Dear Omar, Dear Mira: Exploring Zionism Across the Ethnic Divide

Abstract: What happens to Zionism as an idea when it is encountered through the lens of attachment, loss, and interpersonal connection? This article uses a creative-nonfiction form and a dual autoethnographic lens to examine the question of Jewish Zionist longings and Palestinian memory through the heart and mind of two scholars: a Canadian Jew and a Palestinian American. Mira Sucharov, a professor of political science at Carleton University and a frequent public commentator on Middle East issues, writes to Omar M. Dajani, a former member of the Palestinian negotiating team's legal support unit, who is now a law professor at University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, and Omar writes back. Their correspondence—set both in the present and in a recreated past—suggests avenues for a reexamination of identity and connection to place, and a rediscovery of relationality to one another.