A review by enbylievable
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.

Unfortunately cannot really hold up after October 7th. I read about 30% of the main text and then skipped to the epilogue to read the letters from Palestinians in response to the author. I really appreciated the author's open heart and desire to learn about Palestinian culture and reality. Considering how he describes the history of Zionism and the relationship between Jews and the geographic lands of Palestine, I can understand why he defends so staunchly the concept of Jewish Indigeneity, even if much of what he described was challenging for me and made me bristle. I'm sure both Halevi and discerning people everyone can agree that biblical references to geographic indigeneity, combined with notions of ideological ethnonationalism, cannot in any way justify or legally/morally excuse the prolonged torture and degradation of the Palestinian people and their lands by the Israeli government, military, and civilian body, nor can it allow for Israel's decades-long expansion into Palestinian territories to be referred to as anything but colonial.

I was reading this simultaneously with Gaza: An Inquest into It's Martyrdom which paints a much more realistic image of the consequences borne unto Palestinians due to Israel's and the IDF's propensity toward sadism and human rights violations.