Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

Content Warning: This book presents a perspective on a divisive social and political issue, including reflections on historical traumas like the Holocaust and the Nakba. Where disputed terminology is an issue, this study guide uses terms that seek to encompass both sides (for example, referring to the broad geographic area in question as the Levant or as Israel/Palestine).

Letter 1 opens with a reflection on the motif of neighbors, explaining why Halevi addresses his hypothetical dialogue partner as “neighbor.” He admits the choice is made due to the imprecision of identifying his addressee, for whom he does not yet have a name, but that the term “neighbor” might nonetheless prove too casual: “We are intruders in each other’s dreams, violators of each other’s sense of home. We are living incarnations of each other’s worst historical nightmares” (1). Halevi imagines that he is writing to a Palestinian who lives in the neighborhood adjacent to his own, just across the security wall in East Jerusalem.

Halevi explains the journey of understanding he has undertaken toward Palestinians, which in previous years involved a pilgrimage to Palestinian Muslim sites, seeking to understand the heart of their religious devotion.