A brave plea for two peoples to turn their faces towards peace

The Holy and the Broken: A cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared
By Ittay Flescher (HarperCollins)

Reviewed by James Button

Two days after the October 7 massacre, a Jewish father phoned Ittay Flescher, who is education director of the Israeli organisation, Kids4Peace, which seeks to build friendship and trust between Jewish Israeli and Palestinian teenagers. The man said that his 16-year-old daughter planned to leave Kids4Peace after some of her Arab friends posted messages celebrating the massacre. “It is like a punch in the gut to find out that K4P is an illusion,” he told Flescher.

The next day Flescher saw that a Palestinian acquaintance from a different peacebuilding organisation had changed his WhatsApp profile picture to an image of a paraglider. His heart racing, Fleischer called the man to say he was shocked and hurt by the post. The man replied that he had family in Gaza and that people could be kept in a cage only for so long. Why then, Flescher asked, did the man still work in peacebuilding? “I do this because it’s a job, but really it’s all bullshit,” the man said. Yet the following day, Flescher noticed that the man had changed his profile picture.

Flescher was now a man groping his way through no-man’s land, flanked by two peoples fixed in mutual incomprehension and hatred, and locked into their own despair. He went to a synagogue, and was overwhelmed by the levels of grief in the room. He fielded hard, anxious questions from his 11-year-old son. Perhaps for the first time he wondered: was his life’s work an illusion?

This is the powerful opening to Flescher’s book, The Holy and the Broken: A cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared, published this week. Part memoir, part history, part advocacy for peace-building initiatives, it is a valuable primer for anyone wanting a fair-minded introduction to this desperately bleak conflict, and written by a man who is clearly big-hearted and brave.

But this engaging and thought-provoking book also leaves some unanswered questions – above all, whether any of us can see the whole landscape, know our own priorities and prejudices, and reach a view that brings us closer to the truth.

Perhaps Flescher (who is Jerusalem correspondent for this publication) was born to walk between two worlds. Born in Israel but raised in Melbourne, he felt fully at home in neither culture. Not religious himself, he has a brother who is a Haredi rabbi, and Kids4Peace is a faith-based organisation. His father Reuven, who during the 1967 Six Day War refused a commander’s orders to shoot some captured enemy soldiers, and who died of cancer at just 51, was a huge influence, teaching his son to always look for the humanity in other people and follow the middle path.  

Early in his book, Flescher makes an important point. An education at Melbourne’s Mount Scopus Memorial College, he writes, taught him only one side of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict – a gap he tried to close when he became a teacher at the school and introduced Palestinian perspectives into his classes.

Given that Flescher has worked at Kids4Peace for more than six years, his account of its work should be vivid, but it is strangely flat. We don’t hear the voices and stories of the young people or of the program leaders: Suma, Mohammed, Yarden and others. Was there fear or tension in the meetings, and how was it resolved? What kinds of parents put (or do not put) their children into such an environment? Are they people who are already committed to dialogue, as is often said about interfaith initiatives? Crucially, have friendships made in the program lasted?

These feel like necessary questions, especially when Flescher’s whole theory of change requires thousands of grassroots initiatives, each side being exposed to the other’s narrative, before a political solution can be found. Flescher points to inspiring Israelis and Palestinians who seek to cross the chasm between their peoples, but overall, this part of the book feels more like advocacy than nuanced storytelling. Was the author too anxious to persuade us these programs work? 

I wanted to hear more of moments like this. Explaining to 30 teenagers why he has moved to Israel, he is interrupted by a Muslim girl who says, “You now live in Palestine.” Flescher resolves the issue by telling people from then on that he has moved to Jerusalem, a home to both peoples. This seems to skirt around a harder challenge underlying the girl’s reproach. 

By contrast, Flescher’s way of wrestling with events on and after October 7 feels real and raw. Three days after the massacre, he tells a journalist from Australia’s Channel 7 that Israelis and Palestinians must find a way to share the land. “That’s a remarkably balanced take, given what you’re up against right now,” the reporter observes.

Flescher feels no regret: it should not be remarkable to affirm the humanity of both peoples. “That tightrope I walked, and have continued to tread since October 7, was the only way my conscience could find a modicum of peace.”

Walking that highwire gives him insights. The two sides darkly mirror each other, he writes. Most Israelis believe that if they took down walls and checkpoints to protect them against Palestinian violence, “they would be slaughtered in an instant”. Most Palestinians believe that if they stopped fighting, “Israel would permanently annex all of their land and never support their right to statehood.”

Flescher notes many examples of such mutual blindness. Both sides insist that the other condemn certain acts of their own side before dialogue can even begin, yet this demand is likely to make dialogue impossible. Both sides see a darker meaning in slogans such as “I am a proud Zionist” or “Free Palestine” than might actually be the case. Both assume that their own radicals are the exception to the norm, while those of the other sides are definitive.

Yet standing in the middle, scrupulously following one’s conscience, does not give a writer a free pass. Taking a moral position requires more than ideals, it calls for realism -- what can work? Noting that the two-state solution is now more unpopular among Israelis and Palestinians than at any time since the Oslo process of the early 1990s, he proposes instead that two states be formed as a confederation within a single homeland.

While voting only in their own country, citizens could live as permanent residents in the other state. Neither people would have to extinguish its “dream of national self-determination in any part of the land, making all the territory from the river to the sea a land for all.”

As imperilled as the two-state solution is, this idea feels far less realistic, and Flescher supplies too few details to make it persuasive. He is also vague in his views about the current war, beyond not supporting it. He despairs of the immense public support in Israel for the war, “knowing deep in my heart that negotiations and compromise will always be more powerful at achieving freedom and security than guns and F 15s.”

As an abstract principle, that might be true. But detail is everything. What negotiations and compromise with Hamas were acceptable and available after October 7? Does Flescher agree that after the massacre Israel could no longer live with a statelet run by Hamas on its border? If he does, how was it to achieve that, if not by war? The book does not answer these questions.

Flescher does not minimise the horror of October 7 and is dismayed by the way many leftists and artists in the West celebrated it or were silent. But his book focusses more on what Gazans have suffered from Israel’s response. Young men telling their life stories on Facebook, to leave some record of their existence if they die. Parents writing names on their children’s arms and legs, to identify their bodies in case of an airstrike. Reading of young women being forced to endure surgeries without anaesthetic, “I stared at my screen in shock. How could my people do such a thing to these women?”

This is the crux of Flescher’s argument: fuelled by rage and the trauma of historical memory, and helped by a local media that does not show the destruction of Gaza, Jewish Israelis have closed their eyes and hardened their hearts to Palestinian torment. At one point Flescher asks us to put down his book and watch a YouTube video of a Gazan man, a doctor who had worked in Israel, speaking of the deaths of his three daughters just moments earlier. The author is beseeching Israelis and all of us: see this.

To his credit, Flescher always reports the views of his critics. A friend describes a Facebook post by the author as “beautifully written but immoral as well,” since to the friend it established an equivalence between Hamas’s demonic butchery and the deaths of civilians in Gaza, however horrible, as a result of a war of defence. Flescher acknowledges some truth in this and other responses, which is why he found the post so hard to write.

It takes courage to speak against a tide of opinion held by one’s own people. And with good reason Flescher might argue that once the war is over, the onus is on the Israelis, as by far the more powerful force in this conflict, to take the first steps towards a peace that will lead, eventually, to two states for two peoples.

But focussing single-mindedly on the power imbalance can also distort thinking. Author David Grossman has written for years about how more than 50 years of occupation of the West Bank is corroding the Israeli soul. He longs for Israeli Jews to abandon their sense, forged by millennia of persecution, of being a besieged minority; they are a majority, and have huge responsibility to treat their minorities well. The Israeli government, he wrote in 2018, has “failed this test spectacularly.”     

But Grossman’s recently published book of essays, The Thinking Heart, strikes a new note. In no way does he absolve his own people: “Where will we direct our guilt – if we are courageous enough to feel it – for what we have inflicted upon innocent Palestinians?” But something cold in the world’s response to October 7, a response that figures little in Flescher’s book, has shocked him.

When Saddam Hussein murdered thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons no one called for Iraq to be wiped off the face of the earth. Why, Grossman asks, is Israel the only country in the world whose elimination can openly be called for? Why does it provoke such unique loathing? To read Grossman’s March 2024 essay, After the War, is to read a brilliant writer at the very limits of language, struggling for words to keep a light flickering against encroaching darkness.

We have to keep our hearts open: on this, Flescher and Grossman are as one. Even if one sees the Palestinian catastrophe as incomparably worse than the Israeli one, anybody serious about a resolution of this conflict has to reckon with the torments of both peoples. It’s a strategic necessity as much as a moral one. Peace will come when both sides not only see the other but see that the other sees them. This is a crucial insight from The Holy and the Broken. 

Seven months after October 7, Kids4Peace restarted: “the youth returned enthusiastically, albeit in smaller numbers than before.” It’s a joyous moment in the book. We’ll need many more of these kids, and many Ittay Fleschers, on the day, if it ever comes, when these two peoples finally turn their faces towards peace.