Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The only answer to hate is humanity

Barenboim's concerts sell out because, says the conductor, they represent possibilities

Buried in the mountain of post-holiday mail – mostly bills and other unwanted missives – was a small envelope, a bit grubby, nervously present as if aware it was intruding or daring to do something improper. In it, a handwritten letter told an age-old story in the simplest of words.

A, a young British Palestinian woman has fallen blindly, agonisingly in love with B, son of American Zionist émigrés in Tel Aviv. They met in a London park last summer, got chatting, shared crisps and Cokes and have been meeting in secret ever since. He is about to go back home after post-graduate studies and she is suicidal at the thought of losing him and not losing him. Born enemies, they must die enemies. "Why should that be?" asks A plaintively and then says she knows.

It is the tragedy of the Middle East, two Semitic tribes, irreconcilable foes. Her boyfriend himself shot at Palestinian children who were throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Her father, a Fatah member, would kill her if he knew.

Will such a love be possible in 2050? 2090? 3001? And if not, how long will the hate go on between people who became entrenched enemies only 60 years ago? The conflict began in 1947 when the UN General Assembly voted to appropriate part of Palestine to create a new Jewish State. It was, in part, Europe seeking expiation for the Holocaust, in part the answer to ancient Jewish longings and also the prize claimed by militant Zionists who had waged a deadly terrorist campaign for a homeland they believed was theirs by right.

And so it was that in May 1948 Israel was born; more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced and mass global Jewish immigration began. Before this, even though there were a number of prominent pro-Nazi Arabs, in most of North Africa and the Middle East Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together, peoples of shared places and in many cases shared ethnicity whose quarrels were domestic and easily forgiven.

That ease was replaced by bitterness, political intransigence and relentless violence. Most Muslim Arabs today are instinctively anti-Jewish and the majority of Israelis harbour intense anti-Muslim prejudices. The former have demographic advantage so can spread this virus far and wide; the latter is a superpower capable of destroying the Muslim world and expects to be allowed to do what it pleases, regardless of international law or its own long-term interests. This week Israeli propagandists accused Hamas of abusing 'the laws of war'. They would know from long experience exactly how. Gaza is a razed ghetto, its people kept on their knees. It is not at all surprising to me that young men and boys who are forced to live without basics and dignity are easily seduced by depraved al-Qa'ida ideologues, several of whom were killed in the city of Rafah by Hamas this week. (Suddenly Hamas are the good guys.)

Michael Palin wrote a letter published in The Independent after he returned from the Palestinian Literary Festival on the West Bank. It was uncharacteristically forthright for a mild Englishman: "Palestinians are made to feel inferior. Power is wielded by the gun, watchtower, the arbitrary search and ultimately the separation wall which breaks up centuries-old communities and cuts farmers off from their lands ... [it] prevents the people of the area, Jewish or Palestinian, from coming together for any kind of mutual interest or to exchange their experiences. With human contact virtually forbidden, it is hard to imagine how political change can be effected."

Fish cannot live in the Dead Sea; the environment cannot sustain them. So it is with domesticity, intimacy, trust and commonalities. Unlike fish though, the human spirit rarely gives up trying.

My dearest friend Tom Eisner, a gifted violinist for the London Philharmonic Orchestra came to dinner on Saturday. The son of an ardent Zionist, Tom indefatigably fights for Palestinian rights. He told me about a visit to Gaza when he smelt some food cooking and was invited into dinner by the man of the house who turned out to be a member of Hamas: "I told him I was Jewish. He said, 'It does not matter. Please come in.'"

There are such people all over the Middle East and the rest of the conflicted world who can see and name injustice and courageously abjure group or national loyalties. Take these two particularly-impressive writers whose latest books I read on holiday. My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness by Adina Hoffman is a beautiful homage to the Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali. She, like other Israelis, admits she lost her optimism "after a friend, Anna, a plucky free spirit, avid reader and lifelong peacenik, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber on a bus. I stopped taking public transportation. I also stopped talking to many Jewish friends who had converted their own fear ... into the most unapologetic racism. 'The Arabs are animals' was now a phrase one heard daily ... my brain had been colonised by the new suspicions, new inhibitions, new categories of doubt."

Maybe it was to save herself from that paranoia that she decided to record Taha's life of endless dispossession and his poetic laments.

The other book is by Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian activist and winner of the Orwell Prize for a previous book. In Strangers in the House he describes his complicated relationship (often tetchy) with his father, a human rights lawyer who was murdered by "a despicable collaborator working for the Israeli state"'. He will not though, describe his dad as a "shaheed" (martyr) and rejects the mania for religious martyrdom among his people.

Like Hoffman, Shehadeh has kept his integrity and can still dream of a future without walls and religious barricades.

Daniel Barenboim once more brings the acclaimed West-Eastern Divan (Jewish and Arab musicians playing together) to the Proms this coming weekend. It always sells out because, says the conductor, they represent possibilities, they do not hate. And as Palin says, only that kind of human contact will bring effective political resolution so no more will have to die in an unwinnable war.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk