forestalled, the harsh reality of the ghettoized Palestinian situation remains and grows worse daily.

Here is what dissenting Jews and Christians – and people of conscience of all faiths and backgrounds – must understand about the proposed solutions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:  there will never be – I repeat, never be – a two-state solution where a real Palestinian state emerges.  By a real Palestinian state, I mean a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, all of the West Bank for Palestinians without any Jewish settlers and settlements, and with a protected link to a free Gaza.  No political analyst worth his or her grain of salt believes that there will be a real Palestinian state and certainly no one anywhere, including the Palestinian negotiators, believe that this was on the table during the latest rounds of peace negotiations.  So what are we left with?

Increasingly, the negative one-state solution is spoken about as the reality – that one state being Israel controlling the land between Tel Aviv and the Jordan River, with almost 6 million Palestinians under Israeli control by way of second-class citizenship within Israel proper, under occupation In Jerusalem and the West Bank,  and border lock-down in Gaza.  The more positive role of the one-state increasingly voiced Palestinians intellectuals would grant Palestinians equal citizenship within this state, thus the emergence of a unified, democratic Israel-Palestine.

 Whether through practical reality or utopian aspirations, the positive Israel-Palestine one-state solution is a non-starter for a variety of reasons, including Israel’s absolute opposition to such a state, a position that Israel’s American-European allies are in full agreement with.  Refusing a real two-state solution, Israel correctly calculates that the American-European commitment to Israel is far more important to its history, politics and empire than Palestinians are or will be.  No matter the pressure received, Israel knows the American-European coded language well.  In the final analysis, the American-European alliance will not abandon Israel.

Since there will be neither a real two-state solution nor the positive one-state solution, where should Germans and German Christians stand in this seemingly unbridgeable gap?  Despite the rhetoric, this gap is permanent in the political sense, for the foreseeable future and beyond.  Israel will continue to expand.  Palestine will continue to disappear.  Flare-ups, Israeli incursions/crackdowns, Palestinian resistance/uprisings – the situation will be continually contested.  Where can German justice-seekers stand within this gap and contestation?

For Germans and German Christians, a one-state depoliticized Jewish entity in the Middle East is almost impossible to contemplate.  For German and German Christians, a Jewish permanent conquering of Palestinians – if it is admitted rather than disguised – is likewise almost impossible to contemplate.  Both impossibilities have less to do with Jews and Palestinians than they have to do with German history in relation to Jews.  No matter the rhetorical desire by Germany and German Christians for Jews to decide their own fate, German control of the images of Jews is crucial to its own civilizational rescue from the Holocaust and its continuing political and economic ascendancy in the 21^st century.  Thus Germany and German Christians are limited and constrained by Jews as they appear in images and as they act politically.  German freedom from the horrors of the Holocaust remains tied to Jews in the present.  

Since Jews are on both sides of the empire Israel divide, Jews in Israel and around the world are rocking the German boat once again.  On the one hand, a marauding and conquering Israel distorts the image Germans want and need of innocent Jews.  On the other hand, prophetic Jews refuse to be boxed in by Germany’s need for innocent, empowered Jews who are, for Germans, conveniently outside of Germany.  Even today, the German and German Christian clash with real, living, troubling Jews is fraught historically.  Perhaps this is why German Christians especially seek to relegate Jews to the Bible and a romanticized Israel.   

Of course there is the long love affair among Germans with progressive Jewish Israelis.  Book and political tours by Israeli writers such as Amos Oz and David Grossman have been the mainstay of the progressive Israel-issue circuit for decades.  But, though these progressive Israelis have argued for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in Germany they have functioned to retain the myth of Israeli power’s innocence.  

Following Oz and Grossman, neither explores the fraught terrain of Israel’s birth.  Instead they locate Israel’s waywardness in the aftermath of the 1967 war.  In short, Oz and Grossman – and others such as Gush Shalom’s, Uri Avnery – consolidate for Germans, Israel’s political and, as importantly, ethical legitimacy as a state by indicting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory since the 1967 war.  Arguing for the strict separation of Israel and the Palestinians, these progressive Israelis provide a relief valve for Germans torn internally – and historically – about the Jewish question.  The strict separation of Israelis and Palestinians allows a retreat to Israel as innocent once the waywardness of Israel’s occupation is resolved.  Is this also the safe harbor retreat for Germans?

Importantly, progressive Israelis who have occupied the German liberal sensibility lay blame on Israel’s waywardness in the areas Germany knows well from its own history – on right-wing politicians and their followers that have recently come to power in Israel.    Thus the Israel-German historical parallel is drawn even if it is unannounced.  Jewish politics in an innocent Israel has been taken over by the right-wing just as an innocent Germany was taken over during the Nazi era.  

To be sure, Germany lost its battle in the Nazi era but now that is being corrected.  The German audiences listening to progressive Israelis, chastened by their Nazi era loss, have righted their course and thus are once again innocent.  Moreover, Germans today are struggling with progressive Israelis to right their course, thus Jews are innocent.  How good it is for Germans and Jews to work together in a common struggle to recover/retain their mutual original innocence!  

But with the end of the two-state solution and without a positive one-state solution in sight, what are Germans and German Christians to do even with progressive Jews, Israelis and otherwise, who seek solidarity between, in their minds, a chastened/innocent Germany and a beleaguered/innocent/wayward Israel?  If Germans continue to see themselves as chastened and innocent but cut through Israel and Jews as beleaguered/innocent/wayward, German feelings about Jews might then revert to the “perversion” of the anti-Semitic Nazi era. Here Germans may rediscover an ambivalence about Jews that remains beneath the surface of contemporary German – and German Christian – life.  This wrestling with Jews attests once again to how German perception of Jews is at ground level an internal wrestling with German history.

Of course, there are some Germans who believe they have entered a new Germany and that entanglement with Jews is old-hat.  The issue Germany confronts today has to do with imported workers from different parts of the world and with different religious backgrounds.  In a democratic, European Union- oriented Germany, the issue is the working out a diverse, multi-cultural Germany.  In short, the Nazi-Jewish corner of history has been turned.  

Yet isn’t this simply another attempt to struggle for an innocence belied by history?  If only Germany can turn this difficult present-day corner, then the past – especially its Jewish past – will be left behind as if it never happened.  Ironically, the increase in the Jewish population in Germany provides such an opportunity, especially since these Jews are overwhelmingly non-German Jews and thus can be argued as fitting into the multi-cultural space of the new Germany. 

These “replacement” Jews are convenient.  But do they actually represent a turning of the corner?  Was the problem in previous eras of German history the lack of appreciation of diversity or was specifically something to do with Jews?  Turning one’s gaze to diversity can be an advance.  It can also be a cover, a sought after return to innocence that is not innocent.

On the German Christian front, the issue is equally complex.  There is a tug of war between those who continue to see Jews as central to their faith and history and those who welcomes the new multicultural Germany as attention to the present lest the past repeat itself.  While the former seeks to retain a Jewish focus, the latter see the past as about injustice, right-wing politics and the German refusal of diversity, rather than specifically about Jews.  Though both wings of the German Christian community view themselves as focused on the right issue, they are shadowed by the Holocaust and Israel as it really is.  No matter their hopes, German Christians cannot move beyond Biblical or Holocaust Jews.  Nor can German Christians avoid the reality of contemporary Jewish life.

But if history cannot be left behind, especially a history so marked by violence and atrocity and one that the German state and German Christians continue to be so deeply entangled with, what is the road head?  If Jews aren’t – only – innocent or culpable, Germans aren’t – only – culpable or innocent either.

In the end, we are left with the need to negotiate our histories – Diaspora Jews, Jewish Israelis, Germans and German Christians alike.  But what can that negotiated sensibility be in a time of Jewish and German empowerment?

 Perhaps it has to do with how Palestinians are viewed by Jews and Germans.  If Israel – and Palestine – is seen as a German-Jewish drama, then the history and destiny of Palestinians is beside the point.  That is the way Israel-Palestine has been understood.  I doubt this foundational sensibility will change in the near future.  But what if, even with this one-sided understanding, Palestinians are seen as the interlocutor of German-Jewish history, casting shadows upon and interrogating both?  What if Palestinians point to the hypocrisy of German and Jewish claims to innocence after the Holocaust? 

Palestinians surface the hypocrisy within the well positioned German-Jewish solidarity. Germans may believe that the enablement of Israel truly wipes its history of violence and atrocity clean and it can now move onto other more immediate issues – foreign workers for example. This presumes that the non-acceptance of the Other in German society is not Jewish-specific.  Rather it is simply a cultural working out of difference as in many societies around the world.  At the same time, Palestinians who experience the violence of a German-enabled Israel might uncover the mostly hidden Jewish anger of a Holocaust trauma that cannot be bridged by oppressing another people.  This means that Israel-enablers are not really forgiven either.

 Here Germans and Jews have arrived – no real two-state, no positive one-state.  Here Germans and Jews will remain – hiding their self-serving empires with no lessening of trauma and no authentic forgiveness.  How long can both the material and ethical situations hold injustice toward Palestinians together?

The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) seems to present a way through this holding pattern, calling Israel to account for its occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, albeit in a limited way.  At least, this holding pattern works as a form of negotiation between Israeli power and the West’s – indeed the world’s – unwillingness to act decisively.  For though it is rarely discussed, the BDS movement could be frozen or ended with the signing of any agreement, even an interim one, by Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  In the political world, BDS is a materially actualized movement but, whatever the movement’s rhetoric, is limited to a two-state demand.  BDS is not as some hoped and others rail against a threat to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Nor does it pose a real possibility of achieving a positive one-state reality.  BDS is a witness, an important one, that injustice continues to be done to the Palestinian people and that business as usual should be discontinued as long as injustice continues.  

What awaits Israel-Palestine in the immediate future?  When will German and German Christians break from tired middle that only enables Israel to continue its occupation?  As I have argued in these pages, like most nations and communities, Germany and German Christians are mostly self-involved.  That this self-involvement involves rescue from a horrific past is hardly peculiar to Germany and German Christians.  

Nonetheless the Holocaust marks both with a permanent stain. The Palestinian people have and will continue to pay a horrific price for German and German Christian history.  Against this tide the Jewish prophetic tradition is limited and humbled.  It, too, has to face the Holocaust and the heirs of the Holocaust who use the Holocaust as a wedge of oppression.  For German and German Christian history have done damage to the Jewish prophetic tradition as well.  Dare contemporary Jewish prophets speak the outrage they feel unencumbered by the history they, too, inherit as Jews? 

Perhaps this is why, yet again, this Passover and Easter season has been filled with the trite and the banal sentiments of a “risen Lord” and a “liberated people.”  For after the Holocaust and after Israel there is little left to proclaim other than the empty and meaningless proclamations from yesteryear.  Only a concerted effort by Germans, German Christians, Jews – and Palestinians – will move us beyond holy day clichés.  If it isn’t already too late.