Cuba/Palestine — How Obama can assure his legacy

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 the war crimes-eligible dignitaries in Paris leave for their home stomping grounds, it appears I’m headed to Havana in February. I doubt I’ll see Prime Minister Netanyahu there angling for the front line.

It turns out that the Havana Book Fair is featuring my 25th anniversary Spanish edition of Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation. Though the airfare is steep, I hope to celebrate the survival and flourishing of a book I wrote many years ago. Especially in these heady days of US-Cuba rapprochement.

Sadly, my words are still relevant today. The prospect of Jewish liberation is further away. Has it disappeared?

Twenty-five years is a long time in our globalized virtual word and what I wrote is, as should be expected, somewhat dated. But my words of yesteryear are hardly irrelevant. Israel’s abuse of power and the occupation of Palestine remains.

Empowerment in Israel has not liberated Jews. The possibility of liberation for Palestinians is fading. In the 1980s, I saw the liberation of Jews and Palestinians joined together. Was I wrong?

Traveling to Costa Rica for the book launch in 1988, I mingled with Christian liberationists on the front lines of the wars in Central America. I thought then that the Jewish place in the world is with those on the bottom of the world order. After all, European Jews experienced historically the boot that the majority of Christians in the world experienced then and now.

In the 1980s, Israel was on the front line of the repression in Central America, training and arming the dictatorships. During the last decades, Israel has expanded its military presence throughout the world. Little has changed. What has changed is for the worse.

Justice hasn’t come to the West Bank or Jerusalem and won’t be coming anytime soon. The recent war in Gaza isn’t over. Children are freezing to death in Gaza as I write.

So while normalization is in the US-Cuban air, the parameters of which are yet to be determined, the US-Israel air, with some turbulence, continues in the old dishonest-broker normal. Would that President Obama announced on national television a breakthrough to the Palestinian side and forced Israel to its senses.

First Cuba, now Israel-Palestine. Call it a legacy issue if you want. On the global scene, President Obama’s legacy would be assured. Palestine – and Israel – could choose another path.

Some might see traveling to Havana as a side-step away from Israel-Palestine. I beg to differ. The issues I raised in a Jewish theology of liberation weren’t only about Israel-Palestine. They were and are about the place of Jews of Conscience in a world of suffering and struggle with the two-thirds of the world in dire need of the same liberation we once were in need of.

Jews of Conscience want to reverse the squandering of the Jewish legacy of suffering and struggle. Jews can’t be for others outside Israel-Palestine if we’re not first and foremost for Palestinian freedom. Otherwise we’re just posing for the cameras and seeking our advantage, like Netanyahu and the other “leaders” in Paris.

The Jewish spectacle in Paris precedes me in Havana. Netanyahu’s call for French Jews to emigrate to Israel and the subsequent burial of the Jewish victims of the attack in Jerusalem isn’t a sign of liberation. It’s a sign of retrenchment and defeat, a celebration of a voluntary, albeit nuclearized, ghettoization that Jews – and the world – can ill afford.

The alternative? Remaining steadfast. Refusing to angle for the front line. Working for justice globally while remembering that the key for Jews is Palestine.

All over the world people are hungry for Jewish voices that seek liberation for all peoples, including and especially the Palestinian people. I doubt Havana is different. As a front line people for more than fifty years, Cubans realize correctly that the front line for justice isn’t in Paris.