I WENT TO AN ANTI-ISRAEL DINNER PARTY. IT DID NOT GO AS PLANNED. They described it as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” What they really wanted was an Israeli who would sit quietly and confess:

“Hysterical? I am the calmest person here. I am merely no longer cushioning the information for people who consider contradiction a hate crime.”

“You are proving every stereotype about pro-Israel people,” Nadia said.

“You mean Jews? Which stereotype? That we eventually lose patience after being lectured by people who discovered the Middle East six months ago?”

“You’re impossible.”

“No. I’m inconvenient. There is a difference.”

I picked up my jacket. The room watched me with the shocked resentment of aristocrats who had just discovered the footman could read. At the door, Oliver made one final attempt at magnanimity: “I’m sorry you didn’t feel heard.”

“I was heard perfectly well. That is why everyone is upset.”

“We may simply have to agree to disagree.”

“No. You may have to agree to read.”

He folded his arms. “Do you genuinely believe you’re the only person here who understands the issue?”

“No,” I said. “I believe I’m the only person here who has made the vulgar effort.”

Beatrice opened the door. The conversation, she said, had become unsafe. I thanked her for the meal.

Outside, the night air was cool and gloriously free of moral vocabulary. I walked home reflecting on the strange burden of being “pro-Israel” in polite society. One is expected to arrive with evidence, history, nuance, empathy, military expertise, legal precision, and a detailed alternative strategy for every available course of action. The other side need only arrive with adjectives: colonial, genocidal, apartheid, brutal.

“Hannah Arendt had it right,” Patrick Moynihan once said. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”