The question: What would it take for me to stop supporting Israel?

There’s a question that follows every Jew who defends Israel, whether anyone says it to your face or not: “What would it take for you to stop?”

Not soften, not add the careful qualifier, not go quiet for a while.

What would Israel have to do, or what would have to be done to you, before you walked away from it for good?

Let’s assume it’s a fair question.

Here’s my answer: Nothing.

I know how that sounds. It sounds like the guy who says the country I love is right or wrong, the cheapest kind of loyalty, the kind that is really just a refusal to think. But it’s not that, and the difference is the whole point, so let me be clear about what I am actually loyal to.

Think about how strange the demand is once you say it out loud. Nobody tells the French that France should cease to exist when a French government does something terrible. Nobody moves to dissolve Canada over its own long list of sins, and that list is long. They get told to change their leaders. Hold elections. Apologize. They don’t get told to give up their country. Only the Jewish state gets handed the rule that it has to keep earning the right to exist, over and over, on good behaviour, with its life on the line every single time. I don’t accept that rule, and neither should you. And the moment you throw it out, the whole idea of a red line goes with it. Not because we should stop caring about what Israel does. Because what a government does and whether Jews get to have a country of their own, in safe and secure borders, were never the same question, and I won’t let anyone pretend they are.

Once you see that, you start to see what is actually going on around us.

The people who want us to give up on Israel know, deep down, that they can’t argue us out of it – well, most of us. You cannot reason someone off the ground they’re standing on. So most of them stop trying to convince us and start trying to wear us down. They reach for the biggest words they have, “genocide,” “apartheid”, and they don’t bring them as a criticism of this policy or that operation. They bring them as a verdict on whether the country – Israel – should be there at all. And they get there the way you skip the dull part of a........

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