Weeks before Israeli Independence Day, various entrepreneurs appear at intersections around the country selling flags that can be attached to the roof of the car. These innocuous vendors invariably trigger in me a soul-searching as I wrestle with existential questions about the meaning of the flag in my personal and collective contexts.

“Look at the flags!” my son Nadav exclaimed excitedly when he first saw the vendors last year. “Let’s get one.”

“My friend Alon's car has two flags!” his twin brother Asaf chimed in.

“C’mon mom. Can we get a flag??”

Well, I asked myself, not for the first time, can we get a flag? An apparently simple question, with so much baggage beneath the surface.

What does it symbolize, that white rectangle with the two blue stripes and the Star of David in the center? What would I be saying if I hung it from my car? I cannot divorce this question from the reality of my daily life.  

I see my three kids growing up happily in Jerusalem, talking, thinking and dreaming in the Hebrew language, living their life according to the Jewish calendar. My kids would have no problem unhesitatingly subscribing to the words of the Steven Van Zandt song: “I am a Patriot / and I love my country / because my country / is all I know.”

For me it is not that simple. I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the world and, having been born and raised in the United States before moving to Israel fifteen years ago, I “know” and am full of criticism for both. Patriotism doesn’t come so easy to skeptics like me.

And to compound the general skepticism, I lead B'Tselem, an organization dedicated to documenting and publicizing what are the least attractive aspects of Israel: its military control of the Palestinian population and all the abuses of that control —land confiscations, checkpoints, house demolitions, administrative detentions. It ’s hard to be a flag-waver in my job.

But I too love this country. It infuriates me to see the label “pro-Israel” become a euphemism for the worst of jingoistic Zionism, appropriated exclusively by people who are so clearly working against the welfare of the State of Israel. What is more pro-Israel than my work at B ’Tselem, where we are struggling to make Israel live up to the essence of Jewish and human values?

Recognizing the importance of B’Tselem for Israel’s future does not always make it easy to confront the reality that B’Tselem documents. Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories can create a kind of cognitive dissonance for those Jews who see social justice as inherent to Judaism. One way of resolving this dissonance is to deny the severity of Israel ’s policies: to deny that Israel is guilty of human rights violations and argue that everything Israel does is justified in the name of its security. This is the ostrich strategy, and one of B ’Tselem’s primary missions is to provide the well-documented evidence, so that we cannot simply shut our eyes and claim not to know what Israel is doing in our name.

Another way to deal with the dissonance created by Israel’s human rights violations is to distance oneself from Israel. And indeed it appears that there is such a trend among liberal American Jews. But disassociating from Israel may not be as easy as it seems. I remember my father telling me his experience of June 1967. As war broke out between Israel and its neighbors, my Marxist atheist American Jewish father surprised himself by trying to book a flight to Israel to join the war effort. So you can take the Jew out of Israel, but apparently it ’s not so simple to take Israel out of the Jew.

But couldn’t there be a third way to resolve the dissonance—to embrace those elements of Israel that are continuing the Jewish tradition of justice? Israeli society is full of organizations, groups, initiatives, and individuals advocating social justice. We can be proud that in spite of the difficult security situation and the fear for their personal safety, many Israelis refuse to accept that Israel must be a military fortress where might makes right.

So why should we let the jingoists take over Israel’s sixtieth anniversary events? Why can’t this year be an opportunity to reconnect with the dream of Israel and our commitment to make Israel live up to that dream? This year let ’s say: this is our flag too.