Mr. President, I write this simply trying to understand what you want from us, your once biggest fans in the promised land.
An open letter to the president of the United States:
Dear President Trump,
There’s an endless noise going around Israel right now. We hear it on the radio, we hear it at the Shabbat table, and we hear it from our friends and family, and Americans are asking about it too.
What happened to you? Where is our history’s most pro-Israel president? For years you were the one who showed up for us as fair-weather fans ran away. Now, we turn on the news, and you sound like a different man, a different president, and honestly, we can’t work out what we did to deserve it.
You signed a deal with Iran, Israel’s eternal enemy, giving Tehran things we never thought an American president would ever put on the table. This deal tells us to pull back from the one border where our soldiers are still dying.
The safety of our children is non-negotiable
And you let Pakistan run the talks. This week, the Americans, the Iranians, and the Pakistanis sat down together to decide the future of southern Lebanon. That’s our North, our border, where our kids fight to protect us. That’s the line Hezbollah crosses to get to our kids.
I keep trying to make sense of it, and I can’t. How did Iran and Pakistan get a say over whether a family in the Galilee sleeps through the night, and we’re the ones being told to leave?
Maybe I understand part of it. You’re a man who runs on relationships. When one of them goes bad, everything around it goes cold with it. And if you’ve had it with Prime Minister Netanyahu, look, you wouldn’t be the first, and that’s between the two of you.
But please hear me on this one thing: What’s between our two countries is so much bigger than any one prime minister. It’s bigger than a phone call that went badly. There are 10 million of us living here who never signed that deal. We’re not your fight with Bibi. Don’t make all of us pay for one friendship that disappointed you.
And we’re not naive about it. You’ve got your reasons, and some of them have nothing to do with us. There’s an election coming. Gas got expensive, and now it isn’t. A long war is a hard thing to keep selling back home. We get it, we really do.
I’m not writing this to attack you, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend Israel is an easy country to defend right now. I’m just trying to tell you how it actually feels over here. Your briefings probably won’t.
Israel hasn't forgotten the good you have done for its people
Your own vice president said the harshest truth anyone’s said to us in years. He called you the only leader in the whole world who still feels for Israel. It was hard to hear, and maybe we needed to hear it.
Still, it stung; hard truths usually do. Because if he’s right, and I think he is, then we’re alone in the desert, once again wandering, praying, and hoping for a miracle. That miracle, once again, is you. One man.
That’s why this scares us as much as it does. When you’ve got one friend left, and he starts pulling away, you stop caring what the policy is called. You just feel it.
And we haven’t forgotten what you did for us. We won’t, and if we did, history would remind us.
You brought our hostages home when most of us had quietly given up believing it could happen.
You moved the embassy to Jerusalem and said out loud what this city is, ours.
You made the Abraham Accords out of nothing and gave us neighbors where we’d only ever had enemies.
We are a people that has been let down by almost everyone, over and over, for a very long time. We have grown a thick skin and gotten used to being condemned, but not by you. You were the one who actually did things instead of just talking about them. That’s why this hurts the way it does. You don’t feel like this about a stranger.
So, please understand what this is: We are not a country bashing you. We are a country that’s confused, and honestly heartbroken, trying to read a friend who suddenly went quiet on us.
We’re not asking you to fight or fund our wars. We’re not asking for blank checks. We’re asking you to just tell us, in plain words, what you want from us, because we can’t find it anywhere in the statements, and we’re worn out from guessing.
Israel needs you. I’m not going to dress that up to save face. A lot of us feel forgotten right now. Some of us feel thrown under the bus by the one person we were sure never would.
We have wandered before. We’d rather not wander again, and we’d rather win – with you by our side.
In friendship and gratitude,
Zvika Klein
Jerusalem