44 pages • 1 hour read
Yossi Klein HaleviLetters to My Palestinian Neighbor
Nonfiction | Collection of Letters | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaLetters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Letter 4 Summary: “Narrative and Presence”
The occasion for Letter 4 is the observance of Independence Day on the Israeli side and of Nakba Day on the Palestinian side, both of which look back at the events of 1948, when Israel became a modern nation-state. One side regards it as a time of celebration, and the other as a time of mourning. Halevi also includes reflections on Israel’s Memorial Day, which occurs the day before Independence Day, and which he regards as the saddest day in the Israeli calendar: “a reminder that this is a country where parents sometimes must bury their children so that Israel can live” (65).
Halevi recounts looking through a book of photographs from before the Jewish resettlement of Israel in which Palestinian Arabs occupied a relatively undeveloped landscape under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. Even there, though, Halevi notes that there are pictures of the Jewish remnant that never left the land: members of the “old yishuv,” Jewish communities who had lived for uninterrupted centuries in Hebron, Jerusalem, and other parts of the Levant. From this starting point, Halevi recounts the story of Jewish resettlement and the conflicts that ensued, taking pains to note that it was not a crusade or a colonial venture, because unlike the case of historical European incursions in the Levant, this was a case of the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland. Zionism’s point, Halevi contends, was to resettle the Jews, not to displace the Palestinians, and the decades prior to 1948 had given evidence that there was room enough in the land for both if they could learn to live peacefully together. When it comes to the events of 1948, Halevi does not absolve either side of blame, but rather portrays both the Israeli and Palestinian positions as standing between hard choices of survival and expulsion, with no room left over for empathy toward one’s adversaries. The history of those events is important to consider, Halevi contends, but only insofar as that history continues to inspire; once it becomes a narrative that imprisons, then one needs to look beyond it.
Letter 5 Summary: “Six Days and Fifty Years”
The occasion for Letter 5 is Jerusalem Day, on which Israel celebrates the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War of 1967. Halevi’s own first memories of Israel stem from those events, seeing TV reports about the building tensions in the weeks leading up to the war and hearing the genocidal threats being shouted by anti-Israel crowds. Despite the grave danger that Israel faced, it not only came through the war swiftly and victoriously, but to international surprise pushed Arab nations out of Jerusalem and the West Bank entirely. The young Halevi, along with his father, made his first visit to Israel in the aftermath and was struck by the wonder of that startling victory and the joyful diversity of Israeli Jews.
The Six-Day War led to a shift in international boundaries, with the 1948 resolution giving way to the 1967 one, in which the Israeli government ruled from a reunited Jerusalem and administered an occupied West Bank. Almost immediately thereafter, the settlement movement began, with young Israelis moving into the highland areas that had previously been beyond the accepted international borders, but which the Israelis had always considered as part of their historic claim to the land. Various peace efforts, to which the Israeli government assented in theory, proposed returning to the old 1948 borders in order for a Palestinian state to be established in the West Bank. Each time it was offered, though, Palestinian leaders were perceived as turning away from peace in favor of violent resistance. “Having concluded that every concession I offer will be turned against me,” Halevi writes, “I remain in limbo, affirming a two-state solution while clinging to the status quo” (115).
Halevi also writes poignantly of a visit to the occupied West Bank—to the ancient Jewish city of Hebron—and his experiences as a reservist soldier in the Israel Defense Force. In each case, Halevi continues to uphold the right of the Jewish claim to the land of Israel, along with the parallel Palestinian claim, and he mourns over the emotional impact to both sides in the conflict: “Occupation penetrates the soul” (109). Halevi continues to seek a compromise, perhaps by a two-state partition, but sees a prerequisite necessity of Palestinian leaders coming to the diplomacy table with a sincere desire for peace and a willingness to compromise, which he has not personally observed from them.
Letter 6 Summary: “The Partition of Justice”
In Letter 6, Halevi delves deeper into the issues he brought up in Letter 5, focusing on the question of whether peace can be obtained by partition into two states. He admits the justice of both the Palestinian and Israeli claims to the entirety of the territory of Israel/Palestine and identifies the emotional difficulty of a two-state solution: “As much as I tell myself that I want and need a two-state solution, emotionally I cringe at the prospect of cutting this tiny, beloved land into two sovereign states” (117-18). He expresses sympathy for the Israeli settler movement, which he sees as a reclamation of the ancient homeland of Judea and Samaria and the return of Jewish families to the towns where they had lived some three thousand years before. At the same time, however, he sees the practical necessity of giving up those settlements and pulling back from the highland region of the West Bank in order to allow peace to prosper. This would include a relinquishment not only of the settler communities, but of Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism.
Halevi recognizes that Palestinians will face similar difficulties in contemplating partition. They, too, have a claim to the entire territory and are loath to give it up. It is just as difficult for them to contemplate a Palestine without Haifa as it is for Jews to contemplate an Israel without Hebron. Nonetheless, Halevi believes that this is what is required, and that an enduring justice will only come through voluntary acts of territorial sacrifice by both sides. “In accepting partition,” he writes, “we are not betraying our histories, neighbor; we are conceding that history has given us no real choice” (122). Halevi presents it in terms of the border-alignments of the past century: Israelis will have to relinquish the borders of 1967, and that Palestinians will have to accept the borders of 1948.
Letters 4-6 Analysis
These letters, which constitute the middle section of the book, see Halevi moving from the broad, overarching themes of Letters 1-3 to a more particular focus on the local history and practical difficulties of more recent circumstances in Israel/Palestine. In Letters 4 and 5, the motif of religious and national observances helps to provide some of the framework for Halevi’s reflections as he considers the dual meanings behind Independence Day and Nakba Day, as well as the sorrow of Memorial Day and the joy of Jerusalem Day. In contrast to Letter 2’s invocation of Tisha b’Av, which is a religious day of mourning, each of the days treated in this section are a national observance tied to the recent history of Israel/Palestine. This allows him to ground his motif of letter-writing in a specific temporal context, as he portrays himself as sitting down and writing a letter to his neighbor on that particular day. It also opens a segue to consider the historical effects of the wars of 1948 and 1967.
Jewish Peoplehood remains a prominent theme in this section, as Halevi narrates the reconstitution of the global Jewish family into a single body of citizens in the modern state of Israel. While in the previous section Jewish peoplehood was used as a theme to underscore the sense of Jewish identity while in exile, here it is used as an expression of their solidarity in the face of tremendous cultural diversity among the Jews who returned to Israel. Despite the far-ranging differences between groups, such as secular Jews from western Europe and religious Jews from Ethiopia, the idea of Jewish peoplehood exercises a binding force that allows them to recognize each other as a single family, tied to one another and to the land.
The theme of The Culture-Shaping Effects of Stories also makes another appearance in this section, as Halevi depicts Israeli independence in 1948 and the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, both of which are seen through the lens of the long Jewish narrative of exile and return. Rather than viewing them merely as important political events, Halevi sees them as the partial fulfillment of a story that has been thousands of years in the making, ever since the Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans, and as the realization of the highest hopes of many centuries of Jewish ancestors. The self-narrative of Jewish history thus shapes the interpretation of those events alongside Israeli perspectives on the settler movement. Even for Halevi, who admits the practical difficulty and political instability that comes with the Jewish settlement of the West Bank, he cannot help but see a further fulfillment of the story of the Jewish return.
Letter 6 brings out another prominent theme of the book: Justice and Sacrifice. Following on Halevi’s reflections on the settler movement, he wrestles with the necessity of the required sacrifices to attain peace, one of which he believes will be the relinquishment of those settlements. This theme also ties in with that of the culture-shaping effects of stories, as Halevi maintains that both narratives—the Jewish and the Palestinian—can be counted as true. Each side, he maintains, does have a legitimate claim to the entirety of the land based on centuries of attachment to it. In that sense, both sides could claim that a just settlement would be one in which their own faction gains the whole land. Halevi encourages his readers to consider, however, that a lasting establishment of justice will require a mutual acknowledgment of the validity of the other side’s claims and an accompanying willingness to sacrifice one’s own rights in order to make room for the other’s narrative to be honored. Thus, for Halevi, justice entails not only the narratives of the Jewish and Palestinian past, but a view toward the Jewish and Palestinian future.
