[This is a guest post by a long-time anonymous contributor. -MS]

Jeremy Ben-Ami just told an interviewer for NPR that he loves Israel, but not unconditionally. How very sad for him.

I love America unconditionally - even when it breaks my heart. It is because I love this country so much that it has the power to break my heart when it upholds policies that I believe are wrong. I get mad, I get out and try to change things, but I don't condition my love for my country on my success in changing policies I disagree with.

I love Israel the same way I love America, unconditionally. Certainly there are some things that I wish were different. I make careful choices about where the money I send to Israel goes, and support organizations that I believe work for constructive change in Israeli society. But I am not willing to usurp the right of the Israeli people to make its own choices. I lack Ben-Ami's hubristic, arrogant assumption that he has the right to sit in America and tell Israel how to conduct its affairs. After all, I do not pay Israeli taxes, serve in its army or live where a katusha rocket may come crashing through my living room ceiling. Who am I to speak for those who do?

Unlike, Jeremy Ben-Ami, I do work to defend Israel from unjust and extreme criticism, despite the fact that I am as aware as he that Israel makes mistakes. My parents, spouse, and children also make mistakes. Some of them have made choices that I cannot approve. Sometimes I criticize those choices, other times I keep silent, but even when one of them makes what I consider a very, very poor choice, a choice that hurts me deeply, they have my unconditional love.

I do not always choose to criticize the nations that I love ay more than I always choose to criticize the people I love. Sometimes silence is the honorable course. Sometimes loving Israel is like having a brother who has just lost his girlfriend because he did something really, really stupid and when she called him on it he lost his temper and said something unforgiveable. The woman he loves is gone and at this moment, he does not need my opinion, he needs my love.

I suppose that if I loved in the conditional the way that Ben-Ami does, I would tell my brother that he is a jerk and that he should take a hike until he can keep his temper, make it up with his girlfriend, or learn to treat women better. Ben-Ami recently did pretty much that. Except that, unlike my brother, it was not Israel that was the miscreant. Last winter when Israel finally responded to many years of constant rocket fire from Gaza with a military incursion, Ben-Ami attacked the Israel action, claiming to be unable to discern "who was right or who was wrong."

I do not know whether Ben-Ami has a wife, a brother or a child. If or when he does, I hope that he will love them and his parents unconditionally. And not the way he loves Israel. He seems to me to know how to offer only a very paltry kind of. And for that I pity him.