Israel...continued

OK, so now I've had a personal experience that was interesting in a self-reflective kind of way. I was at a dinner party Friday night...or was it Saturday? Can you tell it was an eventful weekend? Anyway, we got on the subject of politics, and I mentioned that I was reading Beyond Chutzpah. I talked for a few minutes about the stuff I was learning about, and then realized I felt a little uncomfortable. There was this little internal editor inside of me saying "you can't talk negatively about what is going on in Israel".

I suddenly had this eerie feeling that I was sounding like a Nazi or something. From an intellectual standpoint, it made no sense whatsoever since I have no negative feelings about the Jewish people, religion, or culture. I was being critical of a foreign policy, and attempts to hide that policy...sort of how I'm always talking about the use of the topic "terror" by the current administration to cover up all of the crap they are doing (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, look over here at the TERROR instead).

I started working my way through the internals of the feeling, and it really was rooted in some sort of cultural contract that I've learned where you don't speak "about" the Jewish people or culture in any context that could be construed as negative.

Interesting...