I used to think neutrality was the intellectual high ground—until I realized it often just meant borrowing other people’s conclusions while calling it “open-mindedness”.

When Silence Becomes the Easiest Opinion in the Room

There is a peculiar comfort in not taking a position on anything that might invite disagreement. Neutrality can feel like intellectual maturity—measured, balanced, and safely above the fray. In practice, it often requires less courage than conviction and less effort than scrutiny. For a long time, I occupied that space. Israel, like many complex geopolitical subjects, existed in my mind more as a recurring headline than a matter requiring sustained engagement. It was easier to register its presence than to examine its realities, and easier still to defer judgment altogether.

But neutrality, when applied to issues that are continuously debated, rarely remains neutral. As works such as Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism illustrate, even within strongly held frameworks there is ongoing internal disagreement about ethics, direction, and identity. Meanwhile, commentators like Bret Stephens, writing in the The Wall Street Journal, argue that moments of ambiguity often demand moral clarity rather than retreat into ambiguity. At some point, sustained non-engagement stops being a neutral stance and starts becoming an avoidance of engagement altogether. The decision not to think about a subject is itself a kind of position—just one that is rarely acknowledged as such.

This realization did not arrive all at once. It emerged gradually, as the gap between passive observation and informed understanding became harder to ignore. What follows is an account of how that gap widened—and why remaining on the sidelines eventually became untenable.

Raised on Values Everyone Claims—and Few Defend

I didn’t arrive at my early views on Israel through debate or deep study. They were, in a sense, inherited—absorbed through environment, conversations, and a general awareness of history rather than any deliberate effort to interrogate it.

Growing up, I held onto a set of assumptions that felt both intuitive and stable. The Jewish world, and Israel within it, existed in my mind not as distant abstractions but as part of a broader moral and historical continuity. It wasn’t something I had fully articulated to myself, but it didn’t feel necessary to do so at the time. Some things, I assumed, simply were what they were. In hindsight, I recognize that this kind of outlook is less the result of rigorous reasoning and more the product of exposure. Institutions like the Jewish Agency for Israel play a role in preserving and transmitting this sense of identity across generations and geographies—not through arguments alone, but through memory, history, and shared cultural awareness. Much of what I understood came from that kind of indirect inheritance.

When I later encountered structured arguments such as those presented by Alan Dershowitz in The Case for Israel, I found them to be attempts to formalize positions that, for me, had previously existed at a more instinctive level. Similarly, reading Chaim Potok’s The Chosen offered something different—an exploration of identity, tradition, and internal tension that made me realize how layered and contested these seemingly simple inheritances can be.

At the time, however, I didn’t feel any urgency to challenge or defend these views. They functioned more as background assumptions than as conclusions I had worked to reach. It is only........

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