Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

Author:Yossi Klein Halevi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

For many Israelis in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the arguments for settling the territories seemed overwhelming. After all, we had returned to the historic heart of our homeland through a war of self-defense against attempted destruction. A withdrawal from the West Bank would reduce the Jewish state to vulnerable borders that had repeatedly tempted Arab states to attack us. The Arab rejection of Israel’s legitimacy increased the likelihood that sooner or later our neighbors would try again, regardless of whatever piece of paper their leaders signed. And what people, in our place, would have resisted reclaiming land it regarded as its own for thousands of years?

Yet the counterargument was no less compelling. There were voices warning against settling “the territories,” as many ambivalent Israelis called them, even in the heady summer of 1967. The young Amos Oz, later to become one of Israel’s leading novelists, wrote a powerful essay that summer warning that there is no such thing as a benign occupation or “liberated territories.” Only people, wrote Oz, can be liberated, not land.

The success of the settlement movement is a result of the convergence of Israel’s security fears with the call of history. I, too, felt that pull after moving to Israel in the early 1980s, when many of the settlements were founded. Rationally, I understood that Amos Oz was right, that this would likely turn out to be a disaster not only for your side but also for mine. And yet, as a reporter covering the settlements, I involuntarily thrilled to the sight of new white houses rising against the white hills, the courage of young Israelis defying the world to stake our claim—the very spirit, I felt, that had helped us survive as a people. A friend invited me to the ceremony of the founding of his settlement, on the site of biblical Tekoa, near Bethlehem, on the edge of a desert valley. A banner proclaimed the words of the prophet Amos, “the man of Tekoa,” as the Bible calls him: “I will restore my people, Israel; they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them. And I will plant them on their land, nevermore to be uprooted from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God.” At that moment, the fulfillment of those words recorded some 2,500 years ago and being played out before me tempered my misgivings.

Nowhere in this land did I feel more like a returning son than when I went on pilgrimage to Hebron. I love Tel Aviv, its informal vitality, its ability to continually redefine itself, but by the standards of Jewish history and of the Middle East, Tel Aviv is a baby city, barely a century old. In Hebron, though, I felt embraced by all who came before me, all who prayed in the multiple accents of exile to the God of Abraham and Sarah.

I write about “returning” to Hebron, but in fact we never voluntarily left. The Jewish imprint on Hebron wasn’t only biblical—it continued through the centuries of exile.

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