Dear Mr. President,
I want to thank you for your column in the New York Times today, on the anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Your exhortation to “take up the cause for which Yitzhak Rabin gave his life” is as pressing now as it was in 1995, and your grounded determination for peace should inspire everyone who cares about seeing a peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians.
You described Rabin as a “hard-headed idealist,” a combination of qualities to which I aspire. I know, though, that many peace-minded supporters of Israel, like me, have a hard time figuring out how to manifest our idealism in the harsh reality of today’s conflict and the discourse that surrounds it. It seems, often, that we must choose between idealism and realism, that we can only hope for our dreams to come true if we ignore what’s actually going on.
It wasn’t always this way. I’ve written before about how–when I was younger, when you were president and particularly when Rabin still lived–I had a realistic hope of peace, security and harmony. Maybe I was too young. Maybe I was naive. I don’t think, however, that I was alone.
I want to know how to recover that feeling of realistic optimism. In your column, you write that “We can all do something, in our communities or around the world,” to further this vision of peace. And now I ask you: what, beyond writing a blog post or sending some money, can we do? How can we have the most substantial impact on this situation, so that we can help build the world we want to see?
I want to dedicate my life to this work, but sometimes I feel as if nothing I do will make a real difference. You became president and began a historic peace process, something most of us would not be able to achieve. So what can we do?
