The Jerusalem Post published as an op-ed today a piece by Erika Dreifus — whose work I must admit I’ve never read — that describes a serious problem she faces. She’s an American author who has to keep unsubscribing from email lists, unfollowing other authors on Twitter, and declining to join petition campaigns because they all become “a reliable source of condemnation for Operation Cast Lead,” “condemning Israel for enforcing the Gaza blockade,” or some other such thing.

She writes, “In defending Israel, you risk alienating friends, editors and critics. As open-minded as these ‘liberal or leftist’ circles claim to be, they are as quick as their analogues at the other end of the spectrum to judge and scorn. There is no place for centrists.”

I had a difficult time with this op-ed, for a whole host of reasons. The most obvious problem is that the author just doesn’t seem like a centrist to me. She says, toward the end of the piece, that she’d like to gain “the ability to acknowledge [Israel’s] flaws publicly,” but nowhere does she explain why she feels she can’t do this now. What she really seems to be saying is that it deeply offends her whenever anyone else — Jewish, non-Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, or American — brings up a single flaw with Israel.

What’s more, all of the examples she gives of things that have forced her to resign, unfollow, and unsubscribe seem like relatively reasonable complaints, ones that a centrist would understand and be able to discuss in a reasonable manner. Indeed, I consider myself a centrist and I often have public conversations about Israel, the Palestinians, and precisely the criticisms that Dreifus felt were so over-the-top that she needed to resign in protest and horror. Indeed, if you look back through the past two years of my blogging here, you’ll find plenty of places where I’m able both to defend and to criticize Israeli policy. The same is true of the way that I write about American policy.

Indeed, it’s possible to care about a country, to hope for the best for its citizens, and also to continually hold its leadership to standards of respect for human rights and international law. The opposite position to that one isn’t centrism; it’s the nationalist “My country right or wrong” sort of thinking that forces someone to cover her eyes and ears whenever there’s challenges to her view of that country as perfectly virtuous and good.

If Dreifus really cares about the way that Israel is perceived, it’s important for her to enagage in dialogue with people who have a different perception of the country. But it’s also desperately important for her to take a good look at the country she loves because it’s often the case that caring so much blinds us to problems that have arisen. Think, for example, of people who care deeply about — and therefore end up enabling — a drug addicted friend or loved one.

Indeed, if a person cannot recognize problems with Operation Cast Lead, if she cannot stand to hear — even from those who support Israel — that the Gaza blockade is bad policy, then it seems clear to me that she’s either not the centrist she believes herself to be or else she simply doesn’t know enough about the country she loves. Perhaps she knows more than she lets on in the op-ed, of course. But, as it’s written, it’s nothing more than a sad lament from someone who claims she wants to find “a place where I can be an American writer and a Zionist” but whose Zionism seems to preclude finding that place.