BOOKS: Letter To My Palestinian Neighbor

Yossi Klein Halevi’s “Letters To My Palestinian Neighbor” is an extremely thoughtful and personal plea for dialogue from an Israeli Jew wanting to reach out to his Palestinian neighbors. Halevi lives on a hill in Jerusalem with a view from his apartment to another hill across the way where Palestinians live, a very short distance away as the land lies, yet vastly separated by politics, not to mention a physical wall. He imagines a neighbor on that other hill, and what he would like to tell him about his own life and beliefs. Halevi is a religious Jew and devoted to Israel, but also very open-hearted towards the Palestinians, among whom he had traveled and made some friendships in the years before it became no longer possible for a Jew to travel safely in the West Bank. He has written other books about those travels, but in this book, he starts from the premise that any hope for reaching a common understanding has to begin with hearing each other’s stories and really understanding where the other is coming from. This book is his attempt to start that conversation, articulating in a very personal and sensitive way the Jewish Israeli perspective, including some great insights on the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, the sense of being a distinct Jewish people, and the tensions inherent in a Jewish democratic state. Many of his letters are written on a particular holiday, and begin with his observations on that holiday. He does an amazing job of staking out his positions in a way that is very honest, personal, and non-confrontational, always keeping in mind a respect for the Palestinian he is addressing. Even though these letters are not written to a specific known person, his device is to imagine a specific hypothetical neighbor on that other hill, and to address that neighbor personally, one on one, rather than being more generic. The device works well, I think, to keep his letters very personal and heartfelt. I learned a lot from this book, both about Judaism and about Israeli politics. While the situation remains grave, the fact that there are Israelis like Yossi Klein Halevi strengthens my hope for a path forward.