A local college campus is going to play host to the Israel 360 program and an invitation or notification or whatever tey call it ended up in my Facebook inbox. So I clicked “maybe attending” along with a friend and, following her lead, added some photos to the event’s photo album.

Most of the photos people had added were predictable images of the Israeli flag against a multi-hued sky, some beach pictures, happy looking care-free Israelis, etc, etc. The event listing declared, “Come see Israel like you have never seen it before!”, so my friend and I added some photos of Israel soldiers suppressing nonviolent demonstrations, the Wall, occupied houses in East Jerusalem. I posted a link to the website for Mearsheimer and Walt’s book on the Israel lobby. Within a couple of hours they had been removed. I thought, maybe that’s a glitch so I added them again. Again they were removed.

What follows here is the email correspondence between the event organizer and myself after they emailed me.

Organizer: Dave,
Although your opinions are completely fair and valid, Israel 360 focuses only on Israeli culture and the country itself, not the conflict.

Your thoughts deserve to be heard but this is not the forum to do it on.

I hope you can be respectful of that.

Me: Thanks for the message.

I’m not sure how you can divorce the occupation from Israeli culture. They are part of the same whole. Isn’t a fair discussion of the reality in Israel – good and bad – the discussion Jewish Americans should be having?

Organizer: And I agree completely but this program is not the place for these discussions.

Me: Not to belabor the point, but isn’t a discussion of “Israeli culture and the country itself” geared toward Jewish Americans exactly the place for this?

Organizer: Not when we are attempting to spark an interest in Israel, as a campus wide initiative, and then enable students (who are NOW interested) to come learn the good, bad, and ugly.

Me: Then show them the good, and bad. Don’t cover it up, which is what the Hasbara programs are doing.

Israel is repressing the political and human rights of the Palestinian people. This is a fundamental part of Israeli culture.

Organizer: I feel like we should agree to disagree.

I guess that this exchange doesn’t need any commentary, but here are my thoughts anyway. The organizer seems to acknowledge that there are bad things going on in Israel but is content to cover them up in the service of “spark[ing] an interest in Israel” on campus. So, at an institution of higher learning it is better to present some government-sanctioned tourism propaganda rather than have an open discussion of a nation’s history and policies.

Beyond that there is the issue of open discussion about Israel, Palestine, and the occupation amongst Jewish Americans. Here is an event specifically targeted at young Jewish Americans within the university setting. It claims to be a “presentation about Israel from A-Z“, yet they refuse to make space to talk about “O” (occupation), or a number of other letters I could come up with.

When I was a kid our synagogue had a great student rabbi for a while. I remember him telling me that the synagogue should always have its doors open to anyone and that the Jewish community should always be open to any idea or question, that Judaism should be a place to discuss problems and find answers. But when it comes to Israel and the occupation, modern American Judaism has been corrupted and turned from a place to find solutions to an echo chamber for the minority of Jewish Americans who refuse to find any fault with Israeli actions.

More than angry, this stuff just makes me profoundly sad because there is no place for me in a community that refuses to talk openly about the central issues it faces. I just can’t be a supportive member of it, and I’m not alone. Many, many Jewish Americans are forced out of our natural faith communities because of this repressive knee-jerk reaction in favor of anything Israel does.