Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

One of the central figures in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is the titular character of the Palestinian neighbor. The neighbor is directly addressed in each of the book’s ten sections, though never identified. The neighbor is portrayed as a hypothetical interlocutor—or a potential future interlocutor—with whom Halevi hopes to begin a dialogue. In this sense, the neighbor’s character is defined by both fixed and unfixed boundaries. Though Halevi doesn’t know who precisely his future interlocutor might be, he imagines that he is speaking to a Palestinian Muslim, a descendant of the Palestinians who had to leave their homes in the upheavals of 1948. Halevi often addresses the neighbor as being an owner of one of the neighboring houses beyond the security wall in East Jerusalem, which he can see from the boundaries of his own yard.

Despite these fixed parameters in which Halevi uses the figure of the neighbor, there is a sense of open-endedness or flexibility to the character, such that Halevi would welcome a dialogue with any Palestinian, regardless of whether they are from one of those houses beyond the security wall or not. The fact that the Palestinian neighbor is a recipient of Halevi’s attempted dialogue, but not yet a participant in it, gives the book certain unavoidable dimensions, such as its one-sidedness. Although Halevi tries to be gracious and humble in his attempts to portray Palestinian perspectives, he also admits that the Palestinian story is not his to tell, and so he devotes his attention to explaining the Israeli story.

Halevi understands his book, then, to be simply the first part of an effort that would only become complete if the Palestinian neighbor chooses to respond, though he ensures this response doesn’t need to be presented as a published volume. Halevi has made his text available for free in Arabic and encouraged any Palestinian to respond by email, so his attempt at a dialogue with the neighbor is more than the exercise of a literary motif.

Among the many groups that feature in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor are various categories of the global Jewish community. Ashkenazi Jews are one of those categories, denoting most of the Jews whose cultures had sojourned for centuries in Europe. Another group of European Jews called Sephardic Jews are smaller in number and fill less of a notable role in contemporary Israeli society.

Ashkenazi Jews are a diverse group, including local Jewish cultures that stem from a range of contemporary areas from the USA to Russia. They are more likely to be secular than are other major Jewish groups, though Ashkenazi Jews also include some of the most religiously-oriented Jewish sects. Many of the founding leaders of the modern state of Israel were secular Ashkenazi Jews who had emigrated from Europe, though the general populace represented a broader cross-section of global Jewish communities.

Like Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews are a diverse collection of Jewish communities deriving from many different local cultures. Mizrahi Jews are those whose communities sojourned in the Middle East for centuries, with prominent Jewish presences in Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, and Iran, for example. Many Middle Eastern Jews also remained in the Levant throughout the long centuries of their fellow Jews’ diaspora, living in communities centered in Galilee, Hebron, and Jerusalem, and this subset is referred to as the old yishuv.

Mizrahi Jews were among the very first to begin the process of resettling in the Levant in the late 19th century, led by Yemenite communities in the early 1880s. Mizrahi immigration to Israel accelerated exponentially in the years immediately after 1948, when many Jewish communities across the Middle East came under the threat of increased persecution. Today, the majority of Israeli Jews are descendants of Mizrahi communities from across the Middle East rather than European Jews.

Another group that features prominently in the book is the Israeli settlers, the movement of predominantly religious Jews committed to planting settlements in all ancestral areas of ancient Israel. This group stands at the forefront of the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, continuing to settle in Israeli-occupied territories with the intention of forcibly expanding their borders. As such, Palestinians and many outside observers regard these settlements as illegal encroachments on territory that ought to be considered as falling under Palestinian sovereignty. To the Israeli settlers, however, those areas are clearly within the sovereign state of Israel as defined by its post-1967 borders and, more importantly from their perspective, part of the ancestral Jewish homeland. Settlers thus refer to the West Bank not by its common name, nor as Palestine, but as Judea and Samaria—a reference to the ancient Jewish territories that existed before the exile of the Jewish diaspora.

Halevi is sympathetic to the settlers’ worldview and their claims on the land, but he recognizes that their presence in disputed territory will only prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Speaking for many other Israelis, Halevi expresses a heartbroken willingness to give up those ancestral Jewish areas claimed by the settlers in order to gain peace through partition. He also hopes the Palestinians might someday be willing to express the same feelings and part with some of their own ancestral areas, like Haifa and Jaffa.