Shabbat candles. Photo: Wikipedia.

As of this week, Israeli products will be marked with a special tag. The official claim against us is that Israel is an occupying country, and therefore deserves to be condemned. Allegedly, if we stop the occupation and reach a political settlement with the Palestinians, the world will leave us alone. Is it even possible to reach such a settlement? Who is there to talk to? And about what?

In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin began a political process with the PLO that led to the Oslo Agreements. In 2005, Sharon conducted a unilateral “disengagement,” hoping that pulling out of Gaza would bring calm to the region. To this day we are suffering the results of these two moves.

Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, in their turns, were ready to promise the Palestinians practically everything they asked for, including Jerusalem — but that also didn’t last long. Even Tzipi Livni tried to reach a settlement with Abu Mazen and his people. The same Abu Mazen who claimed that Israel executed Ahmad Manasra, who was discovered the next day being treated by a team of doctors at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and the same Abu Mazen whose wife was secretly treated just a year earlier in Tel Aviv’s Assuta hospital.

Still, the world won’t leave us in peace. Ironically, the more the Palestinian hatred toward us grows more vehement, the more the world hates us. All our attempts to explain our position fall on deaf ears. Why? Where does this unfathomable hatred of the nations toward us come from?

Let us put politics aside for a moment. Our neighbors’ and the world’s attitude toward us are just symptoms of an ancient phenomenon that is rooted in the bedrock of nature. Israel is not another nation in the family of nations — it holds the key to changing the fate of the world for the better, just as the world claims against us. Therefore, first we must begin to unite and strengthen the network of connections among us — secular, religious, Israeli and Diaspora Jews — everyone. Instead of being dozens of mutually mistrusting tribes, we must become mutually responsible for one another, until we truly become “as one man with one heart.”

When we connect — when we are considerate of one another — we are channeling positivity through us to the world. And the opposite is just as true: with our hostile thoughts and actions toward one another, we are radiating negativity to the world, inflicting disasters on ourselves and on humanity. Our level of mutual responsibility and concern for others determines how our lives will look tomorrow, how the world will look tomorrow, and the response that we will get as a result of its state. The path to peace with our neighbors and the world begins with correcting the relations between us.