Israel exists

ISRAEL-16 June 2026

To get right to the point, Mr. Trump, President of the United States of America, Israel exists and has existed for almost eighty years because of the sacrifices of its young and not so young soldiers in the regular army and in the reserves, including the death of more than one thousand soldiers in the past three years, and the injuries, both physical and mental, suffered by tens of thousands more.

The People of the United States of America have been and I hope, after the current crisis in our relationship, will still be a very good ally and friend, of the People and State of Israel. Presidents, including Presidents like Truman and Nixon and many other American politicians have come to Israel’s aid during crises!

Israel does not exist because of you. I hope that our relationship which, until a few years ago, was once based on mutual democratic values , will return again in the near future!

I guess that the President of the United States did not think that saying that “Israel only exists because of him” was not enough for him yesterday. Today, the barrage of insults continued as we found out that Syria, the symbol of liberal treatment of enemies, would do a better job than us in “taking care” of Hezbollah.

All of this is the result of years of our present Prime Minister’s relationship with Donald Trump. As I mentioned yesterday in my blog, this relationship has brought us to a national disaster. We are no longer the rulers of our destination. Trump is!

We, in the past few years have lost our warm relationships with both parties in the United States as well as warm relationships with a number of friendly European leaders, not to mention the loss of a positive relationship with the young people (including the young Jewish population) in the United States and Europe. Why? Yes, much of this is due the enormous investment in anti-Israel propaganda, by a number of Arab countries, especially after the seventh of October, but more important than that was a complete lack of any positive information from Israel. This is part of the security and policy disaster created by the present administration in our country!

The big question now is- what can we do?

To be honest, I do not believe that we can really accomplish anything until the present government falls in the next election, and that we have to pray that they do not do any more damage in the next few months. If the present government wins the next election, I believe that will be the end of Israel as we have known it for the first eighty years. I hope I am wrong!

But if the present government falls, then I believe that we will flourish just by the change of members of the new government, no matter who the Premier is, as long as the new government brings change and serves the people of Israel and not only certain parts of the population. This will mean looking at our entire system from the Knesset to the small villages near all our borders, and finding out what are our real problems. It will mean setting up an economy to serve the people especially the young who need housing. It will mean a complete revamping of our social system from schools to hospitals to social workers-and that really means increasing salaries to attract more talented people to all these professions. It will mean helping the hi-tech industries to achieve higher performance. It will mean saving our agriculture. It will mean attracting the best people to the security forces and again that means increasing salaries and it means finally deciding where are our borders and what kind of state do we want. Maybe it means waiting in time until the “other side” is ready to live in peace. In that case we should organize our security system to allow us to wait  without giving in to a one-state solution with a Jewish minority and that is the option being presented to us now!!

As many of our veterans of the security system have said we should make separation from the Palestinians as a goal, and spend our money on improving the lives of those who live in Israel and yes, it will mean defending this country for years to come!

And we should make a real effort to improve relationships with the rest of the world-not everyone hates us (there are enough of those!), but by smart, intelligent policies we can return to the good relationships we had with many countries and peoples. I still believe that other people will look up to us again!

I have been teaching the Spring Semester at Columbia University for almost 25 years and my students know I am from Israel and I am Jewish. I am always amazed at how many of my Chinese students in private conversations tell that they look up to Israel as a country to imitate! I always think to myself-that all of Israel could be one city in China and yet they were admiring us!

I hope that relationship will return again because we will be a country to be admired!

And finally, it is time that we try to attract the Jews of the Diaspora and the Jews of the New Diaspora (about one million Israelis who have left Israel in the past eighty years), by being the best country to live in, in the world, for all Jews!!!!