Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

It begins as a universal story:

The failure of humanity to fulfill God’s plan required a new Divine strategy. And so God appointed Abraham to found a people, through whom, as the Bible puts it, “all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” The Bible then narrowed its focus and became the story of a people, struggling to rise above human nature and become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” God’s redemptive plan for humanity required a people to carry that vision through history. For Judaism, then, peoplehood and faith are inseparable. There is no Judaism without a Jewish people.

The biblical narrative returns to its universal roots and humanity returns to the Garden, but at a higher evolutionary state, having matured through its experiences in history.

The advantage of a universal faith is that it sees all of humanity as its immediate responsibility.

Yet all-embracing universal faiths must struggle against the temptation to define their path as the only legitimate way to God.

Because Judaism is intended for a specific people, it can accommodate the validity of other faiths.

I feel grateful to other faiths for offering vari...

Now Judaism is encountering Hinduism and Buddhism, and rabbis and scholars are beginning to grapple with a Jewish understanding of those essential faiths.

The danger of a peoplehood-based faith is self-obsession.

Partly that’s a consequence of thousands of years of persecution, which have driven many Jews into a kind of protective insularity. Still, the temptation facing Judaism is to forget its universal goal and imagine that God’s overriding concern isn’t humanity but a single people.

But once completed, a convert is regarded as any other Jew. Fellow Jews are forbidden to remind converts of their origins, to avoid conveying, even subtly, the message of exclusion from the community of Israel.

The tradition linking a convert to the messiah is a reminder to Jews: We are a particular people with a universal goal.

“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.

Converts and born Jews are interchangeable; once you commit to the Jewish people and its faith, you are retroactively linked to its very origins—to the first Jewish converts, Abraham and Sarah.

Loyalty to the Jewish people is, for Judaism, a religious act. That’s why religious Zionists never hesitated to partner with secular Zionists, who love and protect their people.

The notion of a people chosen by God wasn’t intended to bestow privilege but responsibility. Jewish history attests that this role carries more burden than glory.

This is the story told by the Hebrew Bible—a national epic astonishing in its relentless criticism of the people it is supposedly intended to celebrate.

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.

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.

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.

On Holocaust Day, we mourn the consequences of powerlessness; on Memorial Day, we mourn the consequences of power.

your day of mourning, Nakba Day. The Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Not of 1967, not of the occupation and the West Bank settlements, but of the founding of Israel. That is the heart of the Palestinian grievance against me. My national existence.

The Jews succeeded where the Crusaders and the Ottomans and the British failed because we didn’t merely come here. We returned.

All national identities are, by definition, contrived: At a certain point, groups of people determine that they share more in common than apart and invent themselves as a nation, with a common language, memory, and evolving story.

I respect your right to define yourself, and I insist on the same right. That is the way to peace.

The first intifada was the moment when many Israelis began to realize that we’d been wrong to dismiss Palestinian nationhood.

An Israeli majority gradually coalesced around the two-state solution—until then a position held in Israel mostly by a Far Left fringe. The Palestinian right to self-determination became a part of mainstream Israeli discourse.

Zionism’s intention was to resettle the Jews, not dispossess the Palestinians. Even the most maximalist Zionist leader of the pre-state era, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, accepted as self-evident that the future Jewish state would include a large Arab minority, which, he wrote, would be granted equality with Jews.

In the 1930s, Zionist and Palestinian leaders quietly tried to reach a compromise. But while the mainstream Zionist position in those years supported two states for two peoples, the mainstream Palestinian position rejected any Jewish sovereignty on any part of the land, no matter how small.

For socialist Zionists, healing the Jewish people meant transforming Jews from traders and luftmensch intellectuals into a peasant and working class.

The only way to build a self-sufficient Jewish society in the land of Israel, socialist Zionists argued, was to create a Jewish proletariat—avoiding at all costs a stratified society in which Jews were the managers and Arabs the workers.

And so the young pioneers organized themselves into a union and competed with Arabs for field hand jobs. The purpose wasn’t to deny Arabs work but to get Jews to work. The result was the emergence of a Jewish working class—sometimes at the expense of Arab workers.

Opt for the non-socialist way and you end up ruling over Arab workers; opt for the socialist way and you turn the job market into a struggle between two peoples.

What about the widespread and unprovoked Palestinian attacks against Jewish communities immediately after the UN vote? And did Arab armies “intervene” to try to help the Palestinians or to fulfill their leaders’ repeated vows to destroy the Jewish state?

It came from those Jews who fought an underground war and expelled the British occupiers, in one of the Middle East’s most successful anti-colonialist revolts.

That objection, though, ignores the fact that more than half the landmass of the designated Jewish state was desert, while the designated Arab state contained the most fertile land.

Curiosity led to empathy—the great enemies of self-righteousness. Finally came the realization that compromise—whether in one’s personal life or in the life of a nation—offers a kind of fulfillment no less “authentic” than maximalist positions.

Jews whose families had lived for centuries in East Jerusalem neighborhoods were expelled. Elsewhere Jews who were captured by Arab fighters were massacred, their communities uprooted. That was the choice: expulsion or slaughter.

Your side had the backing of five neighboring armies. Our side began the war with three tanks and four combat planes. And we were alone. But that, as it turned out, was a crucial advantage, because desperation forced us to mobilize our entire society for a war of survival.

Both versions were untrue. A new generation of Israeli historians proved that many of the refugees were in fact expelled by Israeli forces. While some Arab leaders did encourage Palestinians to flee, the line between flight and expulsion wasn’t always clear.

The refugee tragedy wasn’t the result of a systematic Israeli policy, but often of decisions made by local commanders.

And in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Haifa, the Jewish mayor stood in the street and pleaded with fleeing Arabs to remain.

What almost any Israeli Jew will tell you is that if the Palestinian and Arab leadership had accepted compromise instead of declaring a war to the death, the Palestinian tragedy would not have happened.

Nearly one million Jews lived in the Muslim world in 1948; today, barely 40,000 remain.

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.

Even as we seek a two-state solution, we will likely remain with a two-narrative problem. But that historical divide must not prevent a political compromise. I honor history—up to the point where it no longer inspires but imprisons.

learning to live with two contradictory stories, is the only way to deny the past a veto over the future.

when he realized that the Arab world wasn’t prepared to accept Israel’s legitimacy in any borders, he came to believe that a land-for-peace agreement was naive.

Labor was committed to reaching an agreement to return territory to Jordan, which claimed to speak for the Palestinian cause.

November 10, 1975. That’s when the UN, voting 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions, declared Zionism a form of racism—the only national movement ever singled out for such opprobrium. The bloc of Muslim states, together with the Communist world, meant that any anti-Israel resolution was assured of passage.