A Name and A Story – Reframing Israeli-Palestinian Peace

R Aharon Loschak tells the tale of a rabbi in World War II London. Seeking to study Torah despite the nightly bomb raids by Nazi warplanes, he was told to fit a blackout curtain. This way, the light from his study could not be seen from the sky. A fitter came to his house with various thicknesses of curtain. He asked the rabbi, “How close to the window is your lightbulb? How many watts does it use?” Confused initially by the questions, the rabbi’s face suddenly lit up:

“So the thicker the darkness, the closer and more intense the light on the other side”

As the darkness in the Land gets thicker, let’s take a minute to think about the light on the other side.

War may sometimes sadly be necessary and justified, but it is no less devastating for that. If there is a genuine way out, it is incumbent upon us to find it. We Jews and Muslims are peoples whose values and aspirations, if not sadly our experience, center around peace.

Peace between Israel and the Palestinians – is it possible? And if so, how? Can there be a better way than Oslo? I have set out my ideas in a previous blogpost.

But to discuss any kind of solution is premature.

Since October 7th, and in fact since long before, any lingering trust has gone.

No peace framework – be it two-state, one-state, confederation, whatever – could succeed in current conditions.

What would it take to start rebuilding trust?

Some may argue for confidence-building measures. First build confidence, then goodwill.

But taking the first step requires a supportive political environment. That clearly does not exist, neither in Israel, nor among Palestinian factions and institutions. And nor, importantly, in Tehran.

How can this change?

The Abraham Accords did something straightforward yet effective. Through the simple use of a name, and the story that stands behind that name, it reframed the entire narrative around Arab-Israeli relations.

Leveraging the Abraham name wasn’t rocket science or a piece of creative brilliance. It wasn’t even new.

Nonetheless, it helped make possible a peace that was widely opposed in many places. It helped create a resonance which, until October 7th, had seen gathering momentum – there was excited speculation about which Islamic country would join next. And it helped build durability – the Abrahamic peace has held despite the most testing and tragic of circumstances.

The Abraham theme worked because it spoke to underlying truth. Jews and Arabs are cousins. Judaism and Islam are brotherly religions. Families may fight, sometimes bitterly, but they come from the same source. Wounds can heal. And so we learn from scripture, Isaac and Ishmael stood together, shoulder-to-shoulder, at Abraham’s funeral (Genesis 25:9).

What is our shared underlying truth?

Since the Oslo process failed in 2000, there has been significant research on the genetic similarities between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews.

Research conducted by the remarkable Tsvi Misinai goes further. He asserts that as many as 90% of Palestinians have Jewish origin. And more astonishingly still, he documents that, like the Marranos, secret ‘crypto-Jews’ that hid their identities since the time of the Spanish Inquisition, many Palestinians continue to this day to practice disguised Jewish customs often seen among other ‘crypto-Jewish’ communities.

So perhaps, rather than the Oslo formula of a ‘clean divorce’, we can reframe Israeli-Palestinian peace in the style of a family reunion.

But to do so, like the Abraham Accords, we need a name and a story – a shared story.

So what story – what shared truth – can we find in our common heritage, as Jews and as Muslims? What story speaks about the reunion of a divided family? Of the happy resolution to a difficult journey?

Well, we have Joseph. And we have Judah. 

We have the story of the lost brother, in disguise, the one no longer recognised by the other brothers. And we have the story of the fallen and exiled brother that suffers tragedy and humiliation but is finally redeemed.

And we have a family scarred by alienation and division that becomes transformed, after decades of heartache and pain, into a family that is healed, arguably through history’s first recorded act of forgiveness.

And Scripture tells us that the story doesn’t end there. The original Joseph and the original Judah are archetypes, their destinies forever entwined.

Their tale of schism, rivalry, downfall and exile, and the prophecies of their ultimate redemption and final reconciliation, weave their way through the Prophets – Hosea, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah  – and feature briefly but sharply in Psalms, encapsulating not only ancient history but also what was, to the biblical personalities, the distant future – their future but perhaps our present.

And we can recognise it too, in light of the new research, as our post-biblical story. We Jews already know too well our own tale of subjugation, humiliation, exile, slavery, oppression, stigmatisation, mass murder, return, more mass murder and more return.

Perhaps, in light of the new research, we can identify a parallel but hidden history of a lost brother, in disguise, that we no longer recognise.

And we can see from the last hundred years, how the themes from the original Joseph-Judah story have played out again in this Land: envy, hatred, betrayal, dispossession, slander and violence.

We have lived the first part of that story. Now we need to live the second.

The Joseph-Judah Accords can be a formula for family reunion not clean divorce so that the alienation and division can become transformed, after decades of heartache and pain, into forgiveness and healing.

What greater ‘kiddush Hashem’ (sanctification or glorification of G-d, and His greatness) could there be if the world’s most intractable conflict could be rapidly resolved, not by the secular Western reductivism of an Oslo-style divorce, but rather by recognising the secrets of forgiveness and reunion that lay in one of our most precious shared stories, prominent in the sacred scriptures of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike?

Then the curtain could fall and the light just might be revealed.