By Professor Emerita Melissa Raphael
Praying for Love’s Futurity
There is a rabbinic tradition that says that when all of Israel’s congregations have finished their prayers an angel gathers them together and, instead of discarding them, weaves them into a crown for God.[1] As a Jew, I pray that all prayers for an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs will also be woven into that crown, perhaps one made not from gold, but from wild flowers and herbs for a God whose sovereignty consists only in the power of love to command love.
Like the angel’s loosely woven crown of light, or the strings of King David’s harp upon which the north wind once played its midnight song,[2] a two-state solution maps a space and moment through which the winds of the spirit could blow a history of conflict towards its peaceful resolution.
Driven by hope, bruised trust, and every cause for doubt, I want to suggest that a two-state solution is less a ‘deal’ than an extra-liturgical prayer. It might parcel out land and redraw borders in the secular language of natural rights and strategic interests, but it also sings for the futurity of love; for a peaceful sociality that is at best recumbent in the numbered points of Trump’s recent plan for Gaza.
While early Zionism tended to favour the creation of a binational state, and at least since 1947, variants of a two-state solution have been proposed and opposed by Jews and non-Jews alike, it is as a modern Jewish prayer for an Israel governed by the obligated love of neighbours that its impetus might best be understood.
The emancipation of nineteenth-century western European Jewry from the ghettoes, actual or metaphorical, opened the door to the development of a universalist Jewish ethic whose application had had no previous opportunity. Commanded love for one’s particular Jewish neighbour could now reach beyond its immediate vicinity to command love of one’s universal neighbour.
After Hamas have laid down their weapons and left the political stage, a two-state solution could render a Palestinian citizen of the neighbouring State of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank the proper object of commanded love. By virtue of their respective sovereignty, neither Jews nor Palestinians could exercise dominion over one another. Instead, even without evidence or expectation of love’s return, becoming neighbours would at least entail cooperation for the practical purposes of mutual and separate flourishing.
A klal gadol or all-encompassing principle of Torah is commanded love for one’s neighbour – classically one who is ‘like me’; my fellow Jew. [3] In the twenty-first century, love of her Jewish neighbour may have driven Israel to a defensive war, but the same love must also drive her to peace with her non-Jewish neighbour. That is, when Israel and Gaza become contiguous sovereign states, and the Palestinian can declare me her neighbour, I will be commanded to love her as I would love a fellow Jew, or as I love myself. This is a love (ahavah) that, like the Christian agape, is driven not by inclination but by obligation. It matters not that this is a love that may well drag its emotional feet.
Love as the justification of Israel’s war in Gaza, and its peace.
The paradox of neighbourly love is that it commands both defensive war and peace.
For over two years, my insistence that Israel’s war in Gaza has been a just one has been met with incredulity by many of my friends and colleagues. But it may be that, after this war, the achievement of a two-state solution will prove its justice retrospectively. A modern just war is, after all, one waged, not for conquest and only defensively, for a just and lasting peace between neighbouring states. Only as the planned ‘morning after’ the long night of war in Gaza will a two-state solution have made peace properly continuous with war. Only then will the war have been hard-fought for the redemption of love from hate.
This is something that people of good will often find difficult to accept: that especially in Israel, with enemies on all sides, war, as well as peace, is a function of the commandment to love one’s neighbour. As the post-Holocaust philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas put it in an interview in 1982, the only justification of a Jewish state is as a polity constituted by ‘the old ethical idea which commands us [the Jewish people] precisely to defend our neighbours.’[4] Former Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin was also a peacemaker who understood that sometimes Israel has no other way to defend its citizens than by war: by killing (not murdering) their killers and sometimes, with tragic unavoidability, those moral innocents their killers live among. [5]
The defence of Israel’s own Jewish neighbours against Hamas’ jihadist war of attack has therefore been something of an ethically obligated ethical catastrophe. It has been ethically catastrophic because, along with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the other proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran who have not been the victims of Israeli violence but its cause, far too many innocent people have suffered and lost their lives and homes at Israel’s hands.
On such grounds, the Christian Church has often styled Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza as an act of (mere) vengeance. In December 2024, the late Pope Francis condemned the killing of children in Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza, saying ‘This is cruelty. This is not war.’ That blood-libellous charge must be categorically rejected. Cruelty is intentional and malicious. But Israel does not deliberately target the innocent. That Hamas and Egypt refused Palestinians shelter in the tunnels or refuge across the border added considerably to the civilian death toll.
And more than that, such denunciations of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza neglect to consider why it might have been an ethically obligated ‘last resort’ in the first place. That is, after the October 7th massacres, which Hamas and its allies have repeatedly described as a mere first strike for the elimination of Israel, its Jews and Jews worldwide, love would not be love which refused to defend a Jewish neighbour in ways proportionate to the gravity of the threat, but rather left her to her fate. The human moral order would collapse and evil prevail were one to prohibit wars like this between Israel and Gaza, which has been a war waged in love of the defended, not hate for their assailants. As the rabbinic commentators read Leviticus 19:16, you must not stand idly by while your brother or sister bleeds. A masked gunman who intends to shoot or behead them or me is neither a stranger nor yet a neighbour, but a killer whom I am neither permitted to hate nor commanded to love.
The Realism of a Two-State Prayer for Peace
After the savagery of the October 7th massacres, most secular Israeli commentators are understandably reluctant to trust the security of at least one half the Jewish people to a Palestinian polity (let alone to God). ‘Any time soon’ hopes for a two-state solution can seem recklessly detached from any prevailing reality.
A Jewish prayer for a future State of Palestine may define reality differently to the secular world, but it is certainly the case that a prayer for peace cannot be a substitute for the political character of its conditions. The only State of Palestine that Israel can recognise is one that, alongside a reformed Palestinian Authority, can declare its recognition of Jewish sovereignty within agreed borders.
This declaration may be a long time coming. Among many others, Einat Wilf has observed that the obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has not, in fact, been a Jewish failure to relinquish land. Over 90% of the land it has won in defensive wars has already been relinquished. It is neither the undue leverage of the religious right on Israel’s coalition government policy, nor the violence of the 300 or so delinquent Jews who should face prosecution (‘settlers’, if one must use the language of modern colonialism of the religious Zionist project), that prevents peace. The principal, if not the only, contemporary obstacle to peace is ‘Palestinianism’: a global Islamist and far-left ideology that rejects the Jewish right to self-determination in any part of the land.
Realistically, then, a two-state solution can only be agreed on condition that the Palestinian people collectively declare themselves our neighbours and, crowned with sovereignty’s full moral responsibility and accountability, begin to work for the success of their new country not for the destruction of ours. It is only then, when they do not hate me or Israel simply for existing, and even if they never love me, that both ‘sides’ can expect from the other the ordinary civilities in which the miracle of peace consists.
But realism cannot ignore the non-diplomatic, dialogical peace processes that are already underway between Jews and Muslims who meet to eat, pray, talk, learn and play football together. The hands of men like the prominent Gazan-American moderate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib or fellow Mancunian podcasters, religious leaders and friends, Imam Nasser Kurdy and Rabbi Dovid Lewis, are already stretched out in empathy and respect to the neighbouring other.[6] When women like those in the Nisa-Nashim network bring Muslim and Jewish women together as neighbours who can feel safe in each other’s presence, they too inspire or breathe peace into the world. [7]
The announcement of a two-state solution would turn up the spiritual volume of all these other prayers for peace and drown out the slogans and chants that incite hate. Biblical Israel was commanded to blow short trumpet blasts for deliverance at times of its defensive wars and for joy at the fixed times of its festivals. The great early medieval philosopher Maimonides saw these trumpet blasts as ways of alerting every living thing – even God – to a moment whose momentous significance would not be confined within the walls of the houses and holy cities of Israel.[8] When Israel’s defensive war in Gaza is over, the announcement of a two-state solution could be a fanfare for the advent of love; a cry of jubilation loud enough to carry to the Palestinian neighbour who cannot yet hear it; who is dead or as yet unborn.
Although a Palestinian’s prayer for a neighbourly peace might be prayed on Islamic scriptural grounds not dissimilar to my own,[9] I cannot pray it for him. And in the meantime, a two-state solution is a prayer for peace that does not ask for a miracle or act in blind faith. It simply invites the Palestinians to be my neighbours and thereby, not unreasonably, to abjure Palestinianism’s defining project and idea: the destruction of the State of Israel, the murder, exile or subjugation of its seven million Jews, the theft of its infrastructure, and the desecration of its sacra. I wait, as prayer is always a waiting, to hear what it is they ask of me.
[1] Shemot (Exodus) Rabbah 21.
[2] BT Berachot 3b.
[4] Reprinted in The Levinas Reader, pp. 292-3.
[5] The Hebrew text of the sixth commandment (Exodus 20:13) is better translated as you shall not murder, not you shall not kill.
[6] The Rabbi, the Imam and the Power of Dialogue https://shows.acast.com/the-rabbi-the-imam. There is no shortage of interfaith peace-building initiatives. See also, e.g., https://ritualwell.org/blog/when-jews-and-muslims-pray-together/
[7] See e.g., Sahih al-Bukhari, 6016. The hadith is interpreted as the description of a believer as one whose neighbour, Muslim or otherwise, feels safe in his presence.
[8] Maimonides on Numbers 10:9, Taniyot, 1:1.
[9] Qur’an, Surah An-Nisa 4:36, where good neighbourly relations extend from kin to strangers.