If you have Jewish friends, they’re probably feeling something right now that they’re not telling you.

Not because they don’t trust you. Because every time they’ve tried to say it, the conversation ends. They get labeled. Dismissed. Told to “wake up.” Told they enable evil. Told that if they can’t condemn Israel, they should at least be quiet.

So they’re quiet.

I’m not going to be quiet. Because somebody has to say this, and I’d rather it be me, a Sephardic Moroccan Jewish woman, a mother, a daughter of refugees, a psychotherapist who has spent her career studying why human beings can’t hear each other.

Here’s what your Jewish friends can’t say

→ We Know

We know the creation of Israel displaced Palestinians. We know that suffering is real. We know families lost their homes, their land, their futures. We see it. Many of us grieve it. Privately, at kitchen tables, in conversations you’ll never hear, we wrestle with it.

We are not the heartless people you think we are.

And our parents were afraid for their lives in countries that were supposed to be home. And Israel took them in when nobody else would.

Both of those things are true. At the same time.

The world keeps asking us to choose one. We won’t. Because choosing one means erasing the other. And we refuse to erase our parents’ survival to prove we care about someone else’s suffering. We already care. We said it. We meant it. But nobody seems to hear it.

→ The Word That Does the Hiding

When people say “reject Zionism,” they think they’re talking about an ideology. A political movement. Something abstract you can oppose without hurting anyone.

But here’s what that word means in my house.

My mother couldn’t walk down the street in Morocco without fearing for her life. When violence came, Jews in her neighborhood closed their doors and windows and waited. People disappeared. There was no future. My parents left in the seventies with nothing. They started over because a place existed that would take them in.

That place is what you’re asking me to reject.

The only Zionism I know is my parents having a home when the world didn’t want them. If that’s evil, then say it to my face. Tell me my parents should have stayed in Morocco and taken their........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)