Has the recourse to violence in Palestine and Iraq not proven the impotence of military power and the fallibility of paper dreams? Time and again, your government sets fire to the landscape, but the more it burns the more your fear grows. Yes, your army can reach its targets – people, houses, roads, bridges and towns – but to what end?

As soon as you have reached your goal, it eludes you. However tangible and spectacular your soldiers' conquest might appear, it is condemned to remain a mirage. It will perhaps allow you to dominate space ... but what of time? It is time that is your enemy, time you need to tame. For whatever you do and however much you attempt to destroy our space, it will survive its dead, it will never be yours. The more you scorch and burn it, the more you erase it, the more its memory grows and turns to hatred. This inflamed memory you'll never subjugate.

However different it is from your record of the past, it is useless to deny it or burden it with the crime your people suffered. It is not here, it is in Europe, that the Jewish people endured horror. And it is in the western world that many of your so-called allies who claim to support you are merely silencing their conscience. Don't be deceived by the acquiescent silence of the world. Instead turn to your dissidents and join their lonely struggle; they'll be the ones who will honour your history one day. They may be just a handful, but hasn't it always been the courage of the few that gives birth to resistance?

A field of ruins

Yes, we know, you are frightened by the Islamists: Hamas and Hezbollah are threats. You feel you must get rid of them, rip them up like trees, down to the very last root. But you cannot, you will not succeed. With every attack, the tree grows stronger. Look at Iraq dismembered, decomposing, kept down, for three years, in a daily rhythm of dozens killed and injured.

Look now at Lebanon, the country your army has attacked so fiercely from all sides. What reward awaits you as you contemplate the hills of dead and the trails of refugees? None. A great majority of the Lebanese Shi'a population – almost 40% of the people – supports Hizbollah which, you will remember, was born in 1982 to resist the first invasion of Lebanon by your troops. Since then it's been not just an armed party, but a social, political and economic organisation, a way of thinking, an unstoppable force.

This force, though allied to Iran, is not a foreign body. Whether you like it or not, whether we like it or not, it is part and parcel of the country. To dream of eradicating it by force of bombs is like expecting a man to walk after you have cut off his legs. It also means exposing Lebanon to the risks of civil war. Only time – once again time – would have allowed the delicate balance of power within the communities of Lebanon to slowly reassert itself.

For the fifty-eight years of its history, your country has chosen force over the rule of law. What good has it done you? Your government led you to believe in the Oslo agreements, pressuring their Palestinian partners of the time, to sign this truncated agreement. It was truncated for the simple reason that they did not include the prerequisite for a reliable peace, namely the dismantlement of the settlements.

Now let us for a moment set aside the suffering of the Palestinian people and the right of Lebanon to be more than a field of ruins – what have you gained, you the people of Israel, by giving up nothing? Or let us be fair, you renounced Eretz (greater) Israel, but in exchange for what? For which broken territory, which unspeakable Palestinian prison? What has your inflexibility won you? What other than terror at your doorstep: what more than a closed intolerant universe? This stands in direct opposition to the great Jewish thinkers to whom we owe so much.

Your old enemies, the Arabs, are defeated, utterly defeated. This world we used to call the "Arab world" and that you perceived from afar as the worst of all evils, is no more than a shadow of its former self. Today, it resides merely in its language. The old bonds of solidarity no longer exist, they are politically dead. No conflict over the past thirty years – in Lebanon, Algeria, Iraq, Palestine – has elicited the least expression of Arab solidarity. And the same is true of your current assault on my country.

Some amongst you might take this as a sign of victory. They would be wrong. For so long, this vanquished and dismembered world has been marching to the rhythms and steps imposed by the west; it lived by a timetable that was not its own. This forced march has not been the sole reason for its defeat, but it has, without doubt, been a contributing factor. Whatever the reasons, we can agree that religion has swept back into the political arena, replacing Arab nationalism. This disoriented world remains too complex to be forged – like metal - by the force of arms or the will of the Israeli-American alliance.

A new time

The overwhelming majority of Arab regimes, for whom no adjective can be spared – treacherous, corrupt, repressive – is surviving artificially. Today, Islamism, in all its various forms, has replaced pan-Arabism. This does not please you? A good many of us do not like it either. When I say "us", I think of all of those in the Arab countries who have fought for years, for a society that transcends ethnic and religious differences. For a great number of us, this tidal wave of religion is an enormous defeat. Nevertheless, you can't change reality by pulling a trigger. Is it up to you or is it up to Muslims to determine Islam's fate?

I repeat myself: there is now, amid Islam, a new conception of time which is no longer at the mercy of the non-Islamic world. You can always try to chase their people from town to town and country to country, but they will hold back the hours and the years, which are theirs. Listen carefully to the Arab discourses of the past century, compare them with today's speeches by Islamist leaders. The former are hurried, overexcited, modelled on the west; the latter are slow, calm, indifferent to your demands and ultimatums. Islamists have stopped the watch, changed the hour, and before this new clock, your bombs are useless.

But, if you were to renounce this policy of annihilation, if you were to replace it with a new way of thinking, you would bring about a change that would protect your rights without destroying ours. Better still, you would make your country a pole around which to rally, an open democracy instead of a closed society founded on the false perception of an innate superiority. Is the risk too high? Is it too late? Perhaps. But is there another way, another path that does not lead to suicide?