Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

A pale sun rises over the desert beyond the wall. I bind my arm with the black straps of tefillin, fasten a small black box on my forearm, facing my heart, another on my forehead. Heart and mind bound in devotion. Inside the boxes are biblical verses, including the seminal Jewish prayer proclaiming God’s oneness: “Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is One.” Or as the Qur’an puts it: “He is the One God, God the Eternal, the Uncaused Cause of all being.”

To hear in the muezzin’s call exactly what it is intended to be: a summons to awakening.

In Judaism, there is one sin for which not even the fast of Yom Kippur can atone: desecrating God’s Name. Only

a religious person, misusing or acting unjustly in the Name of God, can be ...

I cherish Judaism as my language of intimacy with God; but God speaks many languages.

The sheikh welcomed me into his little mosque, built across from a cemetery to caution worshippers against frivolity.

We entered the mausoleum of his teacher and stood in silence. He took my hand, and we shared the camaraderie of mortality.

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.

However differently we express it, that faith shares an essential worldview: that the unseen is ultimately more real than the material, that this world is not a random construct but an expression, however veiled, of a purposeful creation. 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.

As a religious person, I am forbidden to accept this abyss between us as permanent, forbidden to make peace with despair. As the Qur’an so powerfully notes, despair is equivalent to disbelief in God. To doubt the possibility of reconciliation is to limit God’s power, the possibility of miracle—especially in this land. The Torah commands me, “Seek peace and pursue it”—even when peace appears impossible,

perhaps especially then.

I want my government to actively pursue a two-state solution, explore even the most remote possibility for an agreement. I want my government to speak not only a language of security and threat but also of hope and coexistence and moral responsibility. And I want my government to stop expanding settlements. Not only for your sake, but also for mine. The right-wing Israeli government that exists as I write seems incapable of a visionary approach.

Today is the most terrible day of the Jewish year. It is the fast of Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Compressed into this day of mourning is the destruction of both ancient temples in Jerusalem: the First Temple by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, leading to the exile of the Jews to Babylon, and the Second Temple by the Roman general

Titus in 70 CE, and the subsequent dispersion of the Jews around the world.

The thought comforts me, and helps me welcome the spiritual

opportunity of self-denial.

The Hebrew calendar, after all, reflects the natural cycle of this land. We celebrate freedom and renewal on the spring holiday of Passover; we mark the giving of the Torah, the spiritual harvest, on Shavuot at the end of spring, the time of the wheat harvest. And so it’s somehow appropriate that the fast of Tisha b’Av occurs during our parched summer, as the land itself seems to convey despair.

Being an Israeli is like awakening into a dream.

Arch of Titus, a monument to the destruction of Jerusalem.

Jews relegated their return home to the messianic age. Surely only the messiah could restore to

sovereignty the most dispersed and powerless among peoples.

The rabbis, popular teachers and arbiters of Jewish law, emerged as the new custodians of Judaism. With the destruction of the Temple, the priests—responsible for its rituals—had become instantly irrelevant. The prophets had been silenced by the withdrawal of Divine revelation, one of the most painful expressions of our spiritual failure.

(Prophecy, according to Judaism, is given to Jews only in the land of Israel.) The synagogue became a substitute Temple, prayer a substitute for animal sacrifices—a major step forward in the spiritual evolution of Judaism. Through these innovations, Judaism declared a truce with the exile.

Before I’d even known the land of Israel as actual place,

I knew it as inherited memory.

“If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.” And then, at the moment of our greatest joy, we broke a glass, in memory of the destroyed Temple.

The year 1882 was one of redemption for the Jews, because it marked the beginning of the modern return to Zion.

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

If in the past one couldn’t separate the land of Israel from Jewish life, today the same holds true for the state of Israel.

Are the Jews going to make it this time? After all, we lost this land twice before.

The Torah warns us that the land “will vomit you out”—the language could hardly be more explicit—if we don’t live up to God’s expectations. In the words of one Jewish prayer, “We were exiled from our land because of our sins.”

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.

But Jews without faith, who still remain faithful to their people—contributing to its well-being,

raising their children as Jews—will be widely regarded

by f...

Jews as within t...

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 Jews were chosen, in other words, not because they were innately special but because they weren’t: the national equivalent of “everyman”—every people, any people.

Judaism, by contrast, is a faith intended for a specific people.

In the Jewish dream of the future, all of

humanity will recognize the unity of existence and ascend on pilgrimage to the “house of God” in Jerusalem.

But Judaism has no expectation that humanity will become Jewish. Instead, the role of the Jews is to be a spiritual avant-garde, attesting to God’s presence—not least through their improbable survival—and helping prepare humanity for its breakthroug...

There is no Judaism without a Jewish people.

But even if all Jews alive today were descended from the Khazars, it wouldn’t affect their legitimacy as Jews. 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.

Israel’s greatest success is its population: nearly nine million citizens, close to two million of them Arabs. Israel contains the largest Jewish community—almost half of the world’s Jews. If present demographic trends continue, a majority of the world’s Jews will soon live here. When the state was founded in 1948, there were half a million.

There is, of course, another anniversary that will follow our Independence Day: 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.

More than anything else, I need you to understand this: The Jews succeeded where the Crusaders and the Ottomans and the British failed because we didn’t merely come here. We returned.

As an old Hebrew song about the birth of modern Zionism put it, “Suddenly a person wakes up in the morning / feels himself to be a nation / and starts walking.” I know of no better description for the creation of a people.

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