BETTINA PRATOand about various liberal, republican, or ‘‘deliberative’’ understandings of human rights
as more or less originally implicated in certain possibilities of political participation or
‘‘public autonomy.’’ In the case of Israel/Palestine, however, these issues take on a differ-
ent character due to the ill-defined boundaries of what constitutes a sovereign public
space. Indeed, this question takes on particular urgency in debates concerning the ‘‘prom-
ised land,’’ its borders, and the nature of Jewish claims to all or part of it. If wielding
sovereign power in a particular territory is to enact the memory of being strangers else-
where and not to oppress other strangers, as Hollander suggests, how is one to understand
the relationship between the Jewish people and the Land? And what, exactly, is the land
of Israel? What are its boundaries? Where can one legitimately draw a line to say ‘‘here
you are strangers, here you are at home’’? Again, this set of questions clearly exceeds both
religious and human rights discourse taken separately. The conjunction of human rights
discourse with a particular reading of the prophetic call summed up in the commandment
to remember one’s own strangeness, however, paves the way for engaging questions of
politics and national rights in relation to the Land.
One of the most explicit RHR statements concerning the political implications of the
convergence of human rights and prophetic discourse for the issue of land rights is offered
by Rabbi Forman, who writes that ‘‘Being wedded to a Divine promise of Eretz Yisrael
Hashleima (the Greater Land of Israel), whose roots are found in a biblical narrative that
took place thousands of years ago, is no longer theological viable.’’^53 In similar tones,
Rabbi Hollander notes that recognizing the human rights of Palestinians today means
recognizing their national aspirations and the right to live in a land that has been theirs
for centuries, by creating their own state alongside Israel. In his view, there are practical
as well as theological reasons for foregoing the interpretation of Eretz Israel proposed by
the settlers’ movement and by the religious right, starting from the fact that it is not
possible today to occupy the entire territory of Mandate Palestine for strategic, legal,
humanitarian, and political reasons. Moreover, in religious terms the value of human life
must, for Hollander (and RHR in general), be put above that of the land, and saving
lives requires confining Israel to internationally recognized borders. While this is also the
position of other Israeli religious peace groups, such as Netivot Shalom, the human rights
focus of RHR enables it to ground this stance not only in the human cost of a ‘‘Greater
Israel’’ in terms of Israeli lives, as these groups do, but also in the costs inflicted on Israel’s
‘‘others.’’ As Rabbi Ascherman put it: ‘‘We have no right to force ourselves on others and
then justify these kinds of human rights abuses in order to protect our presence.’’^54
If this is the case, however, how does RHR as a group understand and justify the
rightof Jews to live as citizensin a Jewish state, the creation of which turned hundreds of
thousands of people into ‘‘strangers’’ in their own land and elsewhere, in refugee camps
that predate by twenty years the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? In principle, the
notion of dwelling in power (i.e., achieving statehood)as a meansto obey the command-
ment to bear witness to one’s legacy of strangeness may suggest a fully egalitarian ap-
PAGE 580580.................16224$ CH28 10-13-06 12:37:09 PS