book review letters to my palestinian neighbor

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LETTERS TO MY PALESTINIAN NEIGHBOR

by Yossi Klein Halevi ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2018

A good choice for any reader with an interest in Middle Eastern affairs, though perhaps unlikely to sway those whose minds...

A plea for “radical goodwill” in the face of the seemingly intractable bad blood between Israelis and Palestinians.

In Judaism, writes the philosophically adept Halevi ( Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation , 2013), a senior fellow at the Shalom Harman Institute, there is one transgression so great that even fasting at Yom Kippur cannot atone for it: “desecrating God’s Name.” By his account, interacting with practitioners of other faiths strengthens and “sanctifies” the bond, forcing the recognition that there are many paths to truth and that, in the end, all that will be left of us is bones and souls. Coexistence has hitherto been sought by exclusion and separation, with Jews, Muslims, and Christians retreating into their separate corners in the Holy Land. Clearly that’s not working, Halevi argues, and if every path toward a solution is fraught with problems, at least there’s promise at the end. The author proposes some truly radical solutions, including reparations for Palestinians displaced from their homeland (and for Mizrahim, Jews forced to leave their Arab homelands for Israel in return) and a hard bargain for the intractable: “I forfeit Greater Israel and you forfeit Greater Palestine,” a proposal likely to fire up opposition among the nationalist hardcore on both sides. More searchingly, Halevi urges that each camp look into its faith to determine where common ground can be found and, even more difficult, where in its doctrine barriers to peace are located: Can Jews give up land they believe sacred, and can Muslims accept the thought that non-Muslims can be equals? The author’s reasoned if sometimes too hopeful suggestions for peaceful reconciliation are surely worth hearing out, though one can imagine the din that would accompany any public reading of his pages among the ranks of Hamas or the Likud.

Pub Date: May 15, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-284491-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018

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by Yossi Klein Halevi

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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A response from Hisham from Egypt to “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor”

A book review of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Hisham from Egypt

I was honored to be invited to read Letters to my Palestinian neighbor by the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi. In fact, I did not intend to read it right away, electing to simply read the introduction during some spare time. However, I soon found myself devouring the book, finishing it in a matter of hours.

The truth is that when one of Yossi’s staff members approached me, asking me to read the book and write a review that would present my thoughts and analysis, I was somewhat confused. I did not know how and where to begin and where to stop. The book is not long but it is so deep to the extent that I could write ten pages commenting on each letter, which would in itself constitute a new book. Nonetheless, I decided to be as brief as possible by focusing on some of Yossi’s letters, not all of them.

First, the book is written in the form of a diary of an Israeli citizen, in the form of ten letters. Throughout the book, the author mentions the celebration of some Jewish holidays and recalls the events that accompanied and coincided with those holidays, whether in Jewish history itself or in the historical framework of Arab-Israeli/ Palestinian-Israeli relations. The writer emphasizes the influence of these events on the Jewish mindset and how they affected the conflict.

The book is divided into an introduction and a subsequent ten letters which holistically address the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians in an attempt to lay out the agreements and disagreements between the two sides. The author endeavors to understand the conflict in order to find solutions which can be found in the monotheistic religions – and this is, perhaps, where my first criticism of the letters lies.

The religious aspect is dominant and clearly demonstrated in the first letter The Wall that Separates Us whereby the writer begins by talking about the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank. He addresses the issue of the discrimination to which the Palestinian citizen is subjected, as compared to his freer Israeli neighbor.

The author then moves seamlessly onto the notion of the psychological wall/barrier that separates Palestinians and Israelis which in turn can be extended to the barrier between the entire Arab community and Israel. This is a wall that is much more difficult to remove than its physical counterpart. The message of the psychological wall between both sides is conveyed between the lines of the first letter in the author’s serious attempt to understand the Palestinians’ psychological perspective of the conflict.

The writer formulates his own understanding of the psychology of the conflict based on his own experience in the Palestinian community, probing deep into the spiritual life of his neighbors in order to understand the Islamic perspective and its role in this conflict. Consequently, the language deployed in the book is overtly spiritual in nature. The author seeks to find a shared language that brings people together. He states that the differences between the three Abrahamic religions lie in the language through which we speak with God, or as he puts it: “I cherish Judaism as my language of intimacy with God; but God speaks many languages”

The writer also refers to the legitimate right of all of these religions to exist in the Holy Land. I share and completely agree with this point of view. A while ago I wrote a post on my wall which said: “If God had a city – it could only be Jerusalem.” The one and only distinguished place on earth that fits the three Abrahamic religions is Jerusalem with its divine and brilliant geometry; with its alleys in which Jesus walked and was buried; where, according to Muslim tradition, the prophet of Islam ascended to visit heaven, met God and returned the very same day.

Jerusalem is a paradox in which none possess the right to own it, but to which everybody belongs.

Hisham from Egypt

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To read Yossi’s response check this link

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A book review to “letters to my palestinian neighbor” by ali alayed.

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