Review by New York Times Review
DEARYOSSI, It has always been my belief that it's important to engage and understand the other in our ongoing struggles in Israel and Palestine. That is why I was encouraged when I received your book and read the title: "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor." From the outset you make it clear that your book, told in a series of 10 letters to a hypothetical Palestinian correspondent, telis your own story: that of a New York Jew who grew up in the right-wing Zionist youth movement Betar, and who then decided in the summer of 1982, during the Lebanon War, to, as you put it, join the Jewish people "in the greatest dare of its history." After living for 36 years in your adopted country, you write (still addressing your imagined Palestinian audience), you believe that the greatest challenge facing your generation of Israelis is "to turn outward - to you, neighbor, because my future is inseparable from yours." Later you add: "What choice do we have but to share this land?" It is in that spirit that you say you undertook writing these missives, to embark "on a journey of listening to each other." I find this an admirable goal. But reading your words, I wonder how aware you are of what our feelings are on the other side. Though you do at least acknowledge that there is a Palestinian "counterstory," one of "invasion, occupation and expulsion," a history of "dislocation" and "humiliating defeats," the sentiment you most express, again and again in your letters, is how deeply we, the Palestinians, misunderstand you. It is our ignorance of your history and religion and attachment to the land that you seek to correct here. Over the years I myself have made serious attempts to come closer to my Israeli neighbors, to form friendships and appreciate their worldviews, and many of my books have been translated and published in Israel. Yet in reading your letters I couldn't help feeling condescended to - an unfortunate reaction since I am, I believe, your intended interlocutor. In one of your letters you wonder how your people can "empower" mine. But it seems the wrong question when all most of us wish is for Israel to withdraw from the territories it has occupied and leave us to go on with our lives. It also doesn't help that while claiming a new understanding of and sensitivity to our plight, you rehearse old and discredited narratives, like the suggestion that the land of Palestine was empty before Zionists arrived or the notion that it was Israel that has constantly offered peace, which the Palestinians have persisted in rejecting. (I was involved in the Oslo negotiations and I can tell you that Israel shares plenty of responsibility for their failure.) Your letters seem like an intellectual exercise, which is a privilege that you enjoy but we do not. "If you were in my place, neighbor, what would you do?" you ask. But we are not in your place. You present the central problem of the conflict as a "cycle of denial," in which my side is denying yours "legitimacy," not sufficiently acknowledging "Jewish peoplehood," and yours is denying mine "national sovereignty." But these things are not equivalent. Twenty percent of the population of Israel proper are Palestinians who are often treated as second-class citizens. And the almost five million Palestinians, like me, who live in the territories that Israel occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, have been living for the past half century under the grueling regime of the occupation. These are actual realities, ones that only one side has the power to change. To make peace possible the Palestinians are not required to become Zionists, to embrace the narrative of Jewish suffering and redemption that you recount in your letters. That you insist on this point as a prerequisite for peace makes me wonder how serious you are about sharing the land and reaching out to your neighbors. Unlike you I will not demand that you see the Nakba, the catastrophe that Israel's founding caused for my people, in the same way as I see it. You couldn't. Suffice it for you to recognize your responsibility and to put a recognition of that culpability on the agenda for negotiations when the time comes for arriving at a settlement between us. Many of your arguments are couched in religious terms about the inextricability of Zionism from Judaism. But ours is not a religious war. It's a conflict between two nationalities in which one of these, Israel, makes it physically impossible for the other, Palestine, to exercise a right to selfdetermination. "The purpose of Judaism," as you see it, "is to sanctify one people with the goal of sanctifying all people." The Palestinians don't need to be sanctified by Israel. We simply want the right to control our fate, a desire I know you must understand well from studying Jewish history. I agree with you that peace can come only if we succeed in sharing this land and living on it with justice and fairness for both nations. And I will forever agree with your sentiment that the "violence, suppression, rage, despair" that characterizes our relationship must end. But perhaps the problem with your letters is that they don't read as if they are seeking an answer, hoping for that Palestinian neighbor - me - to respond, but instead seem like lectures, half a conversation with a partner who is expected to stay quiet and listen. Sincerely, Raja raja SHEHADEH is the author, most recently, of "Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Halevi, codirector of the Muslim Leadership Initiative at the Shalom Hartman Institute, which teaches Muslim American leaders about Judaism and Israel, offers a poetic and moving account of "my experience as occupier" that asserts Israel's legitimacy and evokes its emotional importance for Jews, but refuses to gloss over its flaws. Halevi's goal is to open a dialogue with an imagined Palestinian neighbor living on the other side of a protective wall constructed in Jerusalem to deter terrorists. He frames his chapters as a series of letters to that neighbor that include both concise, balanced histories-of such topics as the history of modern Zionism and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza-and his own memories of growing up an American Jew afraid that Israel would be destroyed in 1967, moving to Israel, and how his "romance with the settlement movement ended." Halevi, who considers both Israel and Palestine to be "rightful claimants" to the territory for historical and emotional reasons, makes clear that he understands Palestinians' perspectives. In that spirit, he asks his imagined correspondent for "respect for my people's story" rather than to buy into positions advocated by the Palestinian government and media that deny the legitimacy of Jewish claims to the land and seek "to be free of Israel's existence entirely." In keeping with Halevi's approach, this heartfelt, empathetic plea for connection and mutual acknowledgement is available as a free download in Arabic. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A plea for "radical goodwill" in the face of the seemingly intractable bad blood between Israelis and Palestinians.In Judaism, writes the philosophically adept Halevi (Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, 2013), a senior fellow at the Shalom Harman Institute, there is one transgression so great that even fasting at Yom Kippur cannot atone for it: "desecrating God's Name." By his account, interacting with practitioners of other faiths strengthens and "sanctifies" the bond, forcing the recognition that there are many paths to truth and that, in the end, all that will be left of us is bones and souls. Coexistence has hitherto been sought by exclusion and separation, with Jews, Muslims, and Christians retreating into their separate corners in the Holy Land. Clearly that's not working, Halevi argues, and if every path toward a solution is fraught with problems, at least there's promise at the end. The author proposes some truly radical solutions, including reparations for Palestinians displaced from their homeland (and for Mizrahim, Jews forced to leave their Arab homelands for Israel in return) and a hard bargain for the intractable: "I forfeit Greater Israel and you forfeit Greater Palestine," a proposal likely to fire up opposition among the nationalist hardcore on both sides. More searchingly, Halevi urges that each camp look into its faith to determine where common ground can be found and, even more difficult, where in its doctrine barriers to peace are located: Can Jews give up land they believe sacred, and can Muslims accept the thought that non-Muslims can be equals? The author's reasoned if sometimes too hopeful suggestions for peaceful reconciliation are surely worth hearing out, though one can imagine the din that would accompany any public reading of his pages among the ranks of Hamas or the Likud.A good choice for any reader with an interest in Middle Eastern affairs, though perhaps unlikely to sway those whose minds are made up. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
