Saudi Arabia

I'm freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I'll begin with the personal.

The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full circle on my life as a young Jew, a life I began to move away from, say 20 years ago. I've never fully resolved that movement personally; and this trip was an encounter with the more-Jewish person I might have been, that maybe my community intended for me to be, but I'm not. There was some grief in that—I learned to read Hebrew as a boy, and now I was seeing Hebrew everywhere, and not knowing what to make of it—but there was also a feeling of reconciliation. Frankly, I liked wearing a yarmulke as I walked around Jerusalem, after visiting friends on Sabbath, but I saw that I don't want to be a Jew in the nationalistic way that Israeli society extols.

That said, I found I had some pride in Israel's achievement. It is amazing that this country leaped up from a fairly rural society to a modern one in 60 years. That's my people's achievement. They were focused and determined to make something to show the world, and did. I don't think much of Israeli architecture (and I despise the destruction and modernization in the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, but the roads, the journalism, the cultural life are impressive. And there are the institutions of a modern state. An Arab intellectual I spent some time with in Jerusalem expressed rage toward Israel for the way it's treated his people, but he also expressed awe for its institutions, and he's hoping that democracy will rub off on the Arab world—the free speech, the rule of law, democratic institutions.

On to politics. I went to Israel because I've said again and again in the last few months that the United States should not be joined at the hip to Israel. I come back feeling more strongly about that position than I did when I left. Allies, yes. Joined at the hip, no way.  read more »

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