Reviewing Yossi Klein Halevi's Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (November 2023)

Having written about his journey to understand the Palestinian narrative in his book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, Yossi Klein Halevi, Israeli author and journalist and Senior Fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, now, in the Letters, published in 2018, attempts "to explain the Jewish story and the significance of Israel in Jewish identity to Palestinians who are my next-door neighbors." The archetypal Palestinian neighbor he has in mind is a reasonable and fair-minded person of faith, who, like himself, is open to listening to the other side ... as a start. But even the greeting, 'Dear Neighbor' risks misinterpretation as is shown in one of the written responses to Halevi's invitation to a conversation.

In his note to the reader, Halevi asserts that the dominant Jewish and Palestinian narratives, "disagree on the most basic premises." While these respective narratives seemingly pose intractable problems, he nevertheless believes that "[o]ne of the main obstacles to peace is an inability to hear the other side’s story." And this 'premise' he hopes will be accepted by both sides. If so, the possibility exists that if, in addition, both sides can accept the reality of two contradictory narratives, then the two peoples may be able to live together in peace instead of perpetual conflict. The political solution he imagines requires two independent and sovereign states—one with a Jewish majority and the other with a Palestinian majority. This would be the two-state solution. He feels that a binational state, or one-state solution, is impractical for it implies that one side will be a majority and the other a minority. In contrast, in a two-state arrangement, each narrative can theoretically be maintained—to a point, i.e., as long as self-determination is recognized for the other. Such would not be the case in a binational state as one narrative would trump the other, denying that party's aspirations to self-determination.

So, how can conflicting narratives coexist about whose claim to the land is more just and which party is the rightful owner and which the interloper or expressed in even more tendentious language, who is the 'victim' and who the 'victimizer?' In his first letter, entitled 'The Wall Between Us,' Halevi acknowledges the hopelessness of an arrangement that will be 100 percent satisfactory to both sides (or even tolerable to 'maximalists' on either side who are unbudging) but offers compromise reached first, through acknowledgement or validation of the other's narrative and ultimately through acceptance of the right of the other to exist.

Neither of us is likely to convince the other of each side’s narrative. Each of us lives within a story so deeply rooted in our being, so defining of our collective and personal existence, that forfeiting our respective narratives would be a betrayal.

But we need to challenge the stories we tell about each other, which have taken hold in our societies. We have imposed our worst historical nightmares on the other. To you we are colonialists, Crusaders. And to us you are the latest genocidal enemy seeking to destroy the Jewish people.

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?

In Letter 6, 'The Partition of Justice,' Halevi demonstrates just how difficult compromise will be, pointing to the highly contentious issue of the 'right of return.' Posing as his Palestinian interlocutor, Halevi asks

Can’t Jews, of all people, understand the longing of Palestinians to return? Jews insisted on their right to return after two thousand years; how can they deny the right of Palestinians to return after barely seventy years?

Halevi grants the Palestinian right of return; however, he asks "To where?" In Halevi's two-state solution, Palestinians would have the right to return to their homeland in the sovereign Palestinian state. But, the right of return to Israel is a non-starter, and here compromise no longer appears to be an option for the simple reason that Israel must be preserved and recognized as a sovereign Jewish state if Jews are to ever feel safe from the terrors of their past. Full repatriation of Palestinian refugees would threaten the Jewish majority and with it, Jewish self-determination. Stating what may be the obvious, Halevi insists that the issue of right of return is a "key obstacle to a final-status agreement," i.e., an acceptable partition. Thus, his compromise: "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."

This 'obstacle' is intimately connected with the conflicting narratives. For Halevi, the starting point for a new partition is 1967 and the borders established at the end of that war, while for Palestinians, 1948 is the starting point. If 1967 is the starting point, then Palestinian right of return would be limited to the occupied territories that would become the new Palestinian state. In other words, refugees whose families were displaced during the War for Independence (Jewish narrative) or the Naqba (Palestinian narrative) would not be automatically entitled to return to their ancestral lands in Israel. Halevi concedes that Jewish settlements in the West Bank must, in exchange, at least be contracted. In summary, Halevi writes that:

The trade-off, then, is 1948 for 1967. I give up most of the territorial gains of 1967 in exchange for your acceptance of Israel’s creation in 1948. And neither side tries to encroach on the sovereignty of the other—not through settlements, not through refugee return.

In addition to these competing narratives, there is what Halevi refers to as the Israeli Paradox, wherein Israel is both a Jewish state and a democratic state. "That dual identity—Jewish and democratic—is the aspirational challenge bequeathed to us by [Israel's] founders." It is an unrealized goal, as Professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi (see below) reminds his 'neighbor' Halevi of the incongruity of his (Daoudi's) living in East Jerusalem as a permanent resident of Israel (without citizenship rights) on one side of the wall that since the second intifada divides the city and separates the West Bank from Israel, while Halevi is a fully vested Israeli citizen in East Jerusalem on the other side of the wall.

Just how and whether the abstract ideal of self-determination for Jews and self-determination for Palestinians can shape a compromise partition remains unclear. The very notion that mutually contradictory narratives can coexist in adjacent sovereign states appears improbable. Leadership, credibility and creativity on both sides at the same time—an extraordinary occurrence if realized—would be necessary to reconcile what have been to this point irreconcilable differences or mutually exclusive claims with respect to:

• just violence as a legitimate means to the end of a political solution with Palestinians pointing to Irgun terrorists and Jews pointing to Hamas terrorists;
• the parallels (or lack thereof) of the displacement of European Jews during World War II and the displacement of Palestinians in 1948;
• self-determination and sovereignty based on an ethnocultural homeland where majority status is granted in perpetuity; and
• responsibility for the failure of the Oslo Accords and subsequent peace initiatives.

There are 10 letters from Halevi to his Palestinian neighbor and true to his word that he is inviting Palestinians to engage in conversation with his narrative, he has included a number of letters from Palestinians in his Epilogue. In one of the more notable letters, Professor Daoudi, who was forced to resign his post at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem in response to intense Palestinian anger at his decision to take a group of university students to visit Auschwitz in 2014, writes

Jews should realize that the 1948 Nakba, without being compared with the Holocaust, left a deep imprint on the psyche of the Palestinians still vivid in their souls. Their persistent traumatic experience as occupied people cannot be matched with their neighbors’ traumatic experience during the Holocaust. While Jews view the Holocaust from the “big picture” of seeing it as an evil effort to obliterate them as a people, Palestinians view the Holocaust from the “small picture” of guards, prisons and barbed wire similar to Israeli jails and barbed wire.

Regarding Jewish and Palestinian claims and counterclaims to the land between the River and the Sea, Daoudi affirms that "Israel has a right to exist and be a country" and he invites Halevi to "share [his] conviction that Palestine has a right to exist and be a country" for the heritage of both peoples trace back to this land, notwithstanding what "Palestinians learn and hear" and what "Israelis learn and hear."

While Halevi and Daoudi envision a rapprochement—if only because the alternative has been and continues to be untenable—there is no unanimity among intellectuals. In fact, Daoudi emphasizes that "[his] perspective views a tacit alliance between the Palestinian-Israeli extremist conflict camp and the Palestinian-Israeli moderate peace camp." There is no monolithic Palestinian view any more than there is a monolithic Jewish perspective. This, despite the existence of two prominent adversarial narratives.

For example, referring to my review of Said's Question of Palestine, Halevi and Edward Said do not agree. Unlike Halevi, Said supported a one-state solution—see his op-ed, 'The One-State Solution' in the January 10, 1999 edition of The New York Times—with the guarantee of return for Palestinian refugees, which seems fundamentally at odds with a two-state solution. Again, the different narratives shape the proposed solutions. What the two do have in common is an aversion to the physical and/or political annihilation of the other, which some extremists on each side never tire of advocating. Despite their deep ideological differences, Halevi and Said, acknowledge that Jews and Palestinians must live together (somehow) in peace, because the alternative is an intolerable perpetual state of violence.

A useful introduction to some of the ideas in Halevi's book as well as his current thoughts in light of the Israel-Hamas War may be found in The New York Times' Ezra Klein Show interview with Yossi Klein Halevi on November 10, 2023. The audio and audio transcript are available at https://www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast, under the title, ' What Israelis Fear the World Does Not Understand.'