January: To be a Jew and an American, to be so egregious to say: when I left the United States and came to Israel, I left one diaspora and entered another. I am a diaspora Jew, a landless, people-of-the-book Jew. Homelands make me nervous. But here I am in Israel. Looking up the Hebrew word “galut,” meaning diaspora, in an English-Hebrew dictionary, I see that the adjective “galuti” is translated as “ghetto-like.” I suppose that’s how Israelis like to remember the diaspora.

Eight years ago I dropped out of school and went to Israel to experience the magic of the Jewish homeland, my Jewish homeland. Things didn’t progress as smoothly as I expected. I got kicked out of my Kibbutz and wound up working as a dishwasher and a line cook in an upscale restaurant in Tel Aviv. But I was young and adaptable…

Arabs have no one to blame but themselves for the plight of the Palestinians

I was born in the West Bank; the first born child to my parents. As I was growing up, nothing around me seemed out of the ordinary or even remotely remarkable. Sound of bullets, kids discussing politics, destroyed buildings, masked men in funerals, checkpoints, a disproportionate number of handicapped youth, and the fact that we had to be home every night before the 6 o’clock curfew- all these were facts of a life that was, to me, completely normal. I did not know any better.