No, we can't

Dear Mr Obama,

I'm an Israeli and, like the majority of Israelis, I have longed for peace for as long as I've lived. The idea that one day we'll be able to just live normal life without people getting killed when they're going to work or doing their shopping or sitting at a café - that is a dream we have been dreaming ever since the State of Israel came into being.

No, that's not true. We've been dreaming that dream for a lot longer. We dreamt that dream whilst being persecuted in a whole load of different countries - we got persecuted in one place so we packed our bags and went elsewhere, hoping that in that place we might be allowed to live in peace. We dreamt that dream when we started to go back to our land, and when Britain promised us a home on that land, and when the world - the League of Nations at the time - gave Britain a mandate to look after our land as a temporary measure and help make this dream happen.

Britain let us down. It took part of our land and gave it to the Arabs, so the territory available for that promised home shrank into a tiny little bit of land. I'm sure you've seen the map plenty of times and you know the size of Jordan as compared to the tiny size of Israel even including the disputed territories which we took back in 1967 and which you want us to now "give back" - as though we'd taken them from their rightful owners! Those disputed territories were never under Palestinian sovereignty - and I can't help wondering how come nobody seemed to contest Jordan's occupation of that area between 1949 and 1967. How come the world did not put pressure on Jordan to give that land to the Palestinians? How come the oil-rich Arab countries did not bother to rehouse these people and left them in refugee camps for almost twenty years?

But for some reason when Israel took it back (and yes, I say "took it back" because it was originally part of our land) the world's perception started to change, and now you are telling us we should go back to the so-called 1967 borders (they weren't borders, they were armistice lines, but that's another story) and I wonder:

Leaving aside for the moment the question of who has more right to that piece of land - because from where I'm looking, and many in my country see it that way, if giving up some of our land would earn us real peace then that's worth it - so leaving aside the question of whose land it really is anyway, here's my question:

What on earth makes you think that we will have peace if we give up those disputed territories and return to the so-called 1967 borders? We didn't have peace in the almost 20 years up to 1967 when the State of Israel existed within the 1949 armistice lines, and these disputed territories were under Jordanian rule. The Arabs kept attacking us during that time. What on earth makes you think that they'll stop attacking us now if we simply go back to how it was then?

There may be some Palestinians who promise they will and actually mean it. I don't know - I can't see inside other people's heads. But what I do know is that there are those who have declared openly that they have no intention of ever stopping as long as we are holding on to one shred of what they regard as "the whole of Palestine" and what we call the Land of Israel. As far as Hamas is concerned, even Tel Aviv is "occupied territory". They have shown absolutely zero inclination towards compromise. Do you really think that if we give them an inch they will not demand the whole mile?

I used to be young and naive and believed that if only we gave the Palestinians a land of their own, all would be well - we could get our dream, we could live side by side in peace and harmony. But looking at history, I can't back up that optimism. Looking at 1948, when the State of Israel was founded on the part of our land which the UN had decided to grant us - the UN had given the Palestinians part of the land, but they said no. They could have had an independent state all this time if they had really wanted to, but instead they chose to believe their Arab brothers who promised to wipe us off the map so that they could have the whole of the land to themselves. Thank God, that plan did not work out and we are alive to tell the tale. But the attempts to wipe us off the map have not ceased, and there is no sign that they're likely to ever stop until the day Jesus comes back and sorts the whole world out.

So in the meantime, we have to do what we can to survive. Because we have nowhere else to go. And without a realistic hope that halving our territory again would bring peace, I don't think we can afford to do that.

I said in the title "no, we can't" and of course it's a play on words, based on your own slogan. But seriously, what I mean is: no, we can't afford to do what you say; and also: no, we can't make peace happen, despite our deep desire and longing for it - not as long as there are people like Hamas around, who are intent on destroying us completely. We long for peace, and we have shown willingness to pay a price for it in terms of giving up land - but there are those who will not settle for just some land, they want it all, and they want us out of there. And we have nowhere else to go.