Ariela Rutkin-Becker wants to know what I want to know, and the bomb-loving crowd won’t tell: “What I want to know,” she wrote on Tuesday, “what burns me up at night is how are so many other American Jews not red-in-the-face, infuriated, embarrassed and righteously indignant now with Israel’s response to Gaza’s rocket-fire?” Ms. Rutkin-Becker, unwillingly and unknowingly conscripted by her temple sisterhood into the Stay-Here-in-America-but-Send-Money brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, isn’t the only one with a presumptive synagogue.

When I came back from studying abroad in Egypt, I found my own rabbi end a glowing speech about President Obama with a justification for Israel’s invasion of Gaza: Israel is “fighting evil.” Blockading Gaza into one of the world’s most pitiable strips of land, forcing its civilians to near starvation with the fanciful rationale that no, they don’t really see Hamas as the Islamic Resistance Movement it is called, and they would ultimately like to be liberated (sound familiar?) not from Israel but from Hamas. What occupation?

All this was “fighting evil.” No one batted an eyelash.

In response to Ms. Rutkin-Becker’s column, The Sun has received and published a substantial amount of critical letters this week, many of the writers of which I know from a Hillel event or two. And just as she charges, none of them were embarrassed at all.

Well, I’m a bit embarrassed, truly, to have jumped onstage at such an embarrassing part of this family drama we’re performing this week (months too late). And for me, Hamas, however violent and anti-Semitic, is not in this scene. This is the family scene, in which we take responsibility for ourselves before complaining about the neighbors. So with the utmost love and respect for my family and coreligionists, for the dead and mourning civilians on both sides, and for the Israeli soldiers, including cousins and friends who are up all night from what they have seen and done, I’ll speak the lines I have written.

Because I prefer a more honest, if angry, prose to the elaborate script that has been written for us. This script where we put on the costumes of political lobbyists, Israeli army spokeswomen or even Enlightenment philosophers and then ask how a Jew could really care about the suffering of the Palestinian? — Care enough, I mean, to get angry?

It’s beard-stroking time. “Ariela Rutkin-Becker overflows with feeling in her recent article ‘The Wrong to Remain Silent,’ but unfortunately she lets this emotion get in the way of reason,” writes a former president of the Cornell Israel Public Affairs Committee, who has apparently been reading his Descartes along with his Dershowitz. We must Reason coolly and calmly here. We shouldn’t get angry, he Reasons, because that might get in the way of our Reason.

This sounds convincing enough, until we realize this is the kind of Reason — calm, cool, very cool, strangely cool, cold, calculating — that states use to calculate their control over populations, their Wars on Terror and their blockades and offerings of civilians. Because the other side is unreasonable terrorists, unenlightened. And sure enough, this letter-writer is up to the challenge, ready to play this dreadful role in such a dreadful play — the role of the government spokesman: “In fighting back against the terrorists in Gaza, I am confident that Israel did everything it could to prevent the loss of innocent life.”

Maybe so, at least in the limited sense of warning before bombing. Israelis are not evil either — and I was always struck that many or most Egyptians I have met felt that way.

So we have on the one hand the most moral army in the world. And on the other hand, that same army perpetrating an occupation. Thus, maybe the IDF is the “most moral occupying army in the world” — only that is a paradox that could use some tinkering.

Another actor takes the stage. This one is a letter to the editor by a friend of mine, who is a really nice guy: “The underlying contention of Ariela Rutkin-Becker’s column ‘The Wrong to Remain Silent’ is fundamentally flawed. Rutkin-Becker argues that the American Jewish community is unconditionally supportive of Israeli government policies without any debate as to the justice and effectiveness of Israeli policies. This could not be further from the truth.”

He goes on to say that there is debate about Israeli policies among American Jews, so we should pat ourselves on the back for that. Of course, the best supporting evidence of his claim is the writing of Rutkin-Becker herself — and, now, a certain other columnist. He needs us in order to make this claim that there is liberal debate — which is then used to extol the common democratic virtues America and Israel share, as opposed to the “undemocratic” democratically-elected Hamas.

So the millions of dollars in aid flow and the rest of the world can’t believe it. Meanwhile, a bunch of comfy faux-military theorists sitting around New York who only wish — as I admittedly used to — that we were in the Israel Defense Forces, get all excited about “reestablishing deterrence,” since the blockade, invasion and cluster bombing of Lebanon didn’t work.

The very staging of our tragicomic play reflects, to some, the American right to free speech — a right one can indeed exercise in Israel as well. Then most of us screw with that right by using it to speak the language of the occupying army, cloaked in the language of reason and logic and even the Talmud. And all of this tells me that we ought to ditch this terrible excuse for theatre before we overshadow the Israelis’ and Palestinians’ more elegant attempts to deal with it, such as in important films like Paradise Now and Waltz With Bashir.

As for the theatrics of this important debate on campus, those who should like to keep reading from the official scripts of state, do as you please — it happens quite often in the world and I, for one, still love and respect you as friends, family and people. But others of us are writing our own scripts.

“In a free society,” writes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Some are guilty, but all are responsible.” It is wrong to remain silent, and we will not.