Israelis, Palestinians, and the Search for Home
Can you hold space for it?
Peace and war
ISRAELIS, PALESTINIANS, AND THE SEARCH FOR HOME
Can you hold space for it?
Chloé Valdary
Can you hold space for the Israeli who embodies the spirit of HaShem that moved King David to dance in the land of his ancestors? Can you hold space for the Palestinian who worships and sways and breathes in Allah amidst the rich deep soil in the land of his ancestors?
Can you hold space for both? Can you honor the fact that both these communities are desperately seeking, and searching, and yearning for Home? Can you hold this even as you hold your grief and anger and righteous rage?
The false dichotomies that you love to tweet and Insta post will not save you. You must look beyond to the space where two become One, where it is self-evident that all are made in the Divine image, where there is no more othering because you and your brother are the same.
Can you look beyond your idolatrous paradoxes and your empty rhetoric and see? Beyond the occupations, beyond the “honor”-driven terrorism, beyond the brutality?
Beyond all of this is trauma borne of pain so deeply particular to Israelis and Palestinians, but so universal to the human condition. And that pain which we all too often hide behind slogans is borne of a desperate need for Home and the security Home offers. And yet the zealousness for Home and security can in turn foster more insecurity. And brutality. And so the powerful play goes on.
And I do not know how to change this. And I do not think I can change this.
I can only name it and hope you have the courage to see beyond and contain the Other within you and transcend.
For you see, it is not so much that the land belongs to both of them but that they both belong to it. They are both indigenous. They are both natives.
And beyond the rubble and the terror and the politics and the rhetoric, they are both searching for Home.
Chloé Valdary is the founder of Theory of Enchantment, “an antiracism program that actually fights bigotry instead of spreading it.” She hosts The Heart Speaks podcast (available on all platforms) and writes a Substack newsletter. Her writings for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets are available on her website. Follow her on Instagram and X/Twitter. (This essay originally appeared as a Twitter thread.)
Yet again, about the only public intellectual, aside from J McWhorter and T C Williams, who ever sees life in perspective, dialectic, with dignity. Thanks.
I have begged my college to use your services. Alas, they like the radical lefties with a more authoritarian view than Mussolini ever had....
A problem is that Jews can live side by side or integrated peacefully with others (20%+ of the ISRAELI population is Muslim or Druze or Christian, holding full rights and representation) but Muslims cannot, when they are in charge. Name any Muslim majority democracy in which non-Muslims exist and have equal status. 950,000 Jews were expelled from middle eastern Muslim countries in the 20th century. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews cannot return to those places where they had many generations of relatives. But non-Jews can absolutely live in Israel peacefully. Maybe if the citizens of Gaza and West Bank stopped acting like terrorists, led by corrupt and genocidal Palestinian governments in blind rage towards Israeli Jews (vs Egypt or Jordan that also controlled these areas at times), they too could live in freedom to pursue their best lives.