A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERSphetic justice is the survival of the Jewish people not only in general but specifically as a
national community inEretz Israel. The question of Israel’s right to exist within the
boundaries of 1949, however, is not always approached in the same terms, since references
to national rights and international law by various rabbis mix with themes of Jewish
history, values, and survival, yielding sometimes an impression of equal appreciation of
secular-political and religious justifications for state survival, and at other times a sense
of identification of the survival of individuals with that of the Jewish people and of the
state, as transpires in the discourse of right-wing religious groups. Unlike the latter, how-
ever, RHR considers sovereign control by Jews over the whole land of biblical Israel not
a ‘‘just’’ end but rather a conditional entitlement, whose ‘‘justice’’ depends on whether it
is an instrument for the realization of properlyJewishlife in a land that Jews both have
been promised and have fought for. Given the presence of Palestinians in the West Bank
and Gaza, control over these areas cannot, according to this view, be a means to ensure
the realization of such Jewish life today, nor to secure Jewish survival or the survival of
the state of Israel. Contrary to the views of religious settlers, Jewish land claims in biblical
Judea and Samaria may, therefore, have to be relinquished, despite their apparent ‘‘jus-
tice’’ in light of the covenant, because the realization of these claims cannot be undertaken
with just (hence properlyJewish) means. In this regard, Rabbi Ascherman often quotes
the biblical story of Abraham’s decision to part ways with his nephew Lot by splitting
with him the Land that was entirely promised to him, so as to avoid strife. This story
suggests to Ascherman that Abraham’s moral inheritance (hence a properlyJewishunder-
standing of justice in relation to the state of Israel) includes the capacity to forfeit some
Jewish land claims out of desire to live in peace with others.
It is not clear that most Palestinians would accept such a notion of justice, which
seems to call only for ending the occupation or its human rights violations, leaving the
historical trajectory of the Zionist enterprise until 1967 essentially beyond discussion. Nor
does this notion account for the fact that Palestinians remain silent ‘‘others’’ and ‘‘strang-
ers’’ in whose name justice must be done, rather than being recognized as people who can
articulate their own vision of justice, which may be quite different from Abraham’s or
RHR’s. Despite these limitations, the conjunction of human rights pragmatism with a
prophetic sense of Jewish chosenness in RHR hints at a vision of the significance of a
Jewish Israel that may at least provisionally work around the difficulty of questioning the
Jewish character of the state as a ‘‘just end.’’ Such a vision is not new: for instance, in his
writings about Zionism, Levinas argues that the most authentic justification for the cre-
ation of Israel was the need to bear a torch of witness to infinity that would shine as an
example to all peoples.^44 Similarly, though not necessarily in religious terms, other Jewish
intellectuals of the early twentieth century, such as Hannah Arendt, Judas Magnes, and
Martin Buber, believed that a Jewish homeland in Palestine might generate forms of
political belonging of unprecedented openness. Even for Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who
claimed that there was no such thing as a national Jewish right to set up a state in today’s
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