ABSTRACT
During two thousand years of wandering and waiting, we never imagined a Jewish nation that would find itself obliged to suppress and humiliate an entire people. Palestinians as homeless victims will make us constantly feel like strangers in our own home. David Hartman describes a "vicious dialectic": the more we control the Palestinians, the more "we lose ourselves", and "become alienated from everything normally identified as Jewish behavior". Hartman is accustomed to speak of the continuous dialectic in Judaism between the biblical dream and Talmudic realism. God shows favor to Israel because they are "strict with themselves" and thank God even for a meager meal, the size of an olive or an egg. Hartman's thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like his thinking in general, begins not with the human being as the ultimate value, but with God's word, the halakhah.
