Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

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. Sometimes, in political arguments with Palestinians, I would be told: Why are we arguing about who owns the land, when in the end the land will own us both?

Very important milestone of understanding

That we are not primarily bodies but souls, rooted in oneness. For me, the only notion more ludicrous than the existence of a Divine being that created and sustains us is the notion that this miracle of life, of consciousness, is coincidence.

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.

No matter how much you may disagree with the Israeli narrative of why the Oslo process failed, you cannot understand Israelis today without accounting for how profoundly that narrative has shaped our worldview and our policies.

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. An indigenous people.

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.

Israelis entering territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority risked being lynched. Finally Israel forbade its citizens from entering those areas. The relationships I’d formed with Palestinians faded.

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.

There was Russian and English and Amharic and especially French: Jews from France are our latest wave of immigrants, fleeing anti-Jewish violence in a Western democracy.

One reason I am a believing Jew is because of their faith.

In the prolonged interim between Tisha b’Av and redemption, the Jews maintained their dual strategy of accepting exile as a fact and rejecting it as permanent.

According to Jewish legend, the messiah would be born on Tisha b’Av.

Muslim rulers of Jerusalem were more gracious. It was, after all, the caliph Umar who, upon conquering Jerusalem in 638 CE, allowed some Jews to return to the city.

Then, the British approached him with an offer to settle territory in East Africa. They hoped to get loyal colonists out of Herzl’s desire to create a Jewish homeland.

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.

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“We were exiled from our land because of our sins.” A terrifying conditionality haunts our return. Jewish sovereignty has been entrusted to us; will we be the generation on whose watch it unravels?

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.

family—a basic sense of belonging to a community of fate, regardless of your religious or political beliefs—has remained at the core of Jewish identity ever since.

Adversity has diminished us but also made us stronger. One reason Jews care so passionately about each other is because of historical necessity. That sense of family has impacted our conflict, too, neighbor. Every

that the state of Israel lacks historical legitimacy because Ashkenazim—Jews of European origin—aren’t descended from the ancient Israelites at all but from the medieval Khazars—a Turkic tribe whose king, along with many of his people, converted to Judaism in

On the opposite end of the religious spectrum are the ultra-Orthodox, who emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as an antimodernist ideology and whose relationship to peoplehood is ambivalent. While surely accepting peoplehood as part of their religious identity, the separatist ultra-Orthodox in effect place stringent religious practice ahead of basic Jewish unity, alienating much of the mainstream Jewish community.

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Some Jews continue to try to “prove” that Palestinian national identity is a fiction, that you are a contrived people. Of course you are—and so are

the Palestinian national movement, from Fatah to Hamas, along with much of the Arab and Muslim worlds, continues to dismiss the very notion of a Jewish people.

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.

in 1948 may well have been the most remarkable Jewish community in history. They were builders, revolutionaries, mystics; writers and poets renewing a dead language, utopians dreaming of redeeming the world.

honor history—up to the point where it no longer inspires but imprisons.

Arab leaders promised to drive the Jews into the sea. I watched on TV as crowds of demonstrators in Cairo and Damascus chanted, “Death to the Jews,” and waved banners imprinted with skulls and crossbones.

And there I fell in love. With the landscape, of course, the diversity of desert and mountain and coast, planet Earth seemingly condensed into a single strip.

Immediately after the Six-Day War, the Arab League, representing the entire Arab world, reaffirmed its emphatic rejection of Israel’s existence, and that, too, helped legitimize settlements for many Israelis.

But, he later explained, 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’s ability to control the settlement movement began to unravel on a precise date—November 10, 1975. That’s when the UN, voting 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions, declared Zionism a form of racism—the

But the Israeli public’s response to the UN resolution tells us something essential about the Israeli character: When we feel unfairly stigmatized, we toughen our position. The greatest beneficiary of attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel is the hard Right.

When Israel’s legitimacy is respected, Israelis tend to take risks for peace. That’s

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.

“I will restore my people, Israel; they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them. And I will plant them on their land, nevermore to be uprooted from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God.” At that moment, the fulfillment of those words recorded some 2,500 years ago and being played out before me tempered my misgivings.

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.

But like many Israelis, I am ready to partition the land—if convinced the trade-off will be peace, and not greater terror. For those of us who

One of my close friends in the unit was Shimon from Ethiopia. I’ve already told you about Shimon, who limped because a Sudanese soldier had crushed his bare foot. Shimon felt none of my ambivalence in Gaza: He was there to defend his family and his country from Gaza’s dream of Israel’s disappearance. They want to destroy us, he said to me, they want to return us to the refugee camp in Sudan. Shimon was not going to allow Gaza to undo the fulfillment of his people’s dream.

I believed, spoke to my generation with two nonnegotiable commandments. 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.

Still, in all the years I’ve been following Palestinian media, I don’t recall a single op-ed or editorial in any publication, regardless of its political affiliation, advocating a reassessment of the Jewish narrative. Not one article among the daily media assault denying and ridiculing and denouncing my being.

How can a foreign name be imposed on my beloved land? Instinctively, I experience the very name “Palestine” as an act of linguistic aggression. It is like waking up one morning and learning that the name you carried since birth isn’t yours after all and you’ve been forced into a new, alien identity.

into a non-Jewish majority culture. A Muslim American friend of mine visiting Israel went to the Western Wall on a Jewish holiday and found himself in a crowd of thousands of Jews. Afterward he said to me, “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.

The settlement movement seeks to fill the West Bank with so many Israelis that withdrawal becomes impossible.

UNRWA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which funds Palestinian refugee camps, making no distinction between, say, those

With the notable exception of Jordan, which granted Palestinian refugees citizenship, the Arab world has kept Palestinians as refugees,

Jordan allowed refugees

Abraham/Ibrahim, who in both our traditions is the exemplar of hospitality, leaving all sides of his tent open to invite travelers for refreshment.

Every Palestinian leader, religious or political, with whom I’ve spoken over the years has insisted that, under a Palestinian state, Jews would have no right to pray at the Machpelah,

Modernity has not been kind to Jewish spirituality: Large parts of the Jewish people have become severed from basic faith

Both our traditions note that Abraham/Ibrahim was buried by Isaac and Ishmael, who overcame their rivalry to honor their father.

On both sides, rage and hatred are growing among our young people. Any possibility for coexistence depends on each side having at least some positive interaction, some knowledge of the other’s reality.