“Two Traumatized Peoples”: Yossi Klein Halevi, the Exhaustion of the Op-Ed Warrior and the Subversive Possibility of Feeling Each Other's Pain

Bad Rabbi Media

I was SO PSYCHED to sit down with author Yossi Klein Halevi fresh off two solid months of touring and dialoguing around his super engaging and worthwhile book Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Yossi describes his transformative experience, in the past year since it was published, of Inviting the voices and narratives of Palestinians into his home, head, and heart (as well as into the newly out paperback edition of the book, which features in-depth responses from some of the very neighbors with whom he'd hoped to spark conversation). Yossi talks about this disorienting experience of "losing his armor," how different kinds of relationships help us to hear differently (and can lead to significant inner shifts), and the hopeful subversiveness of dialogue in which neither side is invested in convincing the other that it is right. Nor is he shy about getting into why a language of hope and reconciliation and offering a different kind of future—at which Netanyahu has been a disaster--is so critical for this moment; why the Bible found it necessary to make peace into a command ("seek after peace and pursue it"; and the implications of the prohibition on making peace with despair.