Dear Neighbor,
Today is Israel’s Independence Day, and my hill is covered in the national colors of blue and white. There are small Israeli flags flying from car windows—some cars boast two flags—and larger ones hanging from balconies.
So much history has been condensed into these seven decades of independence. We leaped from pioneering Israel where young people worked the land with a kind of religious devotion, to postmodern Israel with shopping malls and reality TV. From an impoverished agrarian backwater to an economic power with one of the world’s largest numbers of high-tech start-ups. From shantytowns crowded with Jewish refugees to Tel Aviv’s glass towers. From the most egalitarian society among Western-style countries, with the smallest wage differential between the prime minister and the person who cleaned his office, to a society with one of the West’s greatest wage disparities. From admired little Israel of the communal kibbutz to reviled “greater Israel” of the West Bank settlements.
Israel’s greatest success is its population: nearly nine million citizens, close to two million of them Arabs. Israel contains the largest Jewish community—almost half of the world’s Jews. If present demographic trends continue, a majority of the world’s Jews will soon live here. When the state was founded in 1948, there were half a million.
A helicopter crosses your hill. I feel an involuntary relief: We are being protected, especially on this day, a tempting time for terror attacks. But then I think of you: How frightening it must be for you and your children to hear helicopters hovering over your home. This is the curse of our relationship: My protection is your vulnerability, my celebration your defeat.
The inverse can also be true. Sometimes my misfortune evokes joy among some of my Palestinian neighbors. When missiles are launched by Hezbollah on Israeli towns in the north, or by Hamas on towns in the south, celebratory fireworks light up your hill.
Sarah and I invited family and friends over for the holiday and we picnic on the grass outside our apartment. We watch the same old Israeli comedies on TV that we watch every Independence Day. We feel no pull to go anywhere; this is a day for the simple pleasures of home.
Yesterday, Memorial Day for our fallen soldiers, we grieved. That Independence Day follows the very next day is an expression of our emotionally polarized national life. And yet there is also something profound about this intimacy of mourning and celebration, the insistence on remembering the price we paid for independence. The saddest moment in this country is not Holocaust Day, which we observed last week, but Memorial Day, a reminder that this is a country where parents sometimes must bury their children so that Israel can live. On Holocaust Day, we mourn the consequences of powerlessness; on Memorial Day, we mourn the consequences of power.
The near-total absence of nationalist bombast on Memorial Day is extraordinary for a country under permanent siege. The songs on the radio are mournful, quiet; the short films on TV, each focusing on a young life taken too soon, tell human stories more than national ones. There is deep love of country in these short documentaries, but no glorification of sacrifice. The young men are sometimes remembered as heroes, but always as sons, brothers, friends. When a soldier falls, we turn him back into a child.
There is, of course, another anniversary that will follow our Independence Day: your day of mourning, Nakba Day. The Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Not of 1967, not of the occupation and the West Bank settlements, but of the founding of Israel. That is the heart of the Palestinian grievance against me. My national existence.
And so, neighbor, before we discuss how to reach a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, we need to go back to 1948—and even earlier, to the origins of the conflict. Back to 1882, when the first group of young Zionists landed in Jaffa harbor. We need to understand the competing historic narratives that we carry with us and that the diplomats have tried to bypass on their way to a solution—not surprisingly, with such dismal results.
I have before me a book of photographs of the Holy Land. The photos were commissioned by the late-nineteenth-century Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II, and portray the land in the moment before the Zionists appeared. There are photographs of holy places, caught in seeming timelessness, without the crowds of worshippers and tourists that gather there today. The villages and even towns appear sparse, overwhelmed by empty surroundings.
The photographs I keep returning to are those of the Arabs. Here is a group of women gathered near a well, pitchers on heads; a man and a woman sit facing each other on boulders, speaking without self-consciousness before the camera; a white-bearded sheikh in turban and robes smiles into the distance.
By contrast, the Jews in this album seem beaten by circumstance.
Excerpt From: Yossi Klein Halevi. “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.”