When a friend asks

Somebody you have known for fifteen years puts their glass down and asks how you can support that. What you say in the next twenty seconds decides whether they ever ask you anything again.

You do not have to answer. Telling a friend you would rather not get into it tonight is a whole answer, and nothing below is an instruction to take it on.

This page is a room with two people in it. Where the same thing happens under a post, with forty people who know you both reading, go to somebody you know posted it instead.

This is not an argument, and treating it as one is the mistake almost everybody makes. Hold one point and keep returning to it. Refuse the framing. Concede early to buy standing. Every one of those is sound advice somewhere else on this site, and aimed at somebody who genuinely wants to know they land as a prepared rebuttal. A friend who receives one learns not to ask you again, and you have lost the most persuadable person you will ever speak to.

Is this a question or a challenge?

The same words can be either. “How can you support that?” is an accusation from one person and a genuine request from another. Three signals, weakest first.

Who else is listening. Genuine questions arrive when nobody is watching, in a car or washing up after dinner. In front of an audience the same sentence is more often a position being taken.

How it opened. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about something” is a question. “So what do you make of all this”, said flatly mid-argument, usually is not.

The second sentence test, which is the one to remember. Give one sentence, no more, then stop talking. A person asking a question picks up what you said. A person making a challenge returns to their opening line as though you had not spoken.

Guess friendly. Treating a challenge as sincere costs you a few wasted minutes. Treating a sincere question as a challenge costs you the friend.

You are not the spokesperson

Being Jewish does not make anybody a representative of a foreign government, or oblige you to hold a view on every decision one takes.

“I don’t know. I’m honestly not the right person to ask about that one.”

“I’ve got a strong view on that part and none at all on the rest.”

That stays available even when you know a little. Half-knowledge offered under pressure is how people end up defending a position they do not hold.

Where this backfires: reached for at every question, it reads as a shutter coming down.

Answer the question they asked

Anybody who reads a site like this has prepared answers, and the pull is to route whatever arrives into the nearest one.

Weak: “Well, the real issue is what the coverage leaves out.”

Strong: “I don’t know why that happened. What did you read about it?”

Answer at the size it was asked, even when a better question sits next to it. Somebody who asks one specific thing and gets a history of the region has been told, politely, that their question was not worth taking seriously.

Say what you actually think

The instruction is not to criticise. It is to stop performing. Where you disagree with something Israel has done, say so. Where you do not, do not manufacture it.

A friend can tell when they are being handled. They know what you sound like being careful, and the moment they sense it the conversation is over, whatever carries on being said aloud.

If that is where you stand:

“I’d have voted against that government. I still want the country to exist.”

“That one I can’t defend, and I’m not going to sit here trying.”

And if that is not where you stand:

“I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a problem with that, because I haven’t. Ask me why and I’ll tell you.”

“I do back them on that one. What I won’t do is tell you there’s nothing to argue about.”

Candour is the source of your credibility here, not criticism. The friend who has heard you give a straight answer, including an inconvenient one, believes you the next time you say a charge is false.

Where this backfires, and the warning comes before the move: in a room containing somebody looking for a quotation, the second half gets removed. This is for private conversations, not a public position.

“Why do you care about a country you don’t live in?”

This one comes first, and it is a fair thing to wonder. A friend whose family has never had this relationship with anywhere is not being hostile by finding it odd.

Most of the true answer is personal, and personal is what works here. Four things. Take one. Taking all four is a speech, and a speech ends the conversation.

Family. Nearly every Jewish family has somebody there now, or had somebody who went, or somebody who tried to get out of Europe and would have gone. That is an address book before it is a position.

“My cousins are there. There’s a whole side of my family I only ever see in one country.”

“My grandmother’s brother went in 1949. The rest of them never got the chance.”

Somewhere to go. Not offered as history, and not as a claim on anybody’s sympathy. In a Jewish family, “where would you go” is not a hypothetical question. It was asked for real, one generation back, and the answer was nowhere.

“In my family, ‘where would you go’ isn’t a hypothetical. It got asked, and the answer came back nowhere.”

“I’d like one place to exist that never gets to decide whether we’re worth letting in.”

The prayers, the meals and the calendar. Most non-Jewish friends have never heard this one, and it is the one they remember. Praying facing a particular city, ending a festival meal with a sentence about it, keeping a fast day for its destruction: that is a relationship to a place that started long before any government did.

“I pray facing that city. So did my family in Poland, and not one of them expected to see it.”

“Every Passover meal of my life has ended on the same line about Jerusalem. That’s not a political position, it’s a dinner.”

And the plain one, which people underrate. There is one Jewish state, and no second one.

“It’s the only Jewish country there is. There isn’t another one to go to.”

The other set of answers, and the warning comes first. The democracy point, the Pride march, self-determination: all real, and argued in why Israel exists and in the “only democracy in the Middle East” claims. At a dinner table your friend asked about you and got a ranking of countries, and what they learn is that you were waiting for an opening. Keep them for the point where the friend has stopped asking and started arguing. There they are exactly right.

The question that comes next. Often “do you support what that government is doing?” arrives straight afterwards. Two questions have been folded into one. Unfold them, then answer the first however you actually answer it.

“Whether a government is any good and whether a country should exist are two different questions. I’ll answer both, in that order.”

“No, and I’d have said so before any of this.”

“Yes, mostly. I’d rather tell you that than pretend I’m neutral to make this easier.”

The questions that actually come up

Where a question is really about a specific charge, the argument lives in the claim entries. What follows is how to be asked.

“Is it complicated, or is that what people say to avoid answering?” Grant it out loud.

“Both, honestly. It really is complicated, and people do hide behind that. Ask me something specific and I’ll give you a straight answer.”

“What about the settlements?” Give your own view, not a position paper. Either of these is a real answer.

“I think a lot of that is wrong, and that it damages the country doing it. I’d rather say so than pretend I’m relaxed about it.”

“I don’t have the problem with it that you have, and I’d rather say that than agree with you to keep the evening pleasant. Ask me why.”

“Why does this feel different to you than other wars?” Because of what starts happening around you locally, which is rarely the answer given.

“It isn’t really the war. It’s what changes here, for me, every time there’s a war there.”

“Are you okay?” Sometimes the question is not about the Middle East at all. Somebody asking how you are doing is asking how you are doing, and a briefing refuses an offer of care.

“Not brilliant, actually. Thank you for asking. You’re the first person who has.”

Ask them things back

Curiosity works where assertion does not, and you find out where they got it from, which is worth more than the exchange.

“What made you ask me that today?”

“Where did you see it? I’d like to read the same thing you read.”

Ask because you want to know. A question used to set up your next point is audible as one.

Silence, and time

You do not have to resolve this tonight.

“Can I think about that and come back to you? I don’t want to give you a quick answer on it.”

Stronger than a fast answer. Go back within a week, unprompted, because never returning is worse than answering badly. Long pauses are fine. A friend sitting in a silence with you is not scoring it.

Colleagues are a different case

Three things change at work. The relationship continues tomorrow. An open-plan floor has an audience and work messaging is logged. And where one of you manages the other, the junior person cannot leave freely.

If you are the more senior person, do not raise it. Answer if asked, keep it short, and let them decide when it ends.

“Happy to talk about it, though not here. Coffee sometime, if you want to.”

When it has damaged a friendship

Some do not recover, and no amount of skill prevents that. If you want to try, go once, in private, and go to the relationship rather than the argument.

“I don’t want to go back over it. I miss you, and I’d rather have you than be right.”

Then leave it with them. Asking twice turns a friendship into a campaign. When one does end it is a real loss and not a test anybody failed, and people who tell you a friend lost this way was never a friend are trying to be kind and are wrong.

Before the next time it comes up

Fill in the blanks254 words

Answer these three from memory. If one will not come, that is the section to reread.

1. You have given your one sentence and stopped. What tells you within the next ten seconds whether this is a question or a challenge?
2. A friend asks why you care about a country you do not live in. Which one of the four answers is yours, and can you say it in a sentence?
3. What are you going to say the moment you hear yourself starting a prepared answer?

Then this week. Name the person who asked you something in the past year and got a worse answer than they deserved. Message them and say you have been thinking about that conversation and would like to have it properly.

And put a day on that, because “when I feel ready” is not a cue. Neither is “next time it comes up”, since next time arrives mid-sentence over a coffee. If it is tomorrow evening and I am walking home, then I will send that message, in two lines, explaining nothing in it.

Your plan, for the conversation itself. If a friend asks me something sincere, then I will give one sentence and stop, and let what they say next tell me which of the two conversations this is.

Coping, which is the one that actually goes wrong. If I hear myself starting a prepared answer, then I will stop in the middle of it and say “sorry, that’s not really an answer. What are you actually asking me?”