Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

The occasion for Letter 4 is the observance of Independence Day on the Israeli side and of Nakba Day on the Palestinian side, both of which look back at the events of 1948, when Israel became a modern nation-state. One side regards it as a time of celebration, and the other as a time of mourning. Halevi also includes reflections on Israel’s Memorial Day, which occurs the day before Independence Day, and which he regards as the saddest day in the Israeli calendar: “a reminder that this is a country where parents sometimes must bury their children so that Israel can live” (65).

Halevi recounts looking through a book of photographs from before the Jewish resettlement of Israel in which Palestinian Arabs occupied a relatively undeveloped landscape under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. Even there, though, Halevi notes that there are pictures of the Jewish remnant that never left the land: members of the “old yishuv,” Jewish communities who had lived for uninterrupted centuries in Hebron, Jerusalem, and other parts of the Levant. From this starting point, Halevi recounts the story of Jewish resettlement and the conflicts that ensued, taking pains to note that it was not a crusade or a colonial venture, because unlike the case of historical European incursions in the Levant, this was a case of the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland.