link to http://allisonkaplansommer.blogspot.com

"I rarely pull out the fact that I LIVE in Israel when debating the politics, but I was sorely tempted to when Ben Shapiro started vilifying all Israeli Arabs as hating Jews and the state and wanting to kill us all. I felt too dopey saying things like, "I know some really nice Israeli Arabs" in the middle of a heated political argument, so I let it drop.

"But I thought of him today: I had a flat tire, and went to my local tire place where all of the workers are Israeli Arabs. My six-year-old son dropped his can of apple juice on the ground, and one of the workers didn't just pick it up and wipe it off, he walked across the parking lot and carefully washed it under a faucet. Then another one took out a box of cookies, opened it, and offered it to my kids.

"I thought how intolerable my life would be if I truly believed as Shapiro did that this was all a big act, and that these young men were all harboring murderous thoughts and truly wanted to be banging my kids over the heads with their tools instead of handing them cookies.

"It's so much easier to just throw up your hands, and take an extreme position -- right or left -- when you aren't actually living in the country. You can say, "Yup, all Arabs are scum, let's just kick them all out," or you can say, "Israel is a big failure, the Jews should just pack it in" and then go on with your life in New Jersey. We Israelis (and Palestinians) have to get up every morning and face the consequences of this stuff, it's not just fodder for blogging or material for the talking heads on the Today Show to debate.

"The good thing about discussing this stuff via chat instead of live and in person is that you can't raise your voice or use an obnoxious or sarcastic tone when you are typing. And you can't really interrupt people. Everyone gets to finish their sentence, even if it's all read kind of simultaneously and out of sequence.

- Allison Kaplan Sommer lives and writes in Israel.