Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor Quotes

“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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“But if by “Zionism” one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism without Zionism.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“The notion of a people chosen by God wasn't intended to bestow privilege but responsibility. Jewish history attests that this role carries more burden than glory. The classical way Jews understood their own history was as the story of a people failing to live in the intensity of God's presence. This is the story told by the Hebrew Bible -- a national epic astonishing in its relentless criticism of the people it is supposedly intended to celebrate.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“I recently came across this anonymous message on Facebook: “The rebirth of Israel didn’t occur because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust occurred because there was no Israel.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Today, though, we live in the aftermath of the shattering of Jewish faith, brought on in part by Western secularism and the Holocaust. Whatever faith has managed to survive our experiences in the modern world would be tested to the breaking point by the destruction of Israel. Few Jews, I suspect, would accept another narrative of Divine punishment. Even for many religious Jews, this would be one punishment too many.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“And so, dear neighbor, I end these letters as I began: with the prayer that we will meet. Now we have spent some time together in spirit, but I hope to host you one day in my home—in my sukkah. B’ezrat Hashem. With God’s help. Inshallah.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Today, though, each faith community suffers from a decline of one or the other aspect of religious vitality. Modernity has not been kind to Jewish spirituality: Large parts of the Jewish people have become severed from basic faith and devotion. The Muslim world has the opposite problem: an erosion of open inquiry and self-critique.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“I saw Jews raising Torah scrolls, which contain the injunction to remember that we were strangers in Egypt and so we must treat the stranger fairly, dancing in the streets emptied of their Palestinian neighbors. The insistence on empathy with the stranger appears with greater frequency in the Torah than any other verse—including commandments to observe the Sabbath and keep kosher.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“But if by “Zionism” one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism without Zionism. Judaism isn’t only a set of rituals and rules but a vision linked to a place.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Most of all, they preserved the land in prayer. Jewish prayer became suffused with the longing for the land. As a boy, growing up in a religious home in Brooklyn, I prayed in the winter months for rain and in the summer months for dew—regardless of the weather outside my window, following the natural rhythm of a distant land. In morning and evening prayers, in grace after meals, I invoked Zion. Before I’d even known the land of Israel as actual place, I knew it as inherited memory. When Sarah and I stood under the wedding canopy, we recited, as Jews have done for centuries, the ancient psalm “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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“But if by “Zionism” one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism with Zionism.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Just as the Arab world denied the right of the Jews to define themselves as a people deserving national sovereignty, so we denied the Palestinians the right to define themselves as a distinct people within the Arab nation, and likewise deserving national sovereignty. 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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“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?”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“The single-story approach, which leaves room for only one narrative, for only one truth, is very dangerous. As you write, this conflict is between right and right. The whole world, including the Palestinians, should recognize the Jews’ religious, political and peoplehood identity and claim to the land of Israel. But the Jewish people have to differentiate between the land of Israel and the state of Israel. Both sides must open the space for tough, honest discussion. Thank you for writing a book that helps us have that discussion.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“We are trapped, you and I, in a seemingly hopeless cycle. Not a "cycle of violence" -- a lazy formulation that tells us nothing about why our conflict exists, let alone how to end it. 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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Sometimes, in political arguments with Palestinians, I would be told: Why are we arguing about who owns the land, when in the end the land will own us both?”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“I don't believe that peace without at least some attempt at mutual understanding can endure. Whatever official document may be signed by our leaders in the future will be undermined on the ground, on your hill and mine. It will be a cold treaty, an unloved peace that will wither and die, or more likely be murdered. If nothing else, the intimacy of our geography makes complete physical separation impossible. And so, to live, we must learn to live together.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Curiosity led to empathy - the great enemies of self-righteousness.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“Loyalty to the Jewish people is, for Judaism, a religious act. That’s why religious Zionists never hesitated to partner with secular Zionists, who love and protect their people. For religious Jews, strengthening the Jewish people contributes to its ability to function as a Divine messenger in the world.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

“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.”
― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor