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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.
The moral argument of partition, then, is simply this: For the sake of allowing the other side to achieve some measure of justice, each side needs to impose on itself some measure of injustice.
The pattern in Israeli politics has been that the Right implements the vision of the Left. The Left can’t lead a withdrawal because, on matters of security, the public trusts only the Right.
Inevitably, each side sees “return” as an essential component of its national sovereignty. The settlement movement is an expression of my side’s right of return to the whole of the land—not only to Haifa but to Hebron. It is the analogue to your side’s right of return—not only to Hebron but to Haifa.
My side needs to stop reinforcing the Muslim trauma of colonialism, and your side, the Jewish trauma of destruction.
Both our peoples are warm and generous—among ourselves. But we show our hardest face toward each other.
I had to sum up in one word what most characterizes Israeli society, it is: paradox.
Israel must honor its two nonnegotiable identities, as a Jewish state and a democratic state.
That means that both the Jews and the Arabs of Israel often feel at once like a majority and a minority.
its best, Israel is energized by paradox. I see Israel as a testing ground for managing some of the world’s most acute dilemmas—the clash between religion and modernity, East and West, ethnicity and democracy, security and morality. These are worthy challenges for an ancient people that wandered the world and absorbed its diversity—and has brought the world with it back home.
At those moments, I realize that a part of me remains inconsolable, still stunned by the poisoned knowledge I learned as a child about the preternatural obsessiveness of Jew-hatred, about humanity’s capacity for self-annihilation.
This abhorrence for victimhood is one of the key reasons for Israel’s existence, and for its ongoing success. In the face of relentless and sometimes overwhelming threat, Israelis maintain the pretense of daily life.
The Israeli character can be edgy, aggressive; my wife, Sarah, who grew up in genteel Connecticut, calls Israel the post-traumatic stress capital of the world.
Criticism of Israeli policies, of course, isn’t anti-Semitic, and I know of no serious Israeli who thinks it is. (We can be our own most vociferous critics.) But denying Israel’s right to exist, turning the Jewish state into the world’s criminal, and trying to isolate it from the community of nations—that fits the classic anti-Semitic pattern.
When the UN routinely votes to criticize Israel more than all other countries combined, it reinforces the notion of the Jewish state as uniquely evil.
And so I have a split screen in my head: On one side there’s Israel versus the Palestinians, and I am Goliath and you are David; on the other side of the screen there’s Israel versus the Arab and Muslim worlds, and I am David.
Our Palestinian partners in the pilgrimage to Auschwitz were telling us: We are not at war with Jewish existence. We will not side, even indirectly, with those who tried to erase you from history. We are ready to hear your story, to live together as neighbors. But we need you to see us, too; we need you to hear our story and our pain. Without resorting to foolish and unnecessary historical comparisons. Each side in its wound.
From my porch, I clearly see three distinct political entities. The sovereign territory of the state of Israel ends at the wall. In the distance is the Palestinian Authority. And in the farthest distance, the hills of Jordan.
In one hand I hold a palm branch, flanked with willow and myrtle branches; in the other, a citron, whose sweet and pungent scent seems to fill the sukkah. The Bible instructs Jews to assemble these “four species” for this harvest season. In our prayers, we wave them in the four directions and then toward Heaven and earth, blessing the land and its inhabitants.
my feeling of responsibility as a carrier of an ancient story. What does it mean for humanity that the Jews have maintained a core identity and consistent memory over four thousand years?
This open and vulnerable structure is the antithesis of the fortified concrete room in my basement, which every Israeli family is required by law to build, against possible missile attacks. We live with that threat as a constant reality. But the sukkah is our spiritual air raid shelter, promise of a world without fear.
Neighbors live in equality. Neighbors have shared rights and duties.
What does my grandfather want me to do with his key? Does he want me to fight for it? He had a moral claim that the UN General Assembly recognized in Resolution 194. Do I need to die for this claim? What is my moral responsibility and the action I need to take to honor my story?
Every time the Israeli prime minister demands recognition of the Jewish state without any mutual recognition of our own Palestinian national identity as people he only increases the gap between us. Only genuine voices like yours will help Palestinians recognize the Jews as a people.
and I savored the sadness, the pride and the determination. I mourned for your losses and celebrated your wholeness.
The correct statement is that Palestinians are the only modern group of refugees still in existence whose right of return has been denied for multiple generations.
In 1947, just prior to Israel’s establishment, half of all Jewish-owned land was owned by two funds, the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, was originally known as the Jewish Colonial Trust.
the world still considers Gaza to be occupied due to Israeli control of its airspace, maritime waters, land borders, electricity, communications networks, population register, etc.
The wall between us doesn’t permit those on each side to see the humanity of the other. Instead, it makes both sides feel like the other side is his enemy, whom he should fear.
Now, I understand your longing for and need of the land as Jews, and personally, I have a lot of sympathy for that. But can you acknowledge the suffering you caused by coming back?
understanding those fears is crucial to creating a just and sustainable solution for our conflict.
The insistence on compassion with the stranger appears with high frequency in the Torah and the Qur’an.
It stems, rather, from a basic universal justice I believe in which states that a people with a unique culture deserve to have a unique space where that culture can express itself in a primary manner, where the state reflects the culture of the people it governs.
I find the fact that Jews have held on to this belief for millennia as laudable, but it is an absolutist and maximalist position. It quite categorically states that “the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel,” which, ipso facto, excludes the people who may be already living on the land that Zionism claims as its own. It is a position that implies that ownership of the land by other people(s), no matter how long, no matter what has been done with the land, no matter their attachment to it, is transient at best and has no historical, practical or legal validity.
To give a quote from Herzl for context: “We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transient countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried discretely and circumspectly . .
How dare a people looking for salvation disregard the humanity of another people?
your national movement has made an entire history around dehumanizing the people you demand see you as human beings.
that is the Original Sin of secular Zionism: that it fails to take into account the humanity of other people in the land it demands for itself.
The Palestinians did not travel to Europe to claim land that other people were already living on, nor did they have any wish to harm another people, nor spirit the poor ghetto Jews to some other place for their land.
Regardless of the circumstances you found yourselves in, you took advantage of a poor and relatively powerless people and inflicted a historic injustice against them. A people who, up until the creation of secular Zionism, had done you no wrong.
