President Biden, there is broad consensus Palestinians are not ready for state - opinion

Dear Mr. President:

We remain filled with profound appreciation and admiration for your unambiguous condemnation of the barbarism of Hamas and for your unequivocal moral and material support of the state of Israel. You have championed its right and obligation to defend itself and eliminate Hamas and provided aircraft carriers, weapons, munitions, and financial aid to achieve those ends.

You have consistently said what needed to be said and done what needed to be done, providing badly needed moral clarity at a time of terrible darkness and confusion. You have personally dedicated hours to bring home the hostages and demonstrated your genuine empathy for Israel and the Jewish people.

The images of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau that your father discussed with you as a young man continue to animate you and drive you to act decisively on behalf of the state of Israel and the Jewish people and to reject the complicity of silence.

We are deeply grateful, but we need more. We need you to stand even stronger for the goodness that is Israel and against the evil of our enemies.

The Jewish people have endured millennia of exile and dispersion. We have been blessed to witness the return of our people to Israel, the land of our history and our destiny, the fulfillment of two thousand years of our hopes and prayers. It is, however, our morality, our charity, and our faith – rather than a particular state or piece of land – that represents our highest value and our mission as a people. We have survived millennia without a land but would cease to exist in a moment without our Torah and the biblical values that define us and that we brought to the world.

Our morality has been our priority even at the darkest of times. Rav Yehuda Amital, a Holocaust survivor who went on to be an important spiritual leader in Israel, expressed this idea dramatically:

If there was a single point of light in the Holocaust, it was this: there were two camps there; on one side the camp of the murderers, and on the other side the camp of those murdered. Happy are we that we belonged to the camp of those murdered. The heavens and earth can testify on our behalf: if the nation of Israel had been given the opportunity to reverse roles, the nation of Israel would have said that it is preferable to be among those murdered than among the murderers. This is a historical point of light that cannot be overshadowed.

You are fond of quoting what Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir told you in 1973, that our secret weapon against the Arabs is that we have nowhere else to go. That poignant remark summarizes the physical urgency of Israel’s situation. But Golda said other things that spoke not as much to its struggle for survival but to the nature of Israel’s battle of good vs. evil: 

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children;

We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us;

If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.”

Every one of those statements continues to ring true. Our enemies continue to commit that unforgivable sin and it seems to be working well for them as they have succeeded in making much of the world see us – the Jews – as the murderers. They have helped the world forget that every war that Israel has fought was a response to an actual or looming Arab attack.

By their cynical use of human shields and by making hospitals, mosques, and schools in densely populated areas their rocket-launching pads, they continue to demonstrate that they prefer the publicity benefits of generating images of their own bloodied children to allowing those children instead to live and thrive in peace alongside Jews.

They have created an alternative reality where an army that strives to define and uphold as its central value tohar haneshek, “purity of arms” and risks its own soldier’s lives in its effort to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties can be accused of “indiscriminate bombing” and lectured on international law.

Broad Israeli recognition that the Palestinians are not ready for statehood

The current Israeli opposition to giving the Palestinians an independent state is no longer coming from the political or religious hard right, but from a broad national consensus that the Palestinians are nowhere near ready for a state of their own neighboring Israel. The Palestinians – not solely Hamas, but the Palestinians – remain wedded to terribly evil ideas and practices. They continue – in the West Bank and Gaza – to educate and indoctrinate their children to aspire to our destruction, they celebrate the martyrs whom they pay to slay Jews, and by significant majorities support the explicit and proud genocidal vision of Hamas and their actions on October 7.

The State of Israel, by contrast, is filled with Israeli Arab cities, towns, and villages. In Israeli cities, Arabs will pump your gas, serve you a meal, be the chief of surgery at your hospital or the judge in your courtroom. Racially motivated brutality against Arabs – the so-called and grossly inflated phenomenon of “settler violence” – is roundly denounced and the ideology behind it marginalized across the religious and political spectrum.

Yet the assumption – confirmed by the bright orange signs at the entry to any of the Palestinian-controlled areas that warn Israelis of the dangers of entering – is that any future Palestinian state must be judenrein (empty of Jews) such that the presence of a Jewish settlement contradicts the future possibility of a Palestinian state in that area. Is there a clearer contrast between good and evil?

The Jews aspire for a peaceful state that welcomes and includes all who seek peace. Any discussion of addressing Palestinian aspirations for a state must wait until their aspirations include peaceful coexistence with and inclusion of Jews.

Mr. President, we care deeply for the survival of Israel as “we have nowhere else to go.” But we are no less committed to continuing our mission as the people that represents all that is good, faithful, moral, and charitable, the “light unto the nations.” That light has been shrouded by alternative versions of reality, by false and by terribly incomplete narratives. We need your clear and strong voice to correct that.

We thank you and sincerely pray for your continued success in leading the world to sanity and to true humanity.

God bless you.

The writer is the executive vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (OU).