Marc H. Ellis

By Marc H. Ellis

Yasser Arafat is dead. He leaves behind him the grief of an as-yet-unrealized nation and the unseemly jockeying for money and power. How successful will those who inherit Palestinian leadership work with Israel? The immediate hope is for a cessation of violence. In the long run, the hope is for a political solution that both sides in this conflict can live with.

The question of where Arafat will be buried has been decided. The Palestinians demanded Jerusalem as the fitting burial location for their national leader, a demand tied to their claim for Jerusalem as the future capital of Palestine. Israel refused Jerusalem as Arafat's burial site for the same reasons that the Palestinians insisted on it: Israel has never recognized a Palestinian national identity and claims Jerusalem as its own.

So Israel has allowed a second choice, Ramallah, where Arafat lived his last years as a virtual prisoner surrounded by Israeli occupation forces. From the Israeli perspective, this is the most likely site for the capital of the future Palestinian state.

Still, for his burial, I wonder if there is another possibility, one that evokes politics even as it acknowledges its limitations, a burial arrangement that recognizes the war between these two peoples ending at the grave and symbolic of the joint destiny of Jews and Palestinians.

by Marc H. Ellis

As the prime ministers of Palestine and Israel leave Washington this week, politicians and interested citizens around the world ponder the future of the Middle East. Over the decades encounters in Washington have yielded little in the way of movement towards a just and lasting peace.

Just the opposite. For decades now the facts on the ground have been moving in a decidedly negative direction. Israel continues to build settlements, confiscate land and displace more and more Palestinians. The much discussed Wall of Separation simply acknowledges the emerging borders of an expanded Israel.

Though the future is open, a movement towards justice and peace would mean a radical reversal of Israel's relentless drive to encircle, ghettoise and conquer the Palestinian people. From the standpoint of historical forces this reversal seems unlikely. At this moment, it seems the best Palestinians can hope for is a negotiated surrender, a cessation of Israel's expansion, so that one day another more just reality may come into being.

by Marc H. Ellis

In 1988, at the height of the Palestinian uprising, I had a peculiar and startling dream, one I will never forget. The leading Jewish intellectuals and religious leaders of our century were brought to Israel to share their ideas about the crisis: what should be done? One by one, they testified in front of a distinguished panel of judges made up of the prime ministers of the state since its inception. It was quite a scene: Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Albert Einstein, among others, speaking before the legendary David Ben-Gurion, the irascible Golda Meir, as well as Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Contemporary Jewish intellectuals were also invited and again the roll-call was formidable - Abraham Heschel, Bernard Lewis, Michael Walzer, Noam Chomsky. Somehow I was invited and, because I was an afterthought, I was last to testify.