End this sad affair

It is time to admit the truth and take responsibility for the disappearance of the Yemenite children in the state's early years.

For 70 years, the state has lied to the families whose children were stolen, and it's time to end this sad affair.

The historic decision on Sunday to unseal some 400,000 classified documents about the missing children is an important one.

But a fundamental solution has yet to be found.

Putting my personal story aside, the state's conduct in this affair has been slow and irrational. There is a serious, deep-rooted problem here, and assorted state authorities, from individual decision makers to the executive branch, are responsible for it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to set up a special investigative team headed by Likud Minister Tzachi Hanegbi -- who has been doing an amazing job -- is a positive step, but it is not enough. In recent months, different suggestions to solve this long affair have been raised, but these have been merely band-aid solutions. Does it really make any sense to have these families, who have already suffered enough, undergo invasive DNA tests? Absolutely not.

For months, I have been urging the state to increase its measures and open these abduction files, wrongly titled "adoption files." Opening these documents will reveal the way in which this well-oiled machine that efficiently separated children from their parents operated. However, ultimately it will not tell us anything new about the fate of the children.

Those mothers who until today do not know the whereabouts of their children are not seeking to settle any scores. They just want to know what happened to their children. It is time for the state to step up and do something to right this historical wrong, help the families heal, and close this open wound within the Israeli society.