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In Hebron, though, I felt embraced by all who came before me, all who prayed in the multiple accents of exile to the God of Abraham and Sarah.
Emotionally I agreed with the settlers: If we didn’t belong here, we didn’t belong anywhere.
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. The cycle of denial defines our shared existence, an impossible intimacy of violence, suppression, rage, despair. That is the cycle we can only break together.
Unlike many of my fellow Israelis, I am unfazed by the maps that omit the Jewish state that hang in your classrooms and offices, because on my emotional map there is no Palestine.
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.
Between the river and the sea lie the land of Israel and the land of Palestine. Tragically, those two entities happen to exist in the same space. If you tell me, neighbor, that Haifa belongs to you, my response is: I understand, from your perspective Haifa does belong to you. But the problem is that, from my perspective, Hebron belongs to me.
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.
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 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. The rabbis ask: Why the repetition of the word “justice”? My answer has been shaped by our conflict: Sometimes, the pursuit of justice means fulfilling two claims to justice, even when they clash.
But in the Middle East, as we’ve learned, anything is possible.
In 1950 the new state of Israel passed the “Law of Return,” guaranteeing automatic citizenship to any Jew coming home from any part of the world, under any circumstances. That’s how I became an Israeli: I showed up one day at Ben-Gurion Airport and declared myself a returning son.
Peace requires a mutual constriction: My side contracts settlements, and your side contracts refugee return. Those reciprocal concessions are the precondition for a two-state solution. My people will fulfill its right of return to the state of Israel, not to the whole land of Israel. Your people will fulfill its right of return to the state of Palestine, not to the whole land of Palestine.
UNRWA is the only UN organization devoted to a single refugee issue. And Palestinian refugees are the only refugee community in the world whose homeless status is hereditary—even if they live in Palestine. This has resulted in more international funding by far for Palestinian refugees than for any other refugee problem.
And, of course, we share a common father, Abraham/Ibrahim, who in both our traditions is the exemplar of hospitality, leaving all sides of his tent open to invite travelers for refreshment.
Many non-Jews believe that our holiest site is the Western Wall. In fact, that is merely part of the retaining wall that once surrounded the Temple. For Jews, the Temple Mount is our holiest place, the literal center point of creation.
No matter where a Jew is in the world, he or she will turn in prayer toward the Temple Mount.
But I need your side, neighbor, to reconsider some of its positions, too. I need your leaders to end their campaign denying any Jewish connection to the holy places. The relentless message from Palestinian media is that there was no ancient Temple in Jerusalem, no Jewish attachment to the Western Wall, no archaeological proof of Jewish roots in this land at all. When Palestinian Authority president Abbas would speak of Jerusalem, he’d invoke the Muslim and Christian historical presence and pointedly omit the Jewish presence.
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, that Jews have no attachment to the site, which can function only as a mosque. Jews would be welcome to visit, Palestinian leaders said to me—but as tourists, not pilgrims. For Jews, that would be the modern equivalent of the seventh step.
peace is about mutual respect.
He quoted the powerful Qur’anic verse: “O people! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.” Eyes widening, the sheikh exclaimed: “What does it say? To kill each other? No! To know each other!
What did God create in you that He didn’t create in me?”
For Muslims that means surrendering to God to fulfill human destiny. For Jews, it means partnering with God to help heal a wounded world.
At the very least, though, Israeli Jews need to convey to Israeli Arabs that we see their place in our society not as a problem to be managed but as an opportunity for Israel to uphold its own moral standards.
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.
Last night I went to the official ceremony, held at Yad Vashem. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, spoke about the need for Jews to free themselves of Holocaust trauma: “The Jewish people was not born in Auschwitz,” he said. “It was not fear that kept us going through two thousand years of exile, it was our spiritual assets, our shared creativity. . . . The Holocaust is permanently branded in our flesh. . . . Still, the Holocaust is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future.”
The founders of Zionism didn’t blame anti-Semites for the Jewish condition; they faulted the Jews. Without sentimentality, the early Zionists looked at the flaws in the Jewish character, developed over centuries of homelessness and insecurity, and set out to transform their people. Jews were resented as economic middlemen? Get them to work the land. Jews were physically threatened? Teach them to protect themselves. It doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, Ben-Gurion admonished, but what the Jews do.
I came to Israel to be among those who refused to be defeated by history.
But a people that can emerge from its own grave more vitalized than at almost any time in its history—that is a people that can deal with anything.
And so for pre-contemporary Christianity, The Jew was Christ-killer. For Soviet Communism, The Jew was capitalist. For Nazism, The Jew was race polluter.
Israel isn’t just accused of committing crimes; it is a crime.
There is good reason for me to be in survival mode. When I look around my borders I see Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the south, Islamic Revolutionary Guards from Iran on the Golan Heights—all passionately committed to my destruction.
And on the wall connecting my study with the sukkah hangs a ceramic plaque with one of the most beloved verses of the Qur’an: “His eternal power extends over the heavens and the earth, and their upholding wearies Him not.” All reinforce the same message of a world in harmony with itself and its Creator.
That accepting any part of your story is not compromise but denial and destruction of my story.
