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?