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To the Students Who Walked Out on Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue

(Times of Israel) Yossi Klein Halevi - Last month, I spoke, together with my friend Mohammed Darawshe, at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana. When the event began, several dozen students staged a walk-out. In response, I said there are two warring cultures playing out in this hall. Those warring cultures are not Muslims versus Jews, not even Israelis versus Palestinians. Instead, the war is between those who are committed to sitting together, looking each other in the eye and trying to make peace, and those who are committed to a culture of cancellation, boycott, hyperbole and hatred. On some crucial issues, Mohammed and I agree; on some we disagree. For us, these are life and death issues for ourselves, our families, our peoples. Yet we are committed to unpacking these issues together because we realize that the alternative is much worse. Three years ago, I wrote a book called Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, a New York Times bestseller. It was an attempt to explain who the Jewish people are, why we returned after two thousand years to a home that we share with the Palestinian people, why we believe this is our home as well. It was also an attempt to listen. The book was translated into Arabic and hundreds wrote responses. In a subsequent paperback edition, I included 50 pages of those letters as an epilogue: letters from Palestinians to their Israeli neighbor. The writer is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
2021-11-25 00:00:00
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