Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

Halevi ascribes much of the failure of international attempts to achieve peace in Israel/Palestine with a widespread dismissal of the religious factors involved in the conflict. It has too often been treated as a political affair, while Halevi believes it is more significantly a religious conflict. While not all Israelis or Palestinians are religious believers, many are, and it is impossible to disentangle each groups’ claims on the land from the religious positions that have shaped those claims. This is seen most pointedly in the conflict over the use of the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, which is one of the holiest sites of both Judaism and Islam, and which Halevi refers to as “[the] spiritual and emotional center point of our conflict” (139).

Halevi is clear that he is not simply suggesting a vague idea of interfaith dialogue; it is a pursuit he has long made central to his life and work. Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is the latest incarnation of a longstanding attempt to build bridges from his own Jewish experience to the devotional life of Palestinian Islam, as he writes to his theoretical neighbor, “My journey into your faith was an attempt to learn a religious language for peace” (7). In previous stages, that attempt included pilgrimages to Muslim areas and relationships with sheikhs and imams. Due to the changes in the Israeli/Palestinian context in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, however, Halevi was no longer able to undertake such a direct and in-person approach, so he turned to writing. “I address you,” he writes, “[as] one person of faith to another” (7). Throughout the book, he expresses his appreciation for Muslim ideas, values, and devotional practices and seeks to explain the richness of Jewish devotional life to his readers. His hope is that an appreciation for the beauty and depth of both religious traditions can lead to an acceptance of one another based on shared values of dignity, sacredness, and peace.

One of Halevi’s goals throughout the book is to dispel common notions about Jews as being either a religion or a race (or associated concepts like ethnicity), and to set it in terms of family instead. While there is naturally some truth to the conceptions of Jews as a religion or a race, he writes that “The form that Jewish family takes is peoplehood” (52), as other identifiers are too narrow to encompass the reality of the global Jewish community have been taken as an excuse at times for disallowing Jewish claims to their own identity and their right to live in their homeland. When considered a religion, for instance, some other groups have accused Jews of not having any national or ethnic standing from which to make territorial claims. Meanwhile, when considered a race or an ethnicity, Jews have fallen under the racial attacks that have characterized anti-Semitism through the ages.

Further, both categories are insufficient to express the range of Jewish identity. One cannot regard the Jewish people as a singular religion when they include everything from secular atheists to the ultra-Orthodox. Similarly, to consider Jews a race or ethnicity disregards the broad cultural diversity they have acquired in the diaspora, now bearing ethnic identities attached to the USA, Russia, Morocco, Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq, and many other areas. In addition, Halevi notes, one may become a Jew by conversion to its cultural identity, which is not characteristic of a racial or ethnic profile. The best way to understand Jewish group identity, then, is as a people—more specifically, as the outgrowth of a single global family, which began with Abraham four thousand years ago and which now extends around the world. That family is historically rooted in a single land, as all families are, and for the Jewish people it is the land of Israel. Halevi reasserts that “[The conflict] is about our right to be here, in any borders. Our right to be considered a people. An indigenous people” (14). Jews, while having overlapping ethnic and religious aspects in their identity, are fundamentally defined as a people shaped by the story of their family legacy, which is inextricably tied to the physical territory of Israel.