Dear Barack, do not reward terror with gifts

Dear President Obama,

This week the entire country of Israel performed a security exercise. At 11:00am a siren sounded and all of us, every man, woman and child had to take shelter. At a home for seniors who are Alzheimer's patients, it took much longer than the allotted 3 minutes for the staff to help find these patients protection. (They were pushed in their wheelchairs to sit next to an interior wall.) This whole country is a target for attack. All of us are imperiled.

Our situation is untenable. But your remedy, to get the Jews out of the Palestinian territories so that peace can ensue is naïve. Before 1967 the Jews were out of the Palestinian territories, and there was still a lack of peace. The last disengagement of the Jews from Gush Katif did not lead to peace but to repeated attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon and the southern periphery. 

You err when you believe that this conflict is about the settlements. It is a conflict about the Jews' authentic connection to this land, a connection that began with our Biblical forefathers and mothers and continues today through our historic and unyielding attachment to Jerusalem, the home of our ancient temple. You can give all the settlements away to the Palestinians, and they will still attack us for the rest of Israel. For they don't believe that we have a right to this land.

Furthermore, you who are so attached to your children should realize that when you talk about settlements, you are not just discussing a political issue. You are talking about the homes of the families of hundreds of thousands of Jews, some of whom were expelled from their homes in Arab countries, others who survived the Russian Gulag or the Holocaust. 

We are vibrant communities with very strong connections to the people with whom we live. When my 13-year-old son Koby was murdered here in Tekoa by Arab terrorists (beaten to death with rocks), it was the community that supported our family for years, making us meals, doing our laundry, learning with us, praying with us, crying with us.

Also, by squelching our growth, you are taking away our democratic right to live where we want. I would like to see you try to legislate a similar law in New York City, home of many Jews. Tell the Jews that they can't allow their communities to grow. Or perhaps limit the number of dwellings for African-Americans in Chicago. Tell them that nobody can build a home or even add on a bedroom. The thought is preposterous. Yet you offer it as your first foreign policy objective in the Middle East under the guise of honesty.

Your desire for honesty can be disingenuous. A policy that is so highly discriminatory cannot be called honest. 

By limiting natural growth, you are saying to me that my children will not be able to live here. Our communities are so vibrant that when our children marry they very often want to stay in their hometown. So in effect, you are discriminating against the young who will not be able to live in their own communities. In this way, you may turn the settlements into old age homes eventually because only those who are already here will be able to stay. 

Moreover, by limiting growth here, you will limit our ability to survive. In that case, our communities will be taken over by Palestinians. But that may be your intent.

Consider this: I will not be allowed to visit the place my son was murdered or even his grave because the Palestinians won't allow us into their villages. In any case, I know some would most likely celebrate the place of my son's murder.

If the Palestinians don't believe that we have an authentic connection to any of this land and if you reinforce that thought with a policy that hints of Judenrien - then you contribute to further conflict in the Middle East. If you reward their tactics of terror with gifts of land, your policies will backfire. The only place we are heading if we leave the settlements is to a greater conflagration.