Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

Interacting with believers of different faiths creates religious humility, recognition that truth and holiness aren’t confined to any one path. I cherish Judaism as my language of intimacy with God; but God speaks many languages.

For many years we in Israel ignored you, treated you as invisible, transparent. Just as the Arab world denied the right of the Jews to define themselves as a people deserving national sovereignty, so we denied the Palestinians the right to define themselves as a distinct people within the Arab nation, and likewise deserving national sovereignty. To solve our conflict, we must recognize not only each other’s right to self-determination but also each side’s right to self-definition.

After the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, many Israelis of my generation became convinced that the Israeli Left had been correct all along in warning that the occupation was a disaster—for us as well as you. The price for implementing our historic claim to all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, we realized, was too high. We could not remain a democratic state with ethical Jewish values if we became a permanent occupier of your people, nor did we want to. I didn’t return home to deny another people its own sense of home.

Gaza. Once again, Barak said yes, and Arafat said no. Later, Clinton blamed Arafat for the collapse of the peace process. This was the shattering moment for many Israelis who believed in the possibility of resolving the conflict. I know Israelis who had devoted their careers to convincing their fellow citizens that the Palestinian leadership wanted peace with Israel, that we only had to make a credible offer and your side would naturally agree. The tragedy for the Israeli Left was that it actually succeeded in convincing a large part of our public to trust its approach. And then the peace process literally blew up in our faces. In 2008, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas the equivalent of full withdrawal from the territories, with land swaps. Abbas didn’t respond. Today, ordinary Israelis who desperately want to live normal lives in a normal country at peace with its neighbors regard those leftists who still insist that Palestinian leaders want peace as delusional. However horrifying the violence of the second intifada, its underlying motive was no less unsettling for Israelis: a denial of the Jewish people’s right to exist as a sovereign nation in any part of the land we share, a denial of the idea that this is a land that needs to be shared by two peoples. We experienced the terrorism as an expression of a deeper pathology: an intention to destroy the Jewish presence in this land. A revolt not against occupation but against Israel...

Palestinian leaders never stop telling their people that Israel has no historic legitimacy as a state. Those leaders have convinced us that this isn’t a conflict, ultimately, about borders and settlements and Jerusalem and holy places. It is about our right to be here, in any borders. Our right to be considered a people.

our side amply shares the blame for reaching this terrible impasse between our two peoples. For example, we continued to build in the settlements during the Oslo process, undermining your people’s confidence in our commitment to a solution and reinforcing Palestinians’ sense of helplessness. But when the decisive moment came to end the conflict, we saw our leaders saying yes and Palestinian leaders saying no.

I see my presence here as part of the return of an indigenous, uprooted people, and a reborn Jewish state as an act of historic justice, of reparation.

I see your presence in this land as an essential part of its being. Palestinians often compare themselves to olive trees. I am inspired by your rootedness, by your love for this landscape.

And how do you see me?

Can my life here be seen as an uprooted olive tree restored to its place?

The wall remains an insult. A negation of my deepest hope for Israel, which is to find its place among our neighbors.

For years after the second intifada, I said, like most Israelis: We tried to make peace, and we were rebuffed in the most brutal way possible. But that was too easy. As a religious person, I am forbidden to accept this abyss between us as permanent,

forbidden to make peace with despair. As the Qur’an so powerfully notes, despair is equiv...

The Torah commands me, “Seek peace and pursue it”—even when peace appears impossible, perhaps especially then.

I want my government to speak not only a language of security and threat but also of hope and coexistence and moral responsibility.

And I want my government to stop expanding settlements. Not only for your sake, but also for mine. The right-wing Israeli government that exists as I write seems incapable of a visionary approach.

But we need to challenge the stories we tell about each other, which have taken hold in our societies. We have imposed our worst historical nightmares on the other. To you we are colonialists, Crusaders. And to us you are the latest genocidal enemy seeking to destroy the Jewish people. Can we, instead, see each other as two traumatized peoples, each clinging to the same sliver of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither of whom will find peace or justice until we make our peace with the other’s claim to justice?

The Jewish collective functions on two levels: as family and as faith. What strengthened the Jewish family was its sense of destiny—that the Jewish people has an urgent spiritual role to play in the evolution of humanity.

We are a particular people with a universal goal. According to the book of Ruth, the conversion process of King David’s great-grandmother consisted simply of a declaration. Ruth told her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi: “Your people will be my people, your God my God.” The order of those two vows reveals something

essential about how ancient Judaism viewed not only the process of becoming a Jew but the nature of Jewish identity. First Ruth declares her allegiance to the people of Israel. And then she affirms her faith in God. The foundation of Jewishness is peoplehood.

There are Jews who distort chosenness, transforming it from a basis for serving humanity into an aggrieved separatism from the world. Chosenness can become a form of conceit, a self-glorifying theology. One can readily find examples of chauvinism, along with the opposite, in the vast corpus of Jewish religious literature. For some Jews, particularism becomes an end in itself, and the very universal purpose for which the people of Israel was appointed—to be a blessing for the nations—is displaced by an exaggerated sense of Jewish centrality.

Sustaining the tension between the particular and the universal is one of the great challenges facing the Jewish people today. One part has barricaded itself within the most constricted and triumphalist aspects of our tradition, while another part is so open to the rest of the world that it risks fading out of the Jewish story altogether.

The saddest moment in this country is not Holocaust Day, which we observed last week, but Memorial Day, a reminder that this is a country where parents sometimes must bury their children so that Israel can live. On Holocaust Day, we mourn the consequences of powerlessness; on Memorial Day, we mourn the consequences of power.

Unlike Ben-Gurion’s generation, whose tasks of state building required a turning inward, a relentless self-absorption, the challenge facing my generation of Israelis is to turn outward—to you, neighbor, because my future is inseparable from yours.

The insistence on empathy with the stranger appears with greater frequency in the Torah than any other verse—including commandments to observe the Sabbath and keep kosher.

the fatal flaw of the settlement movement: the sin of not seeing, of becoming so enraptured with one’s own story, the justice and poetry of one’s national epic, that you can’t acknowledge the consequences to another people of fulfilling the whole of your own people’s dreams.

You and I inhabit a land that is, conceptually at least, two lands. Between the river and the sea lie the land of Israel and the land of Palestine. Tragically, those two entities happen to exist in the same space. If you tell me, neighbor, that Haifa belongs to you, my response is: I understand, from your perspective Haifa does belong to you. But the problem is that, from my perspective, Hebron belongs to me.

If Jaffa belongs to you and Hebron belongs to me, then we have two options. We can continue fighting for another hundred years, in the hope that one side or the other will prevail. Or we can accept the solution that has been on the table almost since the conflict began, and divide the land between us. In accepting partition, we are not betraying our histories, neighbor; we are conceding that history has given us no real choice. David

A peace agreement should frankly accept the legitimacy of each side’s maximalist claims, even as it proceeds to contract them. Partition is an act of injustice to both Palestinians and Israelis. It is the recognition of the borders to our dreams. Not only the land but justice itself is being partitioned between two rightful claimants. Neither side can relinquish its emotional claim to territorial wholeness. Yet not every claim must be implemented in full. The state of Israel cannot be identical with the land of Israel, the state of Palestine with the land of Palestine. Each people will exercise national sovereignty in only a part of its land. We need to separate the abstract justness of the entire claim from the practical injustice of its fulfillment.

The moral argument of partition, then, is simply this: For the sake of allowing the other side to achieve some measure of justice, each side needs to impose on itself some measure of injustice.

In the last two decades, Palestinian leaders have rejected every peace offer in part because of their maximalist interpretation of return. For them, the precondition for peace is my agreement to commit suicide.

Israelis need to recognize the deep pain we’ve caused in pursuing our security needs.

Israelis often don’t know how to treat each other with respect, let alone those we are occupying. We are a people in a hurry to compensate for our lost centuries of nationhood, a people that doesn’t pay attention to niceties. Sometimes I think that, if only we’d known how to show your people simple respect, so much could have been different here.

offer new interpretations of old concepts—which is, after all, how religions cope with change.

I see Israel as a testing ground for managing some of the world’s most acute dilemmas—the clash between religion and modernity, East and West, ethnicity and democracy, security and morality. These are worthy challenges for an ancient people that wandered the world and absorbed its diversity—and has brought the

world with it back home.

“The rebirth of Israel didn’t occur because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust occurred because there was no Israel.”

We are a people long practiced in endurance. We have outlived the empires that tried to destroy us—going back to ancient Egypt and Babylon and Rome. But in our long and improbable history, nothing can quite compare to the resurrection Jews managed in the twentieth century. It’s as if all that came before was mere prelude, practice for the moment when Jews had to choose between continuity and extinction.

One lesson Jews learned from the Holocaust is this: When your enemy says he intends to destroy you, believe him.

Our Palestinian partners in the pilgrimage to Auschwitz were telling us: We are not at war with Jewish existence. We will not side, even indirectly, with those who tried to erase you from history. We are ready to hear your story, to live together as neighbors. But we need you to see us, too; we need you to hear our story and our pain. Without resorting to foolish and unnecessary historical comparisons. Each side in its wound.