Key Takeaways:
- The repeated rejection of partition offers, from 1937 through to 2000, has progressively narrowed the map of any possible Palestinian state, a pattern that maximalist anti-Zionism abroad is now reinforcing rather than challenging.
- The settler-colonial framework applied to Israel is not simply a misreading of history. It is part of a broader ideological project targeting the legitimacy of Western democracies, with Israel as its most vulnerable target.
- The Jewish world is losing the battle for public opinion, not because its story is weak — Halevi argues it is one of history’s greatest — but because it is still fighting a 20th-century information battle with facts and rebuttals, rather than with narrative.
As Nakba Day approaches, the settler-colonial framing of Israel’s founding is essentially hegemonic on college campuses, in newsrooms, and in international forums. The word genocide appears in headlines without quotation marks. And a genuine, complicated history has been compressed into a single story of unbroken dispossession.
Yossi Klein Halevi has spent decades trying to complicate that story. He grew up in Brooklyn as the son of Holocaust survivors, joined the Jewish Defense League as a teenager, then moved to Israel, broke with extremism, and went on to write Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor — a book he released free in Arabic, asking Palestinians to see Jews as an indigenous people returning home rather than as colonizers.
In a conversation with The Honest Take, Halevi retraced the history of 1948 from both sides, dissected the ideological machinery behind the settler-colonialism framework, and asked why the Jewish world has failed to tell its own story with the force that story deserves.
From the JDL to Jerusalem
Halevi’s path into Jewish activism began where many teenage political journeys begin: with a search for belonging.
“The other options were sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” he said. “Kahane came along and was effectively the Jewish face of the ’60s.” Kahane drew on the era’s language of minority empowerment — Black Power became Jewish Power — and offered young Jews in Brooklyn a sense of agency at a moment when American politics had turned, in Halevi’s words, anarchic.
But those who joined the JDL, he said, did not sign up for what it became. “We had signed up to protect Jews, with the motto of Never Again as our response to the Holocaust.” As Kahane moved toward an explicitly racist and religiously apocalyptic ideology after relocating to Israel in 1971, most of his American followers left. Halevi was among them.
He eventually settled in Jerusalem, and decades later, the view from his apartment — the partition wall cutting through the landscape — became a daily reckoning with a conflict he could no longer regard from a distance.
“Yesha is here, but so is the West Bank,” he said, using the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. “They happen to be the same place geographically. But they are very different places conceptually.” Living with that duality, he argued, forced him to face what many Israelis find easier to evade: that another people also has a deep attachment to the same land.
The Pattern of Rejection
Any honest account of 1948, Halevi argued, has to begin earlier, in 1937, with the British Peel Commission.
“The first refusal was in 1937,” he said. The Commission offered partition, granting Palestinians significantly more territory than the UN plan of 1947 would. It was rejected. Eleven years later, another offer came. That too was rejected. And the pattern continued: peace proposals in 2000, Ehud Olmert’s offer to Mahmoud Abbas in 2009. Each time, Halevi noted, the Israeli side either initiated the offer or said yes to a plan on the table. Each time, the Palestinian leadership rejected it or walked away.
“If you keep rejecting offers, history doesn’t stand still,” he said. “The Palestinians will find themselves continually confronting a smaller and smaller map.”
He reflected on how the Palestinians frame the 1947 partition plan: that the UN had offered a stranger two and a half rooms in a house that was entirely theirs. “Of course, that’s from your perspective,” he said. “But do you understand that I have a different perspective? That apartment was never owned by any other people as an entity except the Jewish people. There never was a Palestinian state.”
What followed the UN vote of November 1947 is, in his telling, routinely misrepresented. The mainstream narrative jumps from the partition vote to the Nakba, skipping six months of civil conflict that preceded Israel’s declaration of independence.
“The Palestinian national movement declares war before the creation of the state,” he said. “It begins by massacring Jews randomly on the roads.” What followed was a brutal, zero-sum civil war — ethnic cleansing, in his words, on both sides — in which the Jewish community prevailed because, unlike the Palestinians who could cross into neighboring Arab populations, Jews had nowhere else to go.
“We won because we had no other option,” he said.
He argued that the Palestinian refugee crisis that resulted, with some 700,000 people displaced, was a combination of expulsion and flight that resists clean categorization. “If you’re in the middle of a battleground, flight can seem to be expulsion. Expulsion can look like flight.” The historian Benny Morris, he noted, has documented this complexity. What matters is what came next: five Arab armies invaded Israel on the day of its creation, and the war continued.
The Forgotten Refugee Crisis
Alongside the Palestinian displacement of 1948, Halevi pointed to a parallel story that has almost entirely disappeared from the global narrative: the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab countries in the same period. Communities with roots stretching back 2,500 years were destroyed. And yet this mass displacement is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the Nakba.
Part of the responsibility for that omission, Halevi said, lies with Israel itself. “We didn’t see the Jews from Arab countries as refugees. We saw them as olim — as Jews returning home. That was part of Zionist ideology.” In retrospect, he called it a major strategic mistake not to have placed this at the center of how the conflict is framed internationally. “It’s very late now. We’re playing catch up.”
The Arab world’s treatment of Palestinian refugees, he argued, stands in stark contrast to Israel’s absorption of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, even when that absorption was imperfect. “The Arab world treated their Palestinian brothers and sisters in ways that were inconceivable for Israel to treat immigrants, even when we treated our immigrants shabbily. There is simply no comparison. And yet we’ve given the anti-Zionist camp a de facto pass by not challenging them on their record.”
The Nakba: Acknowledgment Without Apology
On the question of the Nakba itself, Halevi drew a careful distinction that he said the current climate collapses entirely: acknowledgment is not apology.
“Israel is not going to apologize for 1948,” he said. “We should not apologize for not allowing ourselves to be massacred three years after the Holocaust.” But he said Israel and the Jewish world have also failed to acknowledge the genuine tragedy of a people simultaneously formed and broken by the same conflict.
He also challenged the term Nakba on historical grounds. Citing research by the late journalist Saul Stern, he noted that in early Arab usage, the catastrophe being mourned was not the Palestinian displacement. It was the failure of the Arab world to destroy Israel. “The tragedy they were referring to was that this foreign body in the Middle East couldn’t be removed. You can’t have a minority that has lived under Muslim domination for centuries becoming sovereign.”
Israel, he said, represents something historically unique: the only Middle Eastern minority to have achieved sovereignty, not the Kurds, nor Christians. And when anti-Zionists tell Israelis to go back to where they came from, he observed, they invariably name Poland and Russia. “They will never say where a majority of Israelis actually come from. Because those are Middle Eastern countries, and that’s too uncomfortable. It complicates the narrative.”
Plan Dalet and the Question of Intent
One of the most contested documents of 1948 is Plan Dalet, the Haganah military plan from March of that year. The historian Ilan Pappé has described it as a blueprint for ethnic cleansing; Benny Morris reads it as a defensive military plan.
Halevi sided with Morris. “Plan Dalet was a military blueprint for dealing with the projected invasion of the future Jewish state,” he said. “There is no smoking gun. There is no written order to destroy Arab villages.” What happened on the ground, he argued, was the result of a fluid military situation in which local commanders often made their own decisions. Ben-Gurion did give a verbal instruction to expel residents in specific cases, most notably Lod and Ramle. “But those are isolated examples which are then turned into the norm by anti-Zionist historians.”
He drew a direct parallel to the accusations of genocidal intent leveled at Israel in Gaza. “We did not have the intention of committing genocide in Gaza. You can cherry-pick quotes.” He pointed to Netanyahu’s invocation of Amalek, which critics have cited as evidence of genocidal intent. “But then, if you listen to the rest of his speech, he explicitly says: I am not speaking about the Palestinians. I am speaking about Hamas — and not, of course, as a race.”
Deir Yassin and the Hadassah Convoy
The asymmetry in how Palestinian and Jewish massacres from 1948 are remembered illustrated for Halevi a deeper problem with how the conflict is taught.
He described asking rabbinical students at a liberal Jewish seminary to raise their hands if they could name a massacre committed by Zionists against Palestinians in 1948. Every hand went up — they had all encountered the Lod massacre. He then asked how many could name a massacre committed by Palestinians against Jews in the same period. One hand tentatively rose, and the student asked whether the Ma’alot massacre had occurred in 1948.
None of them knew about the Hadassah convoy: an attack on April 13, 1948, four days after Deir Yassin, in which Arab forces ambushed and killed 78 Jewish doctors, nurses, and medical staff traveling under the protection of the Red Cross.
“How can I complain about some kid in the Midwest who puts on a keffiyeh and doesn’t know which river and which sea,” he said, “when rabbinical students know about Deir Yassin and don’t know about the Hadassah convoy?”
The Settler-Colonial Framework
Halevi traced the rise of the settler-colonial framework in academia and media to the 1990s, when it began to take over discourse on the left. The framework’s innovation, he explained, was to define the great crime of colonialism not as exploitation but as demographic transformation — the sending of settlers to permanently alter the character of occupied territory.
“The move here is really a profoundly anti-Western one,” he said. “It’s against the whole English-speaking world: Australia, South Africa, the United States, and most of all Israel.” Israel, he argued, has become the most vulnerable target in a sequence that began with South Africa. “It’s not going to end with Israel. The challenges will continue on the legitimacy of all of these other settler-colonial nations.”
But the framework, he argued, fundamentally misidentifies what Zionism was. Israel was founded by utopian socialists. Half its Jewish population descends from people who fled the Middle East. And crucially, the Jewish relationship to the land is not one of settler colonialism but of return, something he pointed out has no real historical parallel.
“We didn’t settle. We returned,” he said. “We re-indigenized ourselves in our own land. There is no other example in history of a people re-indigenizing itself in its own homeland.” Anti-Zionism, he argued, takes that anomaly and flattens it, erasing complexity to fit a ready-made template.
The War of Stories
Near the end of the conversation, Halevi turned to what he described as the Jewish world’s deepest strategic failure: not a failure of facts, but of narrative.
He recalled a series of books published annually under the title Myths and Facts, designed to rebut anti-Israel claims with documented evidence. “You open it up. Refugees. There it is: the myth and the fact. It doesn’t work anymore.” The information war has shifted, he said, and the Jewish world has not kept pace. “It’s about narratives. And we are lacking in telling a compelling story, which is extraordinary to me, because we have the most compelling national story.”
He described living with that frustration as a permanent condition. “None of us have found a way of telling this story that is strong enough, that is worthy of the story itself.”
The reference that stuck was to Exodus, Leon Uris’s 1958 novel that turned a generation of readers into supporters of Israel. “The narrative in those years just told itself,” Halevi said. “The Holocaust told itself.” A story like that cannot simply be replicated. But the underlying story of Jewish return, survival, and statehood remains, in his view, one of history’s most powerful — and it is being lost.
After October 7th
Halevi was direct about what October 7th had cost him personally. He had built relationships across the divide: Palestinian dialogue partners, international contacts, friendships formed over years of engagement. Many of those relationships did not survive his public support for Israel’s military response.
“I’ve lost a lot of friends, people who felt betrayed,” he said. “They thought: you were for peace. Well, I am for peace. But I’m not going to allow my longing for peace to prevent me from fighting evil. That’s not peace. That’s an abuse of peace.”
He remained committed, however, to the possibility of dialogue, not as an act of optimism but as an acknowledgment of what humans are capable of even in the worst circumstances. “There will always be people ready for conversation. Ready to try to understand the other side.” After October 7th, he said, those people are fewer, but they exist.
He recently wrote a new introduction for the German edition of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.His first instinct had been to write about the war, but he quickly abandoned that approach. “The purpose of this book was to go to the foundations of each people’s story,” he said. That purpose, he concluded, had not changed. “I wrote it without hope or despair. As an exercise in self-empowerment, as someone caught in a seemingly hopeless conflict.”
He ended where he had begun: with the conviction that the story of the Jewish return to Israel is one of history’s greatest, and with the frustration of a writer who has spent a career trying to tell it in a world that increasingly refuses to listen.
“We are losing the war of stories,” he said. “The Jewish people invented the written story. We should be able to do better.”
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