Dear Secretary of State Blinken

Open Letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken

Pamela Peled

Dear Secretary of State, Antony Blinken,

Unfortunately I don’t know how to prostrate myself in prose, Sir; if I were in front of you I would throw myself at your feet and beg you to listen. First, of course, I would thank you so very much; you have shuttled around the world tirelessly to help us extricate ourselves from the hell we cannot seem to escape. We so appreciate your help, and America’s friendship and how you endlessly have our back.

But more than thanking you I would cling to your feet and beg you, beg you! to help us save ourselves – not from Hamas, or Hizballah, or Iran, but from our own government.  

We don’t have words to describe our government, Mr. Blinken;we have taken to simply sighing, deeply, and intoning “It’s all too much.” Every day our crazy coalition of corrupt, incompetent, crazy individuals hit us across the heart with a new curse. It feels mythological; it feels like a Biblical meltdown. Shakespeare could have articulated our pain, and maybe he did: in his Scottish play, when Malcolm enquires how his homeland is coping, Ross informs him that under Macbeth the newest grief ‘of an hour’s age doth hiss the speaker’ – calamities occur so quickly that ‘every minute teems a new one,’ and it’s impossible to keep up.  The words have never seemed so relevant; that’s exactly how we are feeling in the unholy mess of the Holy Land.

It is important for us to tell you that we are not like our leaders, Sir, the majority of us are not in the slightest bit messianic, we don’t want to settle Gaza, we don’t even want the West Bank. We want to live and let live, we want to go to the beach and eat our hummus and invent some new miracles to save the planet. We abhor, abhor! the lunatics who want to continue this chronic war at any cost – obliterating our security, our economy and our sanity in one fell swoop.

But most of all we fear our leader – he who sees this war as his “get out of jail free card’ – he who is determined to scupper every deal that you so graciously hand to us. Our Minister of Defense tells us that it is safe, and advisable, to accept the present deal, our Chief of Staff says the same, as does the head of the Mossad and the Shabak. Our soldiers are tired, our border communities are burning and bare; our citizens are broken and heartbroken; every idiot knows that we need a time to heal and regroup.

We go to sleep (if we can fall asleep) thinking of our hostages; we wake up and wonder whether they’ve survived the night. We want them home, now, today, this second; we are all in bondage while they are there. Our stomachs crimp and churn to see how our leader is abandoning them; we gasp in disbelief as we watch his coalition silently standing by. We have given up on this coalition of shame, Mr. Blinken; some of them – at least some of them – must see what this man is inflicting on us, yet they remain as silent as bullied babies. It’s an unsustainable balagan wherever you look – the Hareidim refusing to enlist, Ministers tweeting insanely without a smidgen of sense, forgotten refugees from the north and south falling apart all over the country, our economy downgraded while our Minister of Finance doesn’t seem to know simple math, and the endless, unbearable daily news of deaths and destruction.  

A deal could give us such a desperately-needed break from thisongoing agony.  

Apart from bringing our children, our parents, our partners home, refusing this deal could trigger unimaginable and massive devastation – missile barrages from Iran and Hizballah like we’ve never seen before, ongoing terror, ongoing despair.  Netanyahu doesn’t care.  He wants to stay in charge, and stay out of prison, and if he has to take the country down to do so, and possibly even the world – well, ok. He is dependent on Ben Gvir and Smotrich for his literal survival; only God can save us from them.

And possibly you.

I want to tell you something, Mr. Secretary: many years ago, I attended a charity event where then-Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin attempted to speak. Ben Gvir, our present Minister of Security, was one of a bunch of yelling, rampaging hooligans who stormed the premises, booed our PM, and pushed and shoved their way into ruining the day.

I personally saw Ben Gvir brandish an emblem he had torn off Rabin’s car; “We got to his car,” he raged, in that screechy tone of his, “next we will get to him.”  I don’t know if you remember, Mr. Blinken, that terrifying rally in Jerusalem where crazed right–wingers held up posters of Rabin as a Nazi; Benjamin Netanyahu remembers it well.  He was leaning over that infamous balcony on Zion Square, beaming down at the brutes below.

Soon afterwards Rabin was assassinated, and Netanyahu was elected in his stead. And we watched and rubbed our eyes in disbelief as for years he unraveled every pillar of our beloved country, climaxing in this terrible war.

Our side does not assassinate, Mr. Secretary.  We don’t call for ‘pulsa denuras’ – the supposed ancient Kabbalistic ceremony in which destroying angels are invoked to block heavenly forgiveness for somebody’s sins, causing all the curses of the Bible to fall upon him and cause his death. That’s what their boys did to our beloved Rabin.  

We don’t believe in that way of operating. We embrace the rule of law, and democracy, and sanity. That is why we need you, and your great country, the beacon of democracy, to help us. This government does not speak for the people of the country, or the majority of us at any rate.  

Please help us to stop them from destroying us.  

God bless us and God bless America. And God bless you