Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

The historical context behind Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is the long and complex arc of Jewish history, with a particular focus on the story of Jewish/Palestinian contacts over the course of more than a century. In his argument for Jewish Peoplehood and its connection to the geographic territory of Israel, Halevi appeals to the entirety of Jewish history, beginning with Abraham some four millennia ago. Halevi regards it as historical fact that the ancestors of today’s Jews were in possession of the land during ancient times until their expulsion at the hands of the Roman army in 70 CE. That expulsion began the period of Jewish exile in which the Jewish diaspora took root in various countries around the world. Many of the most significant communities were in Europe and Russia (from which the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish cultures developed) and in North Africa and the Middle East—most prominently, in Ethiopia, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran (and it is from these communities that Mizrahi Jewish cultures developed).

During the nearly two millennia of their exile, these Jewish communities retained traditions that kept their connection to the land of Israel alive, never letting go of the hope for a future return to the territory they regarded as their indigenous homeland. Meanwhile, a small remnant community of Jews—called the old yishuv—remained in Israel and maintained an uninterrupted presence in places like Jerusalem, Hebron, and Galilee. At the same time, the ancestors of modern Palestinians were also inhabiting the land, some of them going back to ancestral Christian and Bedouin populations contemporary with the ancient Jewish presence, and others the result of later Arab Muslim settlement. Both offered a legitimate claim to the land as their residence of many centuries’ duration.

Jewish resettlement began in earnest in the late 19th century, while the Levant (the geographic area immediately east of the Mediterranean Sea) was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The First Aliyah—a wave of Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine—began in the 1880s and continued to the turn of the 20th century, bringing independent surges of Jews from Yemen and eastern Europe who mainly established agricultural settlements. This was followed by another wave, commonly called the Second Aliyah, that brought in large numbers of Russian Jews in the years leading up to World War I. While these early waves generally did not displace local Palestinian populations, many Palestinian leaders nonetheless were growing alarmed at the surge in Jewish immigration.

Concurrent with the Second Aliyah, a group of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe launched the Zionist movement, aiming to encourage the establishment of a Jewish homeland—in Israel/Palestine if possible, but somewhere else if not. In the aftermath of World War I, Zionists found international support for their ideas, most prominently from the British Empire, whose 1917 Balfour Declaration directly (though somewhat informally) backed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel/Palestine. Jewish immigration continued, and violent outbreaks between Palestinian and Jewish communities accelerated. After World War I, the region fell under the British Mandate, and the British position eventually soured on its earlier sympathy for Zionism. They now wanted to maintain a delicate balance between Jews and Palestinians in the region by trying to keep further surges of Jewish immigration at bay, but their efforts had a limited effect. The British proposed several plans for a two-state partition, but none came to fruition.

After World War II and the events of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died and many more were displaced, the international community became widely sympathetic to the idea of a national home for the Jews in Israel/Palestine. The situation on the ground had become too difficult for the British to manage, however, and in 1948 they withdrew, at which point the Jewish leaders in the region declared Israel to be an independent state and fought a brief war of consolidation and defense. These events form one of the many divided viewpoints of the conflict. Israelis remember it as the victorious establishment of their independence against great odds, but Palestinians regard it as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”), which involved the violent erasure of their homes, culture, and identity from the land they had resided in for centuries.

The war of 1948 did, in fact, see Palestinian communities uprooted, some by massacre and some by voluntary displacement. This was urged on by their own leaders in the face of ethnic cleansing fears as well as violence perpetrated against Jewish communities at the same time. The bitter fallout of 1948 was a land split between Palestinian areas like the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the Jewish-dominated nation of Israel. Jerusalem remained divided between the two sides, and the Kingdom of Jordan exercised a limited sovereignty in the West Bank. In the immediate aftermath of Israel’s war of independence, a flood of Mizrahi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East emigrated to Israel. Some made the move because they were inspired by the prospect of a renewed national homeland, but many others were forced to flee from hostility and persecution that had increased exponentially in the wake of Israel’s victory.

The borders of 1948 were to change again in the Six-Day War of 1967, when the united aggression of several Arab countries resulted in a conflict that Israel quickly won, successfully claiming more territory along the way: all of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. After the 1967 borders were in place, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict became less a matter of international warfare (with the exception of the brief 1973 Yom Kippur War) and more a matter of terrorism and civil unrest. Those Palestinians who were not Israeli citizens, meaning they lived in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, had to take up a new life in areas far from their ancestral villages, at times amounting to little more than permanent refugee camps. They experienced difficult economic conditions and were often subject to strict policing measures by Israeli forces, though most of their enclaves were eventually granted self-governing autonomy in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The government of Israel, meanwhile, came to see the task of occupation and the establishment of a security regime as a necessity due to the tenacity of Palestinian resistance and the continuance of official Palestinian rhetoric that pledged the eradication of Israel. The conflict was further heightened by the movement of Israeli settler communities into areas that most of the international community viewed as territory reserved for a future Palestinian state. Many religious Israelis, however, saw the settler movement as the exercise of their territorial rights as indigenous people and the fulfillment of ancient prophecies of the Jewish return.

On several occasions, peace proposals that planned for a two-state partition were available to leaders on both sides (most notably, in the Oslo Accords of the 1990s), but all such proposals eventually fell apart. Israeli leaders refused a blanket “right of return” to Palestinians, and Palestinian leaders were unable to admit a permanent place for a Jewish state in territory that they viewed as belonging in its entirety to their own people. Instead of a peaceful partition, Israel/Palestine was rocked by the violence of the First and Second Intifadas—Palestinian uprisings resisting Israeli occupation—from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, after which most Israelis gave up hope of a two-state solution. In response to the violence of the Intifadas, Israel tightened its security, building a wall along the West Bank border and increasing its defenses around the Gaza Strip.

These historical events form the background context of Halevi’s book, which was published in 2018. It is important to note that his book does not include the context of the events of 2023 and onward, when the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 overran Israeli defenses and precipitated an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.