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 later, when those assumptions began encountering more forceful and competing narratives, that I started to see how unexamined they had been—and how much they had yet to be tested.

What once felt like a settled understanding began to feel, instead, like the starting point of a much longer and more complicated inquiry.

A Country That Appears in Headlines—and Conversations That Never Went Very Deep

For much of my early exposure to Israel, the subject appeared in two predictable settings: headlines and casual conversations. In the media, it surfaced during moments of escalation, where coverage tended to compress complex realities into immediate, attention-grabbing narratives. In everyday discussions—especially in my teenage years—it appeared in a similarly simplified form, reduced to broad impressions about military strength, regional dynamics, and conflict.

At the time, neither environment encouraged deeper engagement. Media framing often lacked continuity, presenting events in isolation rather than as part of an ongoing historical and political context. Analyses such as those by Greg Philo and Mike Berry in More Bad News from Israel suggest that selective emphasis and omission can shape how audiences interpret such conflicts. Even institutions like the BBC have acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining full contextual balance in fast-moving and high-stakes reporting.

In parallel, the conversations I was part of at that stage of life were not much different in depth. They reflected the cognitive patterns described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow—quick, intuitive judgments rather than slow, analytical reasoning. Within group settings, as Cass Sunstein’s work on group polarization suggests, shared assumptions tend to reinforce themselves, gradually hardening into confident but lightly examined positions.

Looking back, both environments—media consumption and peer discussion—contributed to a mode of understanding that felt informed but was often incomplete. What passed as knowledge was frequently a collection of impressions, repeated enough to feel stable, yet rarely tested against deeper inquiry.

Growing Up, Borrowed Certainties, and the Slow Realization They Weren’t Entirely Mine

As I moved further into adulthood, I began to notice that some of the views I held were not as independently formed as I had once assumed. They had been shaped, in part, by the environments I moved in and the people I engaged with. What felt like personal conviction was often a reflection of shared assumptions that went largely unexamined.

Over time, that realization became harder to ignore. Encounters with perspectives that didn’t align neatly with my existing framework forced me to reconsider how those frameworks had been constructed in the first place. Ideas that once felt settled began to appear provisional, requiring more justification than I had previously given them. This shift aligns with broader understandings of intellectual development, such as those described by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self and William Perry’s model of cognitive growth, where individuals move from simplistic, inherited views toward more reflective and self-aware positions. What changes is not just what one believes, but how one arrives at belief.

At the same time, I became more aware of the role of social influence in shaping opinion. Much of what I had taken to be independent thought was, in reality, influenced by peer environments and reinforced through repetition. Concepts like social proof, described by Robert Cialdini, and conformity, demonstrated in the experiments of Solomon Asch, help explain how easily individual judgment can align with group consensus without deliberate intent.

In that sense, what I had considered “my” perspective was often a composite—assembled from exposure, agreement, and subtle reinforcement rather than sustained, independent analysis.

Speed, Shock, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

At a certain point, the way I consumed information began to matter as much as the information itself. Much of what I encountered about Israel came through fast-moving digital environments—social media feeds, short-form commentary, and rapidly circulating narratives that prioritized immediacy over depth. In that setting, understanding often lagged behind exposure.

Platforms tend to reward content that is engaging rather than nuanced. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, digital systems are structured to maximize attention, often amplifying material that provokes strong reactions. Organizations like the Center for Humane Technology have similarly highlighted how algorithmic design can prioritize virality, while data from the Pew Research Center suggests a link between heavy social media use and increased polarization. The result is an environment where simplified narratives circulate widely, while context and complexity are compressed.

This became especially evident during moments of major escalation, particularly around October 7th. Events of that magnitude should, in principle, force a reset in assumptions. In trying to make sense of what followed, I found myself turning to more structured sources such as reports from the International Crisis Group and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which attempt to document developments with factual clarity and context.

At the same time, I began to notice how narratives themselves are constructed. Works like Edward Said’s Covering Islam and Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent explore how media framing can reflect deeper structural and ideological filters. What emerges is not always a direct representation of events, but an interpretation shaped by selection, emphasis, and repetition.

Taken together, these factors—speed of information, the shock of major events, and the framing of narratives—contributed to a realization that what I was seeing was not a complete picture. It was a sequence of fragments, each shaped by its medium, its timing, and its underlying assumptions.

From Silence to Speech—Choosing to Write Instead of Observe

At a certain point, remaining a passive observer no longer felt like a sustainable position. It wasn’t that I suddenly had definitive answers, but rather that continuing to hold views without expressing or testing them felt increasingly inconsistent with the level of engagement the subject demanded. Silence, I realized, can easily resemble neutrality, but in practice it often functions as disengagement.

Choosing to speak—or in my case, to write—was less about asserting authority and more about accepting responsibility for participation. As Viktor Frankl suggests in Man’s Search for Meaning, individuals retain the capacity to choose their response, even in constrained circumstances. That idea resonated with me as a reminder that one’s stance is not only internal, but also expressed through action or the lack of it. Similarly, Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on action as a core aspect of public life reinforced the notion that engagement is part of how one exists within a shared intellectual space.

Writing became the most natural way to move from passive observation to active engagement. It forces clarity, requires structure, and exposes ideas to scrutiny in a way that private reflection does not. In a broader sense, it also functions as a counterbalance to the speed and fragmentation of modern discourse. Writers such as George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens exemplify how language can be used not just to communicate, but to challenge, clarify, and confront prevailing assumptions. As Walter Lippmann noted, public opinion is often shaped by intermediaries rather than direct experience, which makes thoughtful contributions to discourse all the more significant.

For me, writing is not about reaching final conclusions, but about participating in the process of thinking publicly—testing ideas, refining them, and being willing to stand behind them while remaining open to revision.

Thinking, Despite the Incentives Not To

There is a quiet pressure in modern discourse to align quickly, speak confidently, and remain within the boundaries of whatever views are most socially reinforced. Independent thought, in that environment, is less rewarded than it is tolerated—and often only when it does not disrupt prevailing assumptions too much.

Yet the alternative is not particularly appealing either. To outsource one’s judgment entirely to dominant narratives, peer consensus, or algorithmically amplified content is to surrender the very process by which understanding is formed. At that point, one may still hold opinions, but it becomes difficult to claim them as one’s own in any meaningful sense. This is why the value of independent thinking remains central, even if it is increasingly unfashionable. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, argued that individuality of thought is essential not only for personal development but for the health of society itself. Without the freedom to question and dissent, both error and conformity tend to go unchallenged.

Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between different concepts of liberty further clarifies this point. Negative liberty—the freedom from interference—creates space for individuals to form their own judgments. Positive liberty—the capacity to act on those judgments—requires that individuals actually engage with ideas rather than passively inherit them. At the same time, Karl Popper’s vision of the open society emphasizes the importance of critical debate and the willingness to subject ideas to ongoing testing. In such a framework, no position is beyond scrutiny, and no narrative is immune to challenge. Progress, in this sense, depends not on consensus alone, but on the continuous refinement of ideas through disagreement and analysis.

For me, the journey described in these pages has been less about reaching a final conclusion and more about arriving at a point where engagement feels unavoidable. The subject matter does not allow for comfortable detachment, and the available information does not justify remaining uninvolved.

Thinking independently, in this context, is not an abstract ideal. It is a practical necessity. It requires resisting the impulse to adopt positions too quickly, to accept narratives without examination, or to remain silent simply because speaking requires effort or invites disagreement.

The cost of doing so may be discomfort, and at times, disagreement with others. But the alternative—ceding one’s capacity to think critically—is a far greater loss.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)