J. Levine Books is a small, family-owned Judaica store in Manhattan that’s been in business since 1890. When I stopped in on Sunday, doing some last-minute Mother’s Day shopping, I struck up a conversation with Danny, the owner. We talked about my work, the declining number of Jewish stores in Manhattan, the LGBTQ-friendly synagogue down the block, until we finally got to the big Jewish news of the day. “Did you hear that Israel won the Eurovision competition?” he said excitedly.

I had. In fact, I had been discussing Netta Barzilai’s victory in the international singing contest with my fiancée the day before. It was a big deal in the Jewish world: an Israeli winning one of the world’s most famous talent competitions. This doesn’t happen every day; the last time I’m aware of a Jew winning Eurovision was in 1998, and it was (again) the Israeli entry. There is a real sense of communal pride here, a sense that one of us accomplished something, that this is Good for the Jews.

But in another world, the world of pro-Palestinian commentators and activists, the results were a disaster. They suggested that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement had not affected mass culture nearly as much as they hoped, that Israel wasn’t isolated in the way that apartheid South Africa was. In fact, Israel’s Eurovision win means it’ll host the contest in 2019 — a spectacle that BDS activists are already angry about.

“Israel will use next year’s Eurovision to try to legitimize its occupation, ethnic cleansing and illegal annexation,” Ali Abunimah, founder of the website Electronic Intifada, tweeted on Sunday. Europe, he writes, is “giving this propaganda its full Trump-like support.”

It’s not that I don’t understand where they’re coming from. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip are cruel and vicious; it is obvious to everyone that Israel’s current leadership has zero interest in a negotiated settlement to the conflict. (The Palestinian leadership is similarly dysfunctional due to a violent division between the relative moderates who run the West Bank and the militant Islamists who run Gaza.)

Israel’s Eurovision victory came just two days before Israeli soldiers shot and killed dozens of Palestinians in Gaza while they protested the US Embassy move to Jerusalem. I could imagine many Palestinians finding it hard to see the events of the past two days as anything but proof that the world doesn’t care about their suffering.

But I’m not Palestinian. I’m Jewish. And the sense of diaspora Jewish identification with Israeli accomplishments like the Eurovision victory — one that I share, sitting right alongside my horror and outrage at yesterday’s events in Gaza — helps explain why most Jews will never be able to see a wholesale boycott of Israel as anything but an existential threat.

Why so many American Jews identify with Israel

Among American Jews, by far the largest diaspora community and the one I grew up in, there’s a strikingly pervasive sense of connection with Israel. A 2017 American Jewish Committee poll found that 72 percent of American Jews believe that “caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew.” Half of US Jews had been to Israel at least once in their lives, per the AJC data; of those, most had made the trip multiple times.

I’m one of those multi-trippers. I’ve been to Israel five times, but only once in my professional capacity as a journalist. The other four were visits with my family designed around seeing our relatives in Israel.

These are second cousins, at best, but they’re the only Jewish relatives I have. My mother is an only child; her parents were Holocaust survivors, and only a fraction of their siblings made it out of the camps alive. Most of those who did settled in the young state of Israel, where they managed to carve out happy lives for themselves and their children. My Israeli relatives today run the gamut of Jewish identities, ranging from a vegan anti-occupation activist to an ultra-Orthodox Torah scholar.

The reality of knowing all of these Israelis, of seeing them as flesh-and-blood people rather than abstractions, makes Israel’s fate seem vital. It also makes the idea of boycotting Israel seem almost incomprehensible. How can I boycott my own family, especially when we’re the only survivors of a family victimized as part of one of history’s greatest atrocities?

Even for Jews whose connection to Israel is less direct, and less historically weighted, it’s difficult to separate being “Jewish” from feeling an affinity for Israel. American and Israeli Jewry, when put together, make up roughly 85 percent of world Jewry and have become deeply cross-pollinated with each other. Americans Jews immigrate to Israel and bring their cultural trappings, like basketball; Israeli goods are mainstays at kosher American supermarkets and Judaica stores.

It doesn’t stop there. Hebrew schools across America teach young American Jews about Israeli culture and society because it’s seen as an essential part of being Jewish; to understand your Judaism, the thinking goes, you need to understand this other set of Jews.

Some proportion of this identification, I can’t say how much for sure, is a product of historical trauma. American Jews have a deep and profound awareness of being a minority community and the vulnerability created by that.

While Jewish life in America is secure, there’s a communal sense that things could change on a dime, even among Jews who don’t have my family history. We know, acutely, how comfortable Jews in Germany felt before the Nazi rise, and know equally well that Israel is the only country that is absolutely committed to taking us in if things go bad.

For all these reasons — direct family ties, frequent visits, cultural connections, history — most American Jews don’t see Israel as just another foreign country among many. We see it as part and parcel of the Jewish community, a subset of a wider “us.” When I see an Israeli win Eurovision, I feel a little spark of joy, even though it had nothing to do with me personally or my actual home country. That’s because it feels like a victory for the Jews.

On the flip side, that makes BDS feel like a direct threat. The purpose of the BDS campaign is to turn Israel into an international pariah on the level of apartheid South Africa — a country explicitly seen as, by its very nature, outside the community of civilized nations. Accomplishing that goal would necessarily mean severing the diaspora from Israel, as it requires severing Israel from the rest of the world.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine what this would mean for American Jewry. No more Israeli wine in kosher supermarkets, no more Israeli candlesticks in Judaica stores, no more birthright trips for young Jews who want to visit Israel — and that’s just the starters. On a more fundamental level, it means reevaluating all the cultural education and exchanges synagogues across America do on a daily level. Hebrew school curricula would be radically transformed, if not scrapped altogether.

Perhaps most fundamentally, it would mean ties of blood, family bonds that stretch across the Atlantic, would be strained, if not cut entirely. World Jewry would essentially be split in two.

This is one reason why so many American Jews see BDS as an anti-Semitic attack rather than a legitimate political campaign. Not only is the movement singling out the world’s only Jewish state, when there are many countries with worse human rights records, it is working to destroy the sense of “us” at the heart of the modern Jewish community, one that Jews have worked so hard to build up after the Holocaust.

Yet from the Palestinian and Arab point of view, this vast Jewish apparatus supporting Israel is a cultural, political, and economic lifeline to a state that’s viciously oppressing its people. You can’t dismiss this narrative, the experience of Palestinians who saw family members killed and forced from their homes. North Korea and China didn’t commit the Deir Yassin massacre.

You especially can’t dismiss the Palestinian experience after the killings on Monday. Any but the most blinkered apologist for Israel would have to concede that Israel’s response went at least somewhat beyond its legitimate security needs.

This sets the stage for a vicious intercommunal struggle. Jews see a boycott of Israel as a boycott of their community and their family; Palestinians and their allies see commerce with Israel as support for their oppressors. Where’s the middle ground?

American Jews need a middle ground between apologism for Israel and BDS

I don’t buy goods made in Israel’s West Bank settlements, or at least I try not to. Last time I was at the kosher supermarket, I scoured the labels of the Israeli-made goods, vetting the places where they were produced carefully to make sure they’re west of the Green Line. It’s an agonizingly slow way to shop — I’m not familiar with every town in Israel, so I have to Google some of the locations — but it feels ethically urgent.

Boycotting settlement-made goods, which is, in effect, what I’m doing, is a way of reconciling my attachment to Israel with my problems with its policies. I can’t imagine cutting myself off from Israel. Nor can I tolerate subsidizing the people actively displacing Palestinians from their land, the strongest supporters of Israeli military action against Palestinians.

Israeli right-wingers call this kind of liberal Zionism traitorous. BDSers see it as a wishy-washy half-measure that doesn’t accomplish anything but salve conscience of liberal Jews like me. Maybe they’re both right.

But the truth is that there is a real and growing political split between Israel and American Jewry, one that tugs uncomfortably at the ties that bind the two groups.

On one level, the divide between Israeli and American Jews couldn’t be simpler: Israeli Jews are, on the whole, more conservative than their American peers. Forty-nine percent of American Jews identify as liberal, per Pew data; only 8 percent of Israeli Jews say the same. Nearly twice as many Israeli Jews (37 percent) as American Jews (19 percent) described themselves as politically conservative in Pew’s survey.

This owes to profoundly different historical experiences. American Jewish identity comes from “a sense of exclusion from American society,” Steven M. Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, told me. Israel has a long and robust socialist political tradition but has tilted sharply rightward after the 1990s peace process collapsed into the violence of the second intifada and a 2005 military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip ended up with a takeover of the territory by the Islamist group Hamas.

In every presidential election in recent memory, a majority of American Jews have voted for the Democratic candidate. Israel’s center-left Labour Party has not won an election since 1999.

The result is a slow but steady sense of alienation of American Jews from the Israeli political system. A growing number of American Jews look at Israel and see a country that is occupying Palestinian territory and breaking up peaceful Palestinian protests using force. They also see a Jewish state that only recognizes one socially conservative strand of Jewry, Orthodox Judaism, as legitimate — which manifests in things like preventing liberal American Jews from praying in mixed-gender groups at the Western Wall, the holiest prayer site in Judaism.

Pew’s data shows a clear age gap here: Younger American Jews are, overwhelmingly, more skeptical about Israel’s political direction than their older peers. Five times as many American Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel as those over the age of 65. Only a third of Jews between the ages of 18 and 49 believe Israel’s government is making a sincere attempt at peace with the Palestinians; the number is 10 points higher among Jews ages 50 and up.

The sense of being an embattled minority that makes American Jews feel like they need Israel is, somewhat ironically, the same reason they’re growing more and more uncomfortable with it. They look at the Palestinians and see echoes of their own experiences; they cannot understand why their fellow Jews are making the choices that they make.

This has manifested in a recent flowering of new American Jewish organizations, like the liberal lobby J Street and the anti-occupation activist group If Not Now, that try to give voice to these concerns (Israel has long had anti-occupation activist groups). These organizations explicitly bill themselves as counterpoints to the older, more stolidly pro-Israel Jewish groups like AIPAC, with mission statements that are explicitly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Jews can care about Israel, these organizations say, while still abhorring many of its policies.

This is a tricky balance, one BDS threatens to upend entirely. BDS asks American Jews to cut themselves off from Israel, pointing to tragedies like Monday’s as proof of the state’s irredeemability. This is not a message that most American Jews are open to, at least not yet.

If presented a binary choice between supporting Israel and cutting themselves off from it, the vast majority would take the former. But if given some kind of middle-road option, one that allows them to take pride in Israel’s Eurovision win and condemn its killing of Gaza protesters, many would take that happily.

The growth of the BDS movement has the effect, probably unintended, of repolarizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on religious lines, of forcing Jews to pick between Israel and its enemies. At a time when diaspora Jews are actually drifting away from the Israeli government, and many are becoming willing to act against it, it’s hard to see this as a good development — from anyone’s point of view.

Update: An earlier version of this piece referenced news reports on about a specific Palestinian killed in the fighting which have since been retracted. The reference has been removed.