Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

I call you "neighbor" because I don‘t know your name, or anything personal about you - and for that we share the blame. Given our circumstances, "neighbor" might be too casual a word to describe our relationship. We are intruders into each other‘s dream, violators of each other‘s sense of home, incarnations of each other‘s worst historical nightmares. Neighbors? So begins Yossi Klein Halevi‘s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, a powerful attempt to reach beyond the Wall and into the hearts of "the enemy." In these ten, brief letters, Halevi endeavors to explain his position as a liberal, American-born Jew who immigrated to Israel in his 20s, intoxicated by a vision of a homeland and now, desperate to see it succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state in the Middle East. Deeply informative, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is an education in a dream and the inevitable conflict that has been born of it. As Halevi probes Zionism and the battle of competing narratives that has raged between Israelis and Palestinians in the last 70 years, he attempts to untangle the knot of human emotions that has encircled the conflict. In words that often read like poetry, Halevi interrogates the complex mess of faith, anger, warmth, pride, and shame he feels as a Jew living in Israel, using history and personal experience as his guide. These illuminating and poignant letters are addressed to Halevi‘s Palestinian neighbor, and yet they are also sure to speak to a wide, American Jewish audience, perhaps, particularly, the many secular, American Jews who prefer to disassociate themselves from Israel and the conflict. This is a problem that causes many American Jews to avert their eyes. Letters from My Palestinian Neighbor forces the reader to look. Sure to stir a great deal of debate, on all sides, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is a perfect book for our complicated times.