Every moment was beautiful, every moment was meaningful, every moment was good.

Good in the best sense of the word.

The trip changed my life. It helped me find who I wanted to be. It guided me towards the G-d I always knew was there, but wasn’t as ready to recognize.

If you have spent time there, you know there is a certain peace in Israel that’s impossible to find anywhere else. Even on the streets of Chevron, there is this intense feeling of belonging, of joy.

So as I live my life in the 21st century, surrounded constantly by news updates and everyone’s opinions, I feel my heart hurting.

It hurts because the land that I found peace in has numerous accusations of perpetrating evil.

It hurts because the land that changed my life is being told to stop defending itself.

I owe this land so so much.

How do I explain to the world that even in these days of horrific terror, if given the opportunity and the ticket, I would not hesitate to get on a plane and fly there?

How do I explain to the world that I love that land so fiercely, that it means everything to me?

It is physically painful for me to watch the world turn on my land, to twist stories beyond recognition in the hopes of making the tiniest country in all of the Middle East look bad.

I am coming from the most un-complicated view of Israel. I can promise you that.

It breaks my heart that a land so blissfully beautiful and spiritual has to be dragged through politics, war, hate, and harm.

I see Israel for what it was intended- a land for my nation to finally make a home, to finally be free of persecution and hate.

I am young enough to not actually give any about who the president is. I am old enough to feel desperately in love with the land.

I am innocent enough to not care about right and left, to not care about the differences between each sect of Judaism, and the non-judaism, and everything in between.

I just love Israel and I want everyone to love it too.

That.

That is my plea, that is all I feel about this entire “Israel business.”

I don’t have anything to say.

I don’t have a political view, a deep thought process, or anything that contains technical details about this whole thing.

I just want Israel to be the peaceful place it is for me, for every single person. I want people to open up their eyes and realize that the accusations they are making are impossible, because, I mean, it’s Israel.

In my head right now, I am already predicting that there are those who will privately message me that I am naive. I am stupid. I’m not seeing the whole picture.

Well. This is my response.

FINE.

I choose to be naive then. I choose to be stupid. I don’t want to see the whole picture, if that picture is going to make me pick fights with everyone in my facebook feed.

I am not the kind of person who chooses to be naive very often. I like to be very educated about everything. I like to be in the know, to form an opinion about everything.

But this is as far as my opinion about Israel is going to go.

I don’t want to know more, I don’t want to learn more or be more involved in the politics of the matter.

I’m done hearing about how terrible it is.

Remember what we are talking about. It’s Israel. If you think of it as an evil or complicated place, please, just spend two weeks there.

You might change your mind.

We might all live in different places, we might all live in homes across the world, but at the end of the day we all have a place that we can come home. That will welcome us. Even if the people there don’t. Even if there are people who will try to drag us into discussions. To discuss why or why not the entire nation is should be settled in Israel. To bring up the things that I just so desperately want to stop talking about.

Let’s stop.

Just stop.

Stop talking about all the awful things you know or hear about Israel.

That land changed my life.

The way I’ll pay it back is by loving it to it’s core, and ignoring the things that will make me think about it as a place of difficulties.

I feel like this post is so un-Etti. But that’s okay. It’s good for me to not be the pre-conceived notion of me sometimes.

To those of you who are disappointed in me for taking what seems to be the easy road out, by closing my ears and eyes and only opening my heart…well, take it up with someone else this time.