Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

(In 2008, as prime minister of Israel, Olmert would offer your leaders a state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza.)

The greatest beneficiary of attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel is the hard Right.

The change in Israel’s status was one reason why the Israeli government felt confident to initiate the Oslo peace process, and why a majority of Israelis at least initially supported it. For many Israelis in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the arguments for settling the territories seemed overwhelming.

Along with many Israelis of my generation, I emerged from the first intifada convinced that Israel must end the occupation—not just for your sake but for ours. Free ourselves from the occupation, which mocked all we held precious about ourselves as a people. Justice, mercy, empathy: These were the foundations of Jewish life for millennia.

The dream of Palestine wasn’t only to be free of Israeli occupation but to be free of Israel’s existence entirely.

I veered between moral and existential fears. Both seemed to me reasonable—essential—Jewish responses to Gaza, to our Palestinian dilemma.

The first was to remember that we’d been strangers in the land of Egypt and the message was: Be compassionate. The second commandment was to remember that we live in a world in which genocide is possible, and that message was: Be alert. When your enemy says he intends to destroy you, believe him.

Arafat had devoted his life to the destruction of Israel, to undermining our legitimacy. No one in this generation had more Jewish blood on his hands. But if Rabin was ready to gamble on Arafat the peacemaker, then so was I.

Arafat created his own diplomatic language: To CNN he spoke about the peace of the brave, while exhorting his people to holy war.

Arafat reassured his critics in the Arab world that he really had no intention of making peace, that the only reason he entered into peace talks was that the Palestinians were too weak for now to seriously threaten Israel and that the Oslo process was nothing more than a cease-fire, to be broken at the appropriate time.

In supporting the Oslo process, I had violated one of the commanding voices of Jewish history, the warning against naïveté. I had confused war for peace, one big Palestine for two smaller states.

Rather than view our conflict as a tragedy being played out between two legitimate national movements—as many Israelis have come to see it—the uncontested official narrative on the Palestinian side defines the conflict as colonialists versus natives. And the fate of the colonialist, as modern history has proven and justice demands, is to ultimately be expelled from the lands he has stolen. Tel Aviv no less than Gaza.

The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has called our conflict a struggle bet...

And so most Israelis, even many on the left, have concluded that, no matter what concessions Israel offers, the conflict will persist.

from years of conversation with Palestinians I learned that even supporters of two states often see that as a temporary solution resulting from Palestinian powerlessness, to be replaced with one state—with the Jews as a minority, if existing at all—once Palestinian refugees return and Israel begins to unravel. And where Israeli moderates tend to see Palestinian sovereignty as a necessary act of justice, many Palestinian moderates see Israeli sovereignty as an unavoidable injustice.

Instead, we’re trapped in what may be called a “cycle of denial.” Your side denies my people’s legitimacy, my right to self-determination, and my side prevents your people from achieving national sovereignty. The cycle of denial defines our shared existence, an impossible intimacy of violence, suppression, rage, despair.

Instinctively, I experience the very name “Palestine” as an act of linguistic aggression.

Between the river and the sea lie the land of Israel and the land of Palestine.

it is tempting to embrace a one-state solution, in which Palestinians and Israelis will somehow jointly govern. But those promoting that seeming solution are deceiving themselves. The only solution worse than dividing this land into two states is creating one state that would devour itself.

The most likely model is the disintegration of Yugoslavia into its warring ethnic and religious factions—perhaps even worse. A one-state solution would condemn us to a nightmare entwinement—and deprive us both of that which justice requires: self-determination, to be free peoples in our own sovereign homelands.

a state where the public space is defined by Jewish culture and values and needs, where Jews from East and West can reunite and together create a new era of Jewish civilization.

But Israel is a safe refuge for Judaism, for our four-thousand-year civilization. This is the only country where Jews are not concerned about disappearing into a non-Jewish majority culture.

“Now I get why Jews need a state: to be able to protect your religious life and have your own pilgrimages, like we do in Mecca.” “The Jewish hajj,” he called it, a uniquely Muslim insight into Jewish sovereignty.

Or we can accept the solution that has been on the table almost since the conflict began, and divide the land between us.

nevertheless supported the UN partition plan in 1947.

As an interim goal?

peace agreement should frankly accept the legitimacy of each side’s maximalist claims, even as it proceeds to contract them.

“Nothing is more whole than a broken heart.”

The pattern in Israeli politics has been that the Right implements the vision of the Left.

Only those who would mourn the loss of the Israeli heartland and the destruction of its Jewish communities will be entrusted with that heartbreaking process.

I don’t share the pessimists’ conclusion that the settlement movement has won and that it’s too late for Israel to extricate itself from the territories.

“settlement blocs” could be annexed by Israel, in exchange for equivalent Israeli territory to be ceded to Palestine—in

One aspect of a possible solution would be to allow Jews to remain as citizens of a Palestinian state. Just as Arabs live within Israel as citizens, so, too, will Jews live within Palestine as citizens.

Israelis who support a two-state solution envision return to that part of the homeland that will become a sovereign Palestinian state. But Palestinian leaders have demanded that the right of return include what is now the state of Israel.

To demand a Palestinian right of return to what is now Israel is the political equivalent of Israel demanding the right to continue building settlements in a Palestinian state.

The trade-off, then, is 1948 for 1967. I give up most of the territorial gains of 1967 in exchange for your acceptance of Israel’s creation in 1948. And neither side tries to encroach on the sovereignty of the other—not through settlements, not through refugee return.

I was galvanized. Suddenly, I no longer felt the paralysis I’d lived with since the second intifada; I allowed myself to once again hope. Here was the moment I’d been waiting for. The conceptual breakthrough. Abbas couldn’t have been more explicit, in the most moving personal way. No doublespeak, no subterfuge: 1967 for 1948.

Though every Israeli government in recent years has affirmed a two-state solution, and though there is a long-standing majority of Israelis supporting two states, our side has shown its lack of good faith in the most literal way possible—through concrete and mortar, expanding settlements.

And the daily message your society conveys to itself is that a two-state solution is merely a Palestinian tactic on the way to a one-state solution.

Same for Israelis?

Palestinian leaders have rejected every peace offer in part because of their maximalist interpretation of return.

UNRWA is the only UN organization devoted to a single refugee issue.

This has resulted in more international funding by far for Palestinian refugees than for any other refugee problem.

the Arab world has kept Palestinians as refugees, stateless and in camps, politicizing their misery as permanent evidence against Israel.

The special status for Palestinian refugees is unsustainable. And given the certain opposition of any Israeli government to right of return to Israel proper, the issue has become one of the main obstacles to your hopes for national sovereignty.

We need to hear from our neighbors that Israel is here to stay.

the dark side of our vitality is a frankness that can easily become rudeness, the antithesis of Arab decorousness.

My side needs to stop reinforcing the Muslim trauma of colonialism, and your side, the Jewish trauma of destruction.

Our traditions invite interpretation. That very flexibility helped Judaism survive.

Built into the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel is the commandment to periodically relinquish ownership. Every seven years the land is to be laid fallow, returned to its pristine state. And on the fiftieth year all ownership and debts are to be forfeited. The fruit of new trees cannot be eaten for the first three years; the corners of one’s field must be left for the poor. Those agricultural commandments apply only to the land of Israel. The message is that a holy land doesn’t belong to us but to God. The elusiveness of possession is an expression of the land’s holiness.