Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

The ongoing disparity between your hill and mine challenges my deepest self-understanding and moral commitments as a Jew and an Israeli.

Safety is measured by the distance between us.

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 courage to embrace transience could help create a religious language of peace between our peoples, a basis for political flexibility, for letting go of absolutist claims.

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.

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.

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.

From our perspective, it’s not the occupation that creates terror but terror that prolongs the occupation, by convincing Israelis that no matter what we do, in the end the terrorism against us will persist.

I see in that barrier a way of ensuring the safety of my children, my ability to survive in the Middle East. And so I find myself grateful to the wall I despise. Because I feel I have no choice.

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. For me, being a Jew in Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty is a source of uplift, of religious inspiration.

despair is equivalent to disbelief in God. To doubt the possibility of reconciliation is to limit God’s power,

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?

Both Love the same land, struggle to retain an independent identity, live with unpredictably

the most boring details of our daily life were the greatest dreams of our ancestors.”

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

Israel exists because it never stopped existing, even if only in prayer.

Judaism isn’t only a set of rituals and rules but a vision linked to a place.

But 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.

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.

The Jewish collective functions on two levels: as family and as faith. What strengthened the Jewish family was its sense of destiny—that

I have no expectations of remaking humanity in my religious image, and so I feel grateful to other faiths for offering varied paths to God. Islam and Christianity have brought vast numbers of souls into a relationship with God—and,

The danger of a peoplehood-based faith is self-obsession. There is a tendency, especially among the most fervently traditional Jews, to ignore the rest of humanity and its problems. 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.

This is the curse of our relationship: My protection is your vulnerability, my celebration your defeat.

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

When a soldier falls, we turn him back into a child.

We need to respect each other’s right to tell our own stories. That’s why I am writing to you, neighbor: to tell you my story, not yours.

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.

That it was often radical socialists creating egalitarian communes on the newly purchased land only deepened the irony.

One more piece of an unfolding tragedy, in which neither side could avoid seeing the other as an obstacle to its most basic needs.

neither side could avoid seeing the other as an obstacle to i...

I hope a time will come when we no longer feel the need to argue over our shared traumatic past and will instead be focused on our shared future.

The UN didn’t “give” the Jews a state, any more than the British “gave” us our indigenous rights; our claim to the land comes from our very being. It came from those Jews who built the infrastructure of the emerging state—which existed in all but name by the time of the UN vote.

If a stranger squatted in your home, would you accept dividing the house with him? Even if he gave you three rooms and kept “only” two, would you regard that compromise as fair?

Some 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

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. Many fled because they feared expulsion or massacre.

Israel destroyed over four hundred emptied Palestinian villages, and Jewish refugees, many from Arab countries, were resettled on many of those sites. Palestinian refugees were dispersed in Syria and Lebanon and Jordan, in the Jordanian-held West Bank and the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip.

As we Israelis celebrated our reclaimed sovereignty and achieved one success after another, your people exchanged homes and olive orchards for the scorched earth of refugee camps,

Israel, along with the Arab world, shares responsibility for healing this wound. Israel will need to pay compensation to the descendants of Palestinian refugees, just as Arab countries will need to pay compensation to the descendants of Jewish refugees.

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

But the life force, the self-confidence, the ability to dream in history, the belief in a Jewish story—all would dissipate. The longing that sustained us through adversity would be exposed as ludicrous: We had waited two thousand years for an event that turned out to be one more Jewish nightmare.

tells us something essential about the Israeli character: When we feel unfairly stigmatized, we toughen our position.

the arguments for settling the territories seemed overwhelming. After all, we had returned to the historic heart of our homeland through a war of self-defense against attempted destruction.

there is no such thing as a benign occupation or “liberated territories.” Only people, wrote Oz, can be liberated, not land.

The insistence on empathy with the stranger appears with greater frequency in the Torah than any other verse—including

That curfew became for me a metaphor for 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.

Justice, mercy, empathy: These were the foundations of Jewish life for millennia. “Justice, justice, shall you pursue,” the Torah commands us, emphasizing the word “justice.”

Occupation penetrates the soul.

And so how do I relate to you, neighbor: as victim or as would-be victimizer?

The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has called our conflict a struggle between “right and right.”

Those Israelis see their lives as undoing the wrongs of Jewish history, a belated answer to the Roman conquerors and to all who tried to erase us. They cherish their daily life as an affirmation of rootedness.