Joel Magalnick is the Senior Editor of jew-ish.com, a Seattle-based local Web site that brings community, news and events to young Jewish adults. Joel is also the Editor of the JTNews, the Jewish community newspaper for Washington State.

Snow in Jerusalem, 1993

My relationship with Israel is based on something I consider to be tough love. I live in Seattle, an hour up the interstate from Olympia, home of Rachel Corrie, the woman killed in Gaza by a bulldozer five years ago and whose life and death have made for a rallying cry of the Palestinian cause. I can remember the first thing I thought when I heard about Rachel’s death (paraphrased): Oh crap. These days, in some circles in my town it’s bad form to admit you’ve ever had a positive thought about Israel, let alone admit you’ve spent time there, or, worse yet, found it to be a wonderful place. I can find members of that circle in my own synagogue, believe it or not. But here’s the thing: the negativity kind of rubs off on you, and it takes a visit to remind you that the people who claim they want peace (whether on the left or the right, I guess I should make clear) don’t always know what they’re talking about — and could probably use a visit themselves to get a clear sense of the situation in that part of the world.

But having been raised on a diet of Rah! Rah! Rah! Israel is the best! has painted me with a default point of view that makes it that much more difficult to empathize with what so many Palestinians are going through. But if we are to truly love Israel, we have to understand their points of view or we’ll just continue to spin our wheels and end up digging ourselves deeper in the ugliness of this unwinnable war.

This biography of my Israel experience is, in a lot of ways, the narrative of the innocence lost over the 60 years of the life of the Jewish State — only with delayed reaction. I’m a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. Please don’t hold it against me.

My first trip to Israel was the obligatory six weeks between my junior and senior years of high school. I saw everything but I saw nothing. We bussed all over that country. We spent time on a kibbutz (worked in a factory, plastered the walls with quotes from classic rock songs - everything a group of rowdy teenaged boys would do), inner tubed down the Jordan (it still had water then), visited the important sites, swam in the Dead Sea, suntanned in Eilat, saw Eric Clapton perform in the shadow of the Old City. It was glorious. I became a Zionist and knew I’d have to be back.

Having grown up in the Conservative movement with six years spent at Camp Ramah, I was taught that Israel was our spiritual homeland, that it was a place of beauty that we were obligated to love, that it was the result of the power and might of a Jewish people that could not be held down, that the Arabs (they were still the Arabs to us in the ’80s) were the bad guys. I didn’t question any of it. Nobody ever taught us it was a country of real people with poor driving skills and overpriced supermarkets. Even as I saw poor people in the streets near Zion Square, or the street cleared of a chefetz hashud (suspicious object), or the guy wearing a kippah and tzittzit ripping us off in the unofficial money exchange at the back of the jewelry store, I couldn’t let that get in the way of the dream, the vision. I can’t even remember seeing any Palestinians during that trip. And the occupation? Wasn’t even in my vocabulary. It certainly wasn’t taught at Hebrew High.

We both made it!

Fast forward three years. My best friend, at school a thousand miles away, convinced me I should go with him to Jerusalem for our junior year abroad. I decided, less than a week before the deadline (and two weeks before I found out that I actually was let into my university’s journalism program) to go for it. My Jewish life on campus to that point had consisted trying to find new ways to convince the guys I’d been in BBYO with that I didn’t want to extend my high school years by joining the AEPi Jewish fraternity. It was a state school, and way too close to home.

Hillel was a joke and the campus Israel organization was made up of a half-dozen people I’d spent half my Hebrew school career with. Trying to escape that meant not having a Jewish life, and that really was fine with me. By then, the whole idea of the Jewish homeland didn’t mean quite as much. For me, it was a year-long way to get the hell out of Boulder and meet some people, and maybe hang out with Jews that I might actually want to hang out with. I wasn’t disappointed.

My ticket into the big time.

This time, it was Israel on my terms. I learned Hebrew (one of my proudest moments was a car ride with my cousin, during which our entire conversation contained not a single word of English). I argued with Israelis. I spent weekends traveling all over the place, usually in packs of five or more. I saw the beautiful places the tours won’t take you to. I saw the ugly places that the tour companies have never heard of. I hitchhiked. I camped. I hiked on litter-strewn trails (not) maintained by the Israeli arm of the JNF.

Much of the touring we did was learning about the ancient past, though it didn’t always translate to the context of today.

I also learned about the conflict. I stayed with a Palestinian friend in Nazareth, a few blocks from where that Jesus guy lived. I learned about the occupation, about the Western world’s perceived value of an Arab life. That value has gone up greatly in the past 15 years, I should tell you. I rode buses through the Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, one time having a rock hit the window at the seat right next to me. Talk about disconcerting. I ate falafel and hummus with Arabs and at the ubiquitous storefronts in Jerusalem in Tel Aviv. For the record, the best damn falafel I ever had was in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem’s old city. For a dollar. Try finding that in Seattle.

When I returned, I had an experience that has shaped my life. I had a girlfriend who’s now my wife. I made friends who I actually do keep in touch with, whose babies I’ve played with, whose phone calls mean the world to me. And I had a picture of an Israel that was more of the real Israel, with thoughts of maybe coming back there permanently.

Three months after I returned, Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Agreement. Two years after that, Rabin was killed. Five more years was the start of the second intifada, an uprising that lasted far too long and has resulted in bitterness everywhere, not to mention the hardening of views outside of the Jewish State. And in all that time, I never went back. Which is why it is so hard now, 15 years after my return, to look at Israel and see what it has become. From a distance, it’s hard to see the beauty of the country, the contradictions, the scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs, the vitality of the political process so absent in this country, the problems that plague any developed nation, the way the absorption of Russians, Ethiopians, French and so many more has changed the face of the country from the strong, dignified Sabra. All I see is a religious authority gone amok, an occupation gone overboard, an economy gone haywire, an aliyah gone missing. The positives a massive effort from PR firms trumpeting the latest breakthrough, clumsy attempts at subterfuge of the real issues at hand. Meanwhile, the mainstream American Jewish community continues to hold its hands over its ears and pretend nothing is wrong; in some parts of my community you can’t show your face in public if you say something negative about the Jewish state. And, as I said before, in other parts you can’t show your face in public if you say something positive.

Some of the Bedouin villages have no waste disposal services, leaving this. Those buildings in the background are the city of Beer Sheva.

So finally, a year ago, I went back. For four days. I spent more time in the air than on the ground. On this trip, I saw nothing but I saw everything. Invited to the Negev as a guest of the Ben Gurion University, I went to learn about the Bedouin population (read my stories here, here and here), but I finally got to see Israel from the bottom up. Israel is a country that has always struggled, always had economic woes, always had to deal with an enemy that can be held no farther than an arm’s length. What I saw, though, was a country that’s having a difficult time keeping its own citizens from appreciating what it is.

Making do with what they’ve got. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

The Bedouins are a beautiful people, and much more than the “dance and feed us in their nomadic tent” we’d been taught on that six-week high school tour. But they are neglected, to Israel’s peril — as are the Ethiopians, the Thais, the Chinese, the other native Arab populations, and still, to some extent, the Russians. That neglect could have serious ramifications for Israel’s security, but it also has a much more devastating effect on Israel’s moral standing.

The Idan Raichel Project live.

When I was there, I also saw the Israel I’d never had the chance to see even as a student: the center for studying migratory birds at Ben Gurion’s Sde Boker campus, way out in the middle of nowhere; the awe-inspiring canyon overlooked by David Ben Gurion’s grave; the Idan Raichel Project, the hip-hop/Arabic/Hebrew rock band that’s as good an example as any of the power of the Israeli people to turn what could be a life living in fear into powerful art. The same could be said of its film industry, and even its modern artists that have gone beyond painting overpriced trinkets depicting the Holy Land and sold in stores in the Old City that closely resemble your synagogue’s gift shop.

At the same time, on the last night at our hotel in Beer Sheva we had guests: a Russian billionaire intent on seeking office (I’m a journalist - of course I’m cynical) bussed in a ton of residents from Sderot due to the sheer mass of Kassam rockets being fired at them from Gaza. It was a reminder that Israelis know who their enemies are; at the same time, it was hard to remember that not everyone who has the same color skin or the same last name agrees with the terrorists shooting those rockets, even if they do feel frustrated or disgusted by the consequences of Israel’s hard-line defenses.

I also roamed the avenues of Tel Aviv one night. On the beaches of the Mediterranean, I felt the finest, most luxurious sand I’d ever walked on sift between my toes; I stopped in a bar and had a beer, just like at a pub around the corner from my house; and I saw a woman, probably in her 20s, holding a grocery bag while fumbling with the keys to get into her apartment building. It could have been Rachel Corrie. It could have been my wife. Mostly, though, it reminded me of how much over there is so similar to life over here. And that, I think is what I love the most about Israel. As much as we hear about the hate and the war and the poverty and the fervency and the polarization of opinion and religion, in so many ways it’s not so different from here. Except the milk comes in plastic bags. I wonder if Rachel Corrie found that to be as strange as I did.