Choose a path to peace: An open letter to my Palestinian neighbors - opinion

I live in a Jewish town in the Judean Desert, 20 minutes from Jerusalem. I am a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a hospice chaplain, and the mayor of my community. I raise my family here, I celebrate life cycle events here, and I bury the dead here.

I watch the sun set over the same hills that appear in the Bible. Many Jews who live in Judea and Samaria have written open letters to their Palestinian neighbors. Yossi Klein Halevi did it with care and moral seriousness in a full book. This is mine.

I am sorry for what happened to your family. War is ugly. Displacement is painful. Loss leaves marks that last generations. I will not pretend otherwise.

There is no way to turn the clock back to 1948 and restore the exact house your grandparents left. History does not work that way. In 1947, the United Nations offered a partition plan that would have created a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side.

The Jewish leadership accepted it. The Arab leadership rejected it and declared that the entire land, from the river to the sea, would remain Arab. Five Arab armies then attacked the newly declared State of Israel. They lost.

That war had consequences. Jews who remained in what became Israel after 1948 were not expelled from the new state. Arabs who did not flee were allowed to stay on their land and become citizens. Many did. Nazareth remains an overwhelmingly Arab city inside Israel to this day. 

Those who left, or whose families left, made choices in the middle of a war their leaders had chosen to start. Choices in war have costs. Pretending the outcome was simply an “injustice done to” your family erases the agency of the people who rejected partition and launched the attack.

Your great-grandparents decided at a decisive moment. The leadership of their side also made a decision. They were wrong if the goal was a state of their own living next to a Jewish one. Israel exists now. It will not become “Palestine.”

Clinging to a key from a house that no longer belongs to you will not change that. The healthier path is to build a functioning society in the areas under Palestinian control and to seek peace with the Israelis rather than to wait for another war that your side keeps losing.

It is painful to watch the same pattern repeat. Israel has offered the West Bank and Gaza as the basis for a Palestinian state more than once: Camp David in 2000, Olmert’s proposal in 2008, even after Hamas seized Gaza. The Palestinian leadership refused to close a deal. The chant “from the river to the sea” continued.

Waiting for the shift to happen

After October 7, 2023, Israelis are finished making the same offer on the same terms while the other side still treats the Jewish state as temporary and illegitimate.

This land is not empty of Jewish history. Judea and Samaria are filled with ancient Jewish archaeology and biblical sites. Jews were exiled from this land for centuries and longed to return.

In many cases, your families still live only a short distance from where their grandparents lived, on the same stretch of land between the river and the sea. If you live elsewhere, that, too, is a choice. You could be building institutions, schools, and a politics of peace where you are.

Israel has had large, visible peace movements for decades. Palestinian society has produced far fewer voices willing to say, in public and at personal risk, that they want a state next to Israel rather than instead of it. Those who do are often branded collaborators. That culture has a price.

Until Palestinian leaders and a critical mass of the public declare, clearly and repeatedly, that they accept a Jewish state and will build their own instead of trying to erase ours, they will remain without a state of their own.

Jews built a country in which Arab citizens have equal legal rights. Israel has made peace with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and others when those governments decided they wanted peace rather than Israel’s destruction.

When Arabs choose peace, Israel lives with it. When the goal remains the elimination of Israel, Israel treats that population as a security threat. Why would it do otherwise? Jews did not return after 2,000 years of exile just to hand the state over and disappear.

Things do not have to stay as they are.

Accountability would help. Stop presenting every consequence of rejected partition, rejected offers, and renewed war as something done to you with no decisions on your side. Perpetual victimhood without agency has not produced a state. It has produced more funerals.

Choose nation-building. Choose leaders who will say out loud that Israel is here to stay and that the task now is to create a decent life for Palestinians rather than to wait for Israel to vanish.

Until that shift happens in public, loudly, and at scale, the reality will remain what it is: Israeli security control in Judea and Samaria, Hamas in Gaza, and another generation raised on the hope that the next war will succeed where the last ones failed.

I write this from a hill in Judea, as a woman who has spent years sitting with the dying and raising children in a place the world insists is temporary. It is not temporary. Israel is Israel. The question is whether your side will finally decide to live next to it.

The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yericho, where she enjoys spending time with her family.