A European Jew who grew up loving Israel without question finds himself standing at a strange distance from it now, watching a government spend seventy years of diaspora trust as if it could never run out.

I am writing this from a desk in Europe, and I want to start by admitting something that frightens me more than anything happening in the news. I am afraid of falling out of love with Israel. Not out of hatred, not out of some ideological conversion, but out of sheer accumulated grief at watching a country I grew up loving become, year by year, a little less recognizable to me.

That sentence took me a long time to be able to write. I am writing it anyway because I think silence is its own kind of abandonment, and I refuse to abandon this country by simply going quiet on it.

Let me tell you what it looks like from here, because I do not think you can see it from there.

When Israelis tell me their society is self critical, that the newspapers are full of dissent, that the protests are enormous, that democracy is loud and alive, I believe every word of it and I still want to weep, because none of that is what I mean, and none of it resembles what self criticism looks like from the outside. What passes for the edge of acceptable critique inside Israel would barely register as a starting position in a normal European political conversation about occupation, annexation, or the conduct of a war. I watch Israeli friends congratulate themselves on how fiercely they argue with each other while remaining almost entirely unable to hear a single word from outside the room. There is a wall, and Israelis mostly do not know it is there, because from inside a wall just looks like the horizon. I stand on the other side of that wall, holding a lifetime of loyalty to a country I love and a newspaper full of things that country has done, and I promise you the distance between what Israelis believe is searching self examination and what the rest of the democratic world considers a basic accounting of facts has become vast.

This is not the world turning antisemitic, though some of it is that too. Most of it is simply Israel drifting out of the........

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