Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

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.” “Merciful children of merciful parents,” we traditionally called our fellow Jews.

we’d been strangers in the land of Egypt and the message was: Be compassionate.

When your enemy says he intends to destroy you, believe him.

Like most Israelis, I came to believe we’d been played for fools. A two-state solution had never been Arafat’s intention—except

as prelude to a

one-state solution, the end of the Jewish people’s dre...

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.

But emotionally I experience partition just as the settlers do: as self-mutilation.

The well-intentioned Western diplomats trying to make peace between us don’t understand: For both our peoples,

partition isn’t an ideal but a violation, an amputation. Israel without Hebron? Palestine without Jaffa? Inconceivable.

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.

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.

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.

In accepting partition, we are not betraying our histories, neighbor; we are conceding that history has given us no real choice.

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.

“Justice, justice, shall you pursue,” commands the Torah.

As a great Hasidic teacher, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, put it, “Nothing is more whole than a broken heart.” For us, neighbor, nothing is more just than the brokenness of partition.

The Law of Return is the foundation on which the Jewish state stands, defining its moral responsibility to the Jewish people.

The practical implementation of partition, then, requires each side to limit its legitimate

right of return to that part of the land in which each will exercise national sovereignty.

One generation after another of Palestinians is bound to the fantasy of “return” to vanished homes in Israel.

UNRWA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which funds Palestinian refugee camps,

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.