Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

I call you "neighbor" because I don’t know your name, or anything personal about you. 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?

Lyrical and evocative, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is one Israeli’s powerful attempt to reach beyond the Wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians. In a series of letters, Yossi Klein Halevi explains what motivated him to leave his native New York in his twenties and move to Israel to participate in the drama of the renewal of a Jewish homeland, which he is now desperate to see succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state in the Middle East.

In this taught and provocative book, Halevi endeavors to untangle the ideological and emotional knot that has defined the conflict for nearly a century. Using history and personal experience as his guide. he unravels the complex strands of faith, anger, pride and anguish he feels as a Jew living in Israel.

Halevi’s letters speak not only to his anonymous Palestinian neighbor, but to all concerned global citizens, helping us understand the painful choices confronting Israelis and Palestinians that will ultimately determine the fate of the region.