During the recent flap over the use of the term “Israel firster,” I insisted that the words have a worthy meaning– how else does one characterize American political player Sheldon Adelson’s statement that he only cares about being a good citizen of Israel?

Well when I was in Palestine last week, friends pointed me to reporting of a related nature by the Times of London that is behind a paywall, but was picked up by Haaretz:

The Times report revealed several testimonies of Israeli émigrés which ended up giving their passports to the Mossad. “Matthew” first emigrated to Israel after leaving his parents’ London home in 2009, and volunteered to join the Israeli military shortly afterwards. It was just before his first week of army duty that he was approached by a young woman from Mossad and asked if he was “committed to the State of Israel.” According to the article, Matthew received his passport back after 18 months of military service, and was surprised to find stamps in it from Turkey and Azerbaijan, countries that he had never visited. In another testimony to The Times, “Peter,” a Frenchman who emigrated to Israel last year, had a similar story. Months after arriving in Israel and volunteering for military service, he began meeting “a sexy woman,” who asked him if he wanted to help her. He said his passport was taken and returned a year later with stamps from Russia and several other countries.

These cases are not aberrations. Duality of loyalty, or actually singularity, was built into Jewish nationalism, which is one reason that anti-Zionists repudiated Zionism; they said it would raise questions about their patriotism. If there is controversy over the question today, it is because these reports– and the push for war on Iran by American neoconservatives–make the question of whose national interest an important one.