Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

The interfaith encounter, I believe, sanctifies God’s Name. Interacting with believers of different faiths creates religious humility, recognition that truth and holiness aren’t confined to any one path.

I learned that the experience of surrender begins with the formation of the line itself, aligning shoulder to shoulder with those of your neighbor on either side. And then the sacred movement: Bow, return, prostrate, stand. Repeat: until you feel your body turning to water,

By the end of my yearlong journey I had come to love Islam. I cherished its fearless heart, especially in the face of death. Westerners often try to evade an encounter with one’s own mortality. Not so Muslims. I learned that Islam has the uncanny ability to impart in its believers—from the simplest to the most sophisticated—a frank awareness of one’s own impermanence.

the well-intentioned efforts of diplomats have failed so far is that they tend to ignore the deep religious commitments on both sides. For peace to succeed in the Middle East, it must speak in some way to our hearts.

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.

The second intifada is the moment most of us guilty Israelis lost faith in the peaceful intentions of the Palestinian leadership. And not just because of the terrorism. We lost faith because the worst wave of terrorism in our history came after Israel had made what we considered a credible offer—two offers, actually—to end the occupation.

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. An indigenous people.

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 equivalent to disbelief in God.

I want my government to actively pursue a two-state solution, explore even the most remote possibility for an agreement.

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.

For now I’ll say only that I couldn’t bear the impact of seemingly endless occupation on the lives of my neighbors—and also on my own moral credibility as a Jew, a carrier of an ancient tradition that cherishes justice and fairness, that places the value of a human life, created in the Divine image, at the core of its worldview.

But we need to challenge the stories we tell about each other, which have taken hold in our societies.

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 rabbis, popular teachers and arbiters of Jewish law, emerged as the new custodians of Judaism. With the destruction of the Temple, the priests—responsible for its rituals—had become instantly irrelevant. The prophets had been silenced by the withdrawal of Divine revelation, one of the most painful expressions of our spiritual failure. (Prophecy, according to Judaism, is given to Jews only in the land of Israel.) The synagogue became a substitute Temple, prayer a substitute for animal sacrifices—a major step forward in the spiritual evolution of Judaism. Through these innovations, Judaism declared a truce with the exile.

The Jewish relationship to the land of Israel shifted from space to time.

For us, the land existed in past and future—memory and anticipation.

Jewish prayer became suffused with the longing for the land.

Before I’d even known the land of Israel as actual place, I knew it as inherited memory.

For Shimon, the longing to live in Israel began with the Sigd. He proudly informed me that he began fasting at the age of eight. Severed for centuries from other Jewish communities, Ethiopian Jews believed they were the last Jews in the world. Their Christian neighbors feared them as black magicians—just as Christians in medieval Europe feared Jews as devil-worshippers and well-poisoners—and called them “Falasha,” strangers. They called themselves “Beta Yisrael,” the House of Israel. And year after year, century after century, they ascended the mountain, their faith mediating between patience and longing.

And so thousands of Ethiopian Jews were on the move. They walked for weeks through jungle and desert; old people died from exhaustion, children from hunger. No Diaspora community suffered proportionally more fatalities on its way to Zion than the Jews of Ethiopia.

I think of Ethiopian Jews whenever I hear a Middle Eastern leader say that the only reason Israel exists is the Holocaust, that the Palestinians have paid the price for Western guilt. Many Ethiopian Jews never even heard of the Holocaust until they got to Israel. Half of Israel’s Jews come from the Arab world, where, for the most part, the Nazis didn’t reach.

The impetus for creating a political expression of the longing for return—restoring the Jewish relationship to Zion from time back into space—was dire need. In nineteenth-century Russia, millions of Jews were threatened by regime-instigated pogroms. Many Russian Jews were fleeing their homes and heading west.

Need gave Zionism its urgency, but longing gave Zionism its spiritual substance.

Zionism started amongst secular Jews.

But every alternative to Zion failed.

A tragic colonialism, impelled not by greed or glory but existential need.

But by insisting on Zion—against all odds, no matter the consequences—Zionism affirmed its legitimacy as a movement of repatriation, restoring a native people home.

Zionism was of course strongly influenced by European nationalism.

A majority of Israelis today are descended from Jews who left one part of the Middle East to resettle in another. Tell them that Zionism is a European colonialist movement and they simply won’t understand what you’re talking about.

The year 1882 was one of redemption for the Jews, because it marked the beginning of the modern return to Zion.

the Jews of Yemen didn’t know about the groups of young Zionists forming in Europe.

I have heard Palestinian leaders cite the immigration from Russia—with its large numbers of intermarried couples—as proof of the inauthentic nature of Jewish nationhood. From a Zionist perspective, though, none of our waves of immigration is more or less “authentic.” Traditional Jews from Iraq and Yemen, assimilated Jews from the former Soviet Union: All are indigenous sons and daughters returning home.

Halakha says, if your lineage is proved, you are a Jew.

In the era before the establishment of Israel, Jews vehemently debated the wisdom of the Zionist program. Marxist Jews rejected Zionism as a diversion from the anticipated world revolution. Ultra-Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism as a secularizing movement, while some insisted that only the messiah could bring the Jews home.

But if by “Zionism” one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism without Zionism. Judaism isn’t only a set of rituals and rules but a vision linked to a place.

Modern movements that created forms of Judaism severed from the love of the land and the dream of return all ended in failure.

Reform?

Israel’s Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives of almost the entire spectrum of the Jewish community—from ultra-Orthodox to Communists.

The great irony of Jewish history is that, for all the centrality in Judaism of the land of Israel, we’ve lived far more of our history outside of it than in it. We are a people of both homeland and Diaspora.

The Torah warns us that the land “will vomit you out”—the language could hardly be more explicit—if we don’t live up to God’s expectations.

A terrifying conditionality haunt...

It sometimes seems that we are intent on compensating for two millennia of lost sovereignty by cramming into mere decades the fulfillment of all our dreams, while repeating all the mistakes that other nations commit over centuries.

Judaism was intended to be lived communally, shaping a society’s ethics and behavior. Here, then, is our chance to test our most noble ideas—abstractions in exile—against hard reality. This is where the worthiness of the Jewish story is being decided.

I imagine that the first law that the state of Palestine will pass will be your own law of return, granting automatic citizenship to any Palestinian in your diaspora who wants to come home. That is the duty of a state whose existence is meant to undo exile.

That sense of family has impacted our conflict, too, neighbor. Every attempt to destroy or undermine Israel over the years only strengthened the support for the Jewish state from Jews around the world.

When Jews determine that fellow family members have betrayed either the interests or the values of the community, they can turn against each other with a ferocious contempt.

The centrality of peoplehood in Jewish identity helps explain the seeming anomaly of Jewish atheists. In Islam and Christianity, for example, adherents who stop believing in the basic tenets of the faith are no longer Muslims or Christians. But Jews without faith, who still remain faithful to their people—contributing to its well-being, raising their children as Jews—will be widely regarded by fellow Jews as within the fold.

But we have no sympathy for your insistence that you are a people, with the right to national sovereignty, because we know you aren’t a people but a religion.

The denial of Jewish peoplehood is one of the key divides between us. Even Palestinian moderates I’ve known who want to end the bloodshed tend to deny that the Jews are an authentic nation. So long as Palestinian leaders insist on defining the Jews as a religion rather than allowing us to define ourselves as we have since ancient times—as a people with a particular faith—then Israel will continue to be seen as illegitimate, its existence an open question.

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. Destiny gives meaning to fate.

The purpose of Judaism is to sanctify one people with the goal of sanctifying all peoples. According to this belief, God set aside a random group of human beings—emphatically not a nation of saints—and exposed them to mass revelation at Mount Sinai, where God appeared not only to Moses, a single great soul, but to all of Israel.

The Jews were chosen, in other words, not because they were innately special but because they weren’t: the national equivalent of “everyman”—every people, any people. They were to be a test case for what happens when a cross-section of humanity is subjected to an unmediated encounter with the Divine. Sinai was a rehearsal for the revelation that humanity will experience at the culmination of history.

But Judaism has no expectation that humanity will become Jewish. Instead, the role of the Jews is to be a spiritual avant-garde, attesting to God’s presence—not least through their improbable survival—and helping prepare humanity for its breakthrough to transcendence: a particularist strategy for a universal goal.