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2 Reclaiming the Place of Exile for Political Theology In the refugee mappings examined in the preceding chapter, exile is primarily presented as a location to escape through return. Yet, I contend, these cartographies of return from exile, when they create palimpsests and reveal the land to consist of heterogeneous places and overlapping identities, do more than simply overcome or erase exile. Instead, these mappings suggest the possibility of an exilic form of return, a vision of inhabiting particular places in IsraelPalestine shaped by the lessons of exile. The “return journeys” charted by AbuSitta and other Palestinian refugees at their best create such palimpsests, and therefore project not only a departure from exile but also display having been shaped by exile. In this chapter I defend the claim that mappings of return might be shaped by an exilic ethos through an analysis of two competing political theologies of exile: first, what Israeli political theorist Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has called the national colonial theology of Zionism, with its doctrinal insistence on the “negation of exile” (shelilat ha-galut); and second, the late John Howard Yoder’s exilic ecclesiology and missiology, with its embrace of galut as vocation.1 Through a close discussion of how the negation of exile fits within a Zionist political theology in which the Jewish people are redeemed from exile through physical return to the land of Israel and through (re)entry into “real” history understood as the history of nation-states, I follow Raz-Krakotzkin, Gabriel Piterberg, and others in insisting that the negation of exile fuels cartographies of return that erase Palestinians from the map. To counter this Zionist political theology of exile, I turn to an analysis of how Yoder named exile as the shape of the church’s mission, a posture of “not being in charge” and of seeking the shalom of the cities and lands in which the church finds itself. While Yoder’s theological appraisal of exile unfolds within a sometimes problematic account of Christianity’s relationship to 59 Judaism, these flaws are not fatal. As I will show, one can separate Yoder’s exilic ecclesiology from the supersessionist dimensions of his theology of Judaism. Furthermore, contrary to Yoder’s critics who charge that Yoder’s theology of exile cannot provide a positive account of landedness, I will show how Yoder’s work subverts easy binary oppositions of exile to return. Instead, a careful reading of Yoder’s treatment of exile uncovers a vision of return shaped by exile, a theology of life in the land molded by the exilic commitment to building the polis for others with whom one enters into shared political existence. In the concluding section of this chapter, I consider how Yoder’s political theology of exilic landedness intersects in productive and provocative ways with critiques of the nationalist assumptions underpinning traditional Zionism and proposals for binational accommodation that transcend versions of the twostate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still wedded to such nationalist presuppositions. Raz-Krakotzkin and other Israeli Jewish political theorists and activists describe the binational polities they defend as “exilic” or “diasporic” in character. To live in an exilic manner need not mean a cosmopolitan repudiation of all particular places, but can rather name a specific way of inhabiting those places that affirms their always already heterogeneous nature. Proponents of an exilic binationalism thus contest traditional forms of Zionism not by opposing exile to return or exile to landedness, but instead by opposing Zionism’s theological negation of exile and by defending an alternative political theology of exile in which exile conditions understandings of land and return. The Negation of Exile in Zionist Political Theology In order to claim exile as a positive category for developing a constructive theology of land and return, particularly within the context of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, one must first address how Zionism has conceptualized exile as a negative condition to be overcome through return to the land. “Zionism challenged all the aspects of traditional Judaism,” contends Yosef Salmon, and nowhere is that challenge more evident than in Zionism’s “attitude to the religious concepts of diaspora and redemption.”2 Exile, in traditional Jewish terms, named an ontological condition of the Jewish people (and by extension the world as a whole) awaiting in expectant, eschatological longing the redemption that the arrival of the messiah would bring. For Zionism, exile acquired a new meaning as a weak and degenerate spiritual and mental state. The Zionist “negation of exile” (shelilat ha-galut...

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