The unfinished Six Day War: An open letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu

You ought to recall what Frederick Douglas once observed: "where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

To blame the Palestinians for the lack of peace is hypocritical at best. What is it that you want from them? They are at Israel's mercy; they have nothing left to give. You, Netanyahu, have the power to propose a framework for peace. No country or combination of countries in the Middle East can expect to defeat Israel militarily for the foreseeable future. If you do not negotiate peace from strength now, then when?

Peace based on a two-state solution is not a favor to the Palestinians-it is fundamental to Israel's long-term national security. Without peace, you jeopardize the Jews' nationhood for which so many have suffered and died.

Remember this, Mr. Netanyahu: nearly 80 percent of Palestinians and roughly 70 percent of Israelis were born under occupation. What sort of Jewish state are you creating? A state which is in the business of oppressing other people, because people like you portray them as the eternal enemy?

Haven't the Jews lived long enough to know the meaning of being persecuted, incarcerated, segregated, expelled, and sentenced to death? Are you suggesting that the Palestinians are an irredeemable foe, and we the Jews must oppress and humiliate them to be safe and secure?

No, Mr. Netanyahu. What you are subjecting the Palestinians to day in and day out defies Jewish values, defies what is moral and right, defies logic, and defies the very reason why the Jews struggled to survive for millennia to have a home of our own.

You and your blind zealots are utterly ignorant of what we must stand for. They are destroying brick-by-brick the only country that offers a refuge to every Jew who seeks to live in a free, democratic Jewish state. The occupation does not make Israel a free, safe, and independent state, but a prison with fences and wall and bunkers and shelters, with tens of thousands of soldiers on the ready to kill, to raid, to destroy.

Why?

Because you want to make the Palestinians the eternal enemy, only to support a warped ideology that wantonly ignores their unmitigated reality. Yes, the existence of the Palestinian people is a fact that you cannot wish away. Does it ever occur to you that they want to live a normal life without fear, without dread, and without anxiety and concerns? Does it ever occur to you that the continuing occupation feeds into the frenzy of extremism? Would we the Jews have acted any differently under brutal occupation?

As one who claims to represent not only Israel but world Jewry, don't you have the obligation to offer a vision as to where you are leading the people of Israel? And what should Jews around the world, in whose name you claim to speak, expect five or ten years down the line?

Given the continuing tense and dire situation in the territories, it is only a matter of time when the next bloody conflagration will happen. The blood of every Israeli and Palestinian man, woman, and child will be on your hands. No one else is to blame for your paralysis to act but you.

You cannot blame your lunatic and outrageous hardcore ideologues partners like Bennett, Shaked, and Lieberman, who refuse to see the light and choose to live in the dark, not knowing what's in store for them. They put a leash around your neck and you welcome it because you hypocritically use them to provide you with the political cover you need to pursue your twisted scheme. It is you, and only you, who can change direction by getting rid of them and forming a new government committed to peace, if you only will it. But you don't.

I wonder, Mr. Netanyahu, what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind? To reap the real fruits of the Six Day War is to make peace. Nothing short of peace will make the Six Day War a triumph, because the war is continuing. You, more than any other human living in Israel, will be responsible and accountable to the next generation who will be asking, why? Why must we live in a prison of our own creation when the state of Israel was created to liberate us?

History will not be kind to you, Mr. Netanyahu, unless you change course. It is time to reflect, because the destiny of the nation of Israel is in your hands.