My relationship with Israel started before I can remember. Growing up Orthodox, I started learning to read Hebrew at roughly the same time I started learning to read English, although my Hebrew had a decidedly Biblical vocabulary. Gamal (camel), ohel (tent), and elohim (God) are among the first words I learned to read in that curvaceous, inky print. Zionism was inextricable from the Jewish studies curriculum that took up half my school day. We learned the story of God promising Abraham a land and we prayed facing Jerusalem, for the preservation of Israel against its enemies.

Every year, I tramped up Fifth Avenue with my schoolmates in the Salute to Israel parade, carrying homespun, glitter-adorned banners. My awareness of the Holocaust—the great cataclysm that had bit branches off so many of our family trees—was from my earliest school days wrapped in the story of the establishment of the Jewish state. My school hewed to the Israeli calendar, which ties the agony of genocide to the ecstasy of self-rule by placing Holocaust Memorial Day and Israeli Independence Day in close proximity. Solemn slide shows of emaciated bodies, and then, days later, joyous, gender-segregated hora dancing in the gym, punctuated every spring. In August we mourned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. I went to a summer camp so ardently Zionist we lined up each Friday and stood at ease or attention when camp officials barked IDF commands in Hebrew. One year, counselors created a mini-golf course decorated with papier-mâché Israeli landmarks.

Israel wasn’t just a story in Genesis or a lovingly evoked and distant land; my family visited frequently, nearly every year, most often for Passover. Our visits didn’t resemble the sterile, highly coordinated theater of Birthright trips, but they were gentle on us children. I remember the bright colors of the souk in Jerusalem, running my hands over hot limestone, scribbling notes in childish script to insert in the mossy cracks of the Wailing Wall. I moved through the end of high school in this cocoon, a Zionist and politically conservative milieu so comprehensive and homogenous it lulled me into complacency. I grew up thinking The New York Times was, for reasons I couldn’t understand, far too rough on Israel.

It’s only in retrospect that I see the glimmers of violence that managed to pierce even the thick carapace of this idealized Zion. At the Salute to Israel parade, one year, a wild-eyed man with our group shouted: “Shechem—is Israel! Hebron—is Israel! Ramallah—is Israel!” We echoed his chants. I don’t recall how old I was, who he was, but I remember my shiver of discomfort: Even then, I knew Ramallah was where Palestinians lived. In school “the conflict” was occasionally referenced; once, we watched a propaganda film commemorating the death of an Israeli infant, ten-month-old Shalhevet Pass, whose family had been part of a militant settler enclave in Hebron. Accompanied by a swelling orchestral score, the film condemned Palestinian terrorism. One year my family had an unusually luxurious suite in Jerusalem for Passover: Even the grand foreigner-friendly hotels were mostly empty, at the height of the intifada in 2003.

But generally what I knew were ripe pomegranates and chopped salad, shawarma wrapped in warm lafa, a whole country that—just like me— ritualistically avoided bread for eight days in spring.