Coming and going

Relax, everyone. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is currently being solved by none other than the Gawker commentariat.

Pareene at Gawker recently learned, second-hand, that when you travel to Israel, they question you like crazy, mistakenly attributing the questioning to the traveler's critical-of-Israel bloggings. I promise that you can blog Zionist day in and day out and still get a hard time on your way to Ben Gurion. All the more so if traveling with someone who is a) not your spouse, and b) not a Jew, because why would someone do such a thing if not for nefarious purposes? After all, interfaith romance is basically terrorism, right? Finishing what Hitler started and all that. Is the over-the-top security, not just on the way to Israel, but anywhere where Jews are identifiable, justified? Yes and no, but to those who are questioned, for god's sake don't take it personally.

The Gawker thread is strangely interesting. After a whole lot of back-and-forth I-P blah blah blah, it is revealed that the pro-Israel contingent is not a man, as others had assumed, but a woman, one married to a Christian man, at that. This confuses other commenters, who do not understand how a Jewish person might a) defend certain Israeli policies (not every last one), and b) act in ways not 100% in line with the Jewish religious establishment. Jews can be so confusing! Anyway, the gender revelation leads to a gotcha one-liner from someone who'd considered converting to Judaism but thought better of it: "My balls were part of the reason I didn't go through with the conversion--I didn't want to have them removed by some Jewish woman like you." The charming commenter, so threatened by a woman with political views not his own, seems not to realize that converting would not have brought him closer to a woman like the one with whom he's sparring, whose dude is, it seems, unconverted. His balls are safe either way.