Sublime

American Jews, I held, should uphold Israel’s right to defend itself and to exist as the Jewish State. They should respect the responsibility that Israelis bore by choosing their leaders democratically. Israel, for its part, must acknowledge American Jewish pluralism and behave as the nation-state of all the Jewish people.

Did some American Jews prefer the moral ease of victimhood, I asked myself, to the complexities of Israeli power? Was no Israel better than an Israel that fell short of their dreams?

"Palestinians are often pinioned between two opposing but equally harmful tendencies: to turn them into abstractions on a political stage, or to turn away from them because what they’re enduring is too horrendous to truly grapple with

the fear that the very legitimacy of the Jewish state is eroding;