Israelis have a few standard responses that are used to rebuff a Diaspora Jew who attempts to offer advice or opinion.

There's the "you don't pay taxes here," the "you don't serve in the army" - always a good one, that, beautifully pitting Israeli machismo against Jewish guilt - but perhaps the best one is "what we see from here, you don't see from there"

Ah, you naive Diaspora Jews, we rebuke, if only you could see things through our eyes, if only you could live in our shoes for a while, you would cast away your fairytale penchant for human rights and liberalism, and you would come to accept our version of events.

You would stop caring about "the other" so much and worry more about yourself. Living in your large two-garage homes, in your cloistered middle-class suburbs, you don't really get what it's like to live in the jungle of the Middle East. We see things how they really are. "What we see from here, you don't see from there."

Maybe now, though, thanks to President Barack Obama, J-Street, and other trends in Diaspora-Israel relations, some Israelis are beginning to realize that it's the other way round, and that "what you Diaspora Jews see from there, we Israelis don't see from here."

In other words, we Israelis are so immersed in our own narrative, in our own pain, in our own twisted logic, that we have lost the ability to see things as they really are. Diaspora Jews, with their distance and perspective, can actually see things much more clearly than we can here.

The idea that only those actually living here can really understand things is one that on the surface appears persuasive, but if you scratch away at it for a bit, you see how absurd it is.

In our personal lives, we understand intuitively that others with outside perspectives may help us see our own situation differently and more clearly. If that wasn't so, nobody would ever go to a therapist.

When good friends give us advice, we don't dismiss them by saying "you don't live in my skin, you don't have my job, you don't sleep in my bed."

On the contrary: we are grateful for their outside-but-caring perspective, and sometimes their fresh eyes can help us understand our own problems differently.

Businesses, too, understand that outside-but-caring perspectives can help them see their own situation with more clarity: that's why they employ management consultants.

When these management consultants submit their findings, the CEO doesn't brush them off and say "how on earth can you claim to understand what it's really like in this company? You don't work here, you don't understand our culture, you don?t know what we face day in, day out!"

No - a good CEO understands that the outside perspective can help a business understand itself much more clearly than the internal perspective alone.

Diaspora Jews should be less tolerant of the usual Israeli brush-offs. Whether it's about the steps Israel needs to take in the peace process, or the laws it needs to pass to defend religious pluralism, or the battles it needs to fight against racism, Diaspora Jews must learn to challenge the excuse "what we see from here, you don't see from there."

No, the response must be, sometimes, it's the other way round. We see things differently, and if you were only to listen, maybe you would see things differently too. Maybe you Israelis could learn something from our outside-but-caring perspective.

We Israelis need to take these ideas to heart in our interactions with our friends abroad, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It's true that they don't pay taxes here, or serve in the army here, and so, both financially and physically, they have much less at stake than we Israelis do when it comes to the results of our policies.

But sometimes they can help us see things that we can't. We are so dizzy from the spinning turbulence of life here, we are so deafened by the noise of Israeli public "debate", that we can?t think straight.

It is true that we have sometimes been victims and experienced terrible events; but our national post-traumatic stress disorder prevents us from taking the course of action that is the best one for us to take in the long term. It might feel hard at first, but we Israelis have to practie, practice, and practice again saying: what you see from there, we don't see from here.