Rarely has such a sincere declaration of love for Judaism and the State of Israel been written. On the other hand, the presence, in the same book, of acid criticism coming from Palestinian voices is somewhat unprecedented. This set of oppositions has a name. It is the synthesis of the most distilled intellectual honesty.
“Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor”, by Israeli pacifist Yossi Klein Halevi, has just been translated by Contexto. And it is already born as a fundamental lesson for those who are rooting for peace and who want to understand the Middle East. And to those who are also willing to know that the two sides don’t just combine warmongering positions.
The “Letters” project is curious. Yossi Halevi, an American who emigrated to Israel in 1982, participates in a movement that has become an institution to promote conciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. As a goodwill, the author, in addition to giving the floor to those on the other side of the wall that separates Israel from the Palestinian National Authority, translated his book into Arabic and made it available for free on the internet.
It is true that none of this resolves the historical impasse. But there are already a few steps. That’s why reading the “Letters” and the responses they received are worth reading. On the Palestinian side of the wall there is white smoke. It’s Israeli soldiers firing tear gas. Yossi asks his anonymous neighbor. “How do you manage, if at all, maintain a normal life?” And further on: “As a Palestinian, you are denied the citizenship rights I enjoy as an Israeli.”
But for an Israeli not everything is thorns. In 1948, the young country survived the attack of five of its neighbors and then organized, from the Yemenis, the massive return of Jews from the diaspora.
The idea of ​​return is very strong in Yossi’s language. The Jews, with the Zionism of the beginning of the 20th century, began to return to the lands they occupied 4,000 years ago, when in Hebron the patriarch Abraham received the monotheistic message from God. Since then, Judaism was a shared theological thought and a feeling for a certain territory that the Babylonians and the Romans wanted to deny them.
Hence the idea of ​​disconnection between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. It was not compensation offered by the international community in exchange for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. Israel, much more than that, remained alive as a millennial aspiration. Yossi has a well-calibrated radar in identifying the moments when the Israeli right is strengthened based on the fear it propagates and that terrorism fuels. The pacifist Israeli is at the same time indulgent with David Ben-Gurion’s Labor and the predisposition to dialogue of a now weakened left.
The “Letters” give almost non-existent weight to the so-called right to return of the Palestinians, in the aftermath of the Oslo negotiations – in which conciliation between the two peoples was closer. The Palestinians wanted the expropriated land back and were not satisfied with the response from the other side.
At the same time, Yossi shows indignation at certain Israeli decisions, such as the decree of curfew for the Palestinian population during festivities in a city with an Arab majority.
Palestinians who responded to the Israeli take a more monologic stance. They do not recognize the mistakes of their compatriots and contest the neighborhood status that Yossi attributes to the residents on the other side of the wall, insofar as there is no symmetry between colonizers and residents of the occupied territories.
But spokespeople on the other side – business people, teachers – say dialogue is still possible. They deplore the weight of orthodox extremists in Israeli politics and claim that they consider Arabs culturally inferior. It is a counterweight to anti-Semitism. But they do not bemoan terrorism.
Another discrepancy is in the way in which the two national groups grew up in the 1960s. While Israelis laid the foundations of a thriving, modern society, Palestinians grew up in refugee camps and shared in grief over the loss of their homes and villages, which it was in part necessary for Israel to strengthen demographically and economically.
