I’ve been trying to figure out my relationship with Israel, and unfortunately, the closest comparison is my alcoholic ex-boyfriend.

My ex wasn’t a bad person, which in hindsight was part of the problem. He was just complicated. It bothered him when I got a job he didn’t apply for or read a book he hadn’t heard of. Intellectual curiosity was, for him, a personal attack. He had a very obvious drinking problem, obvious to everyone but me— though, eventually, I saw the light and got him into AA. Then I would tell everyone we were working on it together. Couple goals! Nothing says stability like managing someone else’s addiction while ignoring your own emotional decline.

Then Israel passed a convoluted, controversial, death penalty law. Israel—not my ex- boyfriend. Though the communication style was similar to that of an alcoholic’s: confusing, delivered with absolute confidence, and holding a bottle to the sky.

Over the years, I’ve used a wide variety of metaphors to describe and make sense of my relationship with Israel. I’ve described her (Israel—who, depending on the conversation, uses she/her, he/him, they/them) like a mother-in-law, “I hope she’s doing well and that I don’t hear from her often!” and like the one safety-net for a people continuously persecuted throughout history. That one’s not really a metaphor.

My relationship with Israel, and therefore, the middle east, started at birth. I was born way away from Israel under a Colombian sky, but every Jew instantly becomes an ambassador of Israel at birth. The past few years, however, are what truly solidified that relationship, taking me and the middle east through ups and downs I wouldn’t have imagined.

“I can fix him”, I said to myself as I pulled my hungover ex-boyfriend (still boyfriend at the time) into his first AA meeting and encouraged him to get up and receive his one-day chip (he had been drunk less than ten hours ago). And so, I’ve been trying to fix the middle east for about three years now, but he just can’t seem to put the bottle down. It turns out ‘I can fix him’ is less a phrase and more a worldview.

What’s so enticing about it? Why do I stay? The truth is, I’ve met some of the most interesting, like-minded (because I, too, am interesting), complex people in the middle east space. While I’m consistently disappointed by developments, headlines, and non-Jewish friends with WiFi and a strong sense of moral certainty— I have gotten to meet and work with hostage families who risked everything to get their loved ones back, October 7th survivors who travel the world hoping to show people the complexities of living near Gaza as an immigrant, and Palestinians who carry more knowledge of nuance and contradictions than anyone I’ve ever met, who try to bridge a divide while consistently being ignored by my non-Jewish, WiFi friends.

It’s been a struggle to hold a complex, multi-dimensional relationship with a country so far away from me. It has equal times been met with “dirty Zionist kike” as it has been with “a bad Jew who supports Hamas”. Jewish organizations across the world struggle daily to protect Jews in the diaspora while supporting Israel. Young Jews like myself can’t seem to find the space to criticize and love a country. We can be Americans and love this country but dislike the administration and work to better our conditions. We can’t be Jews who love Israel, think it needs to exist, but dislike the actions of an administration that has gotten more and more unhinged. We can’t even vote in Israel, yet we’re expected to defend it without question — which feels a lot like being asked to defend your ex in front of the cops for something you didn’t even witness—and definitely wouldn’t have signed off on.

The death penalty law is weird. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a writer—which means I will have opinions and they will be structurally sound while emotionally compelling—  but I won’t do you the disservice of unpacking this law. While not technically stated that it’s aimed at Palestinians, it makes it clear that it is. People far smarter than me think it will be struck down by Israel’s High Court. They’re probably right, but it brings up points of contingency in me.

I’m writing this post-breakup—Israel, not my ex-boyfriend. That ended years ago. I have grown. Allegedly. No longer part of the Jewish professional world, feel I can have a publicly more challenging take on issues I would be scared to bring up in the past. Every citizen of a democratic country deserves to have a complex relationship with their home. We all deserve to challenge that which we find unjust, immoral, illegal, without being labeled traitors, extremists, or generally othered. We in the diaspora deserve that same relationship with Israel, a country many aren’t citizens of but will always have an implicit connection to.

It’s a scary concept, especially in a world where bits and pieces are taken out of context, and where one thing that may appear to be anti-Israel to some can be tokenized and turned into a reason as to why a country that totally exists, shouldn’t.

I understand why we’re scared of that. We’re frightened that what starts with rhetoric within our community will end with falsely justified attacks on our communities. But we’re losing both those battles— the physical and rhetorical. I don’t know what it means to be in a relationship with a country you can’t leave, can’t fix, and can’t stop caring about. Certainly, far more checking social media and defending them in public than when I broke up with my ex.

Maybe that’s the real issue—not that the relationship is complicated, but that we’re not allowed to admit it is.

There is a difference between a complex relationship and a harmful one. And if we can’t tell the difference—if we’re not allowed to name when something feels wrong, unjust, or unsustainable—then we’re not in a relationship. We’re just stuck in it. At what point does loyalty stop being love and start being denial? I’ve stayed in relationships like that before. It didn’t make either of us better, it just made me smaller. Silence has never made anything, person or country, better.

Because the truth is, I don’t need Israel to be perfect to care about it and all the people that live there. I don’t want to defend every action. I want to engage with it, challenge it, and make it better. That’s what a real relationship looks like— at least, in theory. Not blind loyalty, not total rejection. Just the uncomfortable, often exhausting ability to hold two opposing truths at once. Which, if I’m being honest, is something I never managed to do with my ex-boyfriend.

So maybe my relationship with the middle east is, in fact, healthier. Which probably says more about my dating history than my political analysis.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)