We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It did not matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial; what mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—burglarized, blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all.
