We are approaching the jubilee year of the Six Day War. Like many of you I recall those terrifying weeks – before the victory – of dread and aloneness that Jews around the world shared with Israelis. Our contemporary Jewish world has been shaped by the victory of June 1967, but we remain haunted by the vulnerability of May 1967. For all its turbulence, the Jewish world of 1967 was blessed with clarity. Israel had just warded off a genocidal threat. The international movement to save Soviet Jewry was about to begin in earnest. And it seemed, in those years, that nothing could be clearer, simpler, than our struggle for Jewish survival.

Today we face an immeasurably more complicated reality. On the one hand, physical threats to our well-being persist – from a rising imperial Iranian regime to the growing open question of whether the brave post-Holocaust experiment of renewing Jewish life in Europe is still viable. But we also know that survivalism as the basis for Jewish identity is no longer enough to sustain us.

We face vexing challenges we could not have imagined in 1967. How can Israel safely extricate itself from the wrenching dilemma of ruling another people? A majority of Israelis know we must end that occupation – now approaching its 50th year – but fear the absence of a credible partner for a durable peace. Much of the international community trivializes our dilemma by insisting that Israel’s choice is between occupation and peace – ignoring the history of Palestinian rejectionism and a poisoned educational system that teaches Palestinian children to hate Israel and deny any Jewish connection to the land.

Read the full article at Times of Israel.