Sometimes I think of who I was before Corona and what followed warped my concept of self, my values, my freedom to think for myself.  My freedom to think independently of the situation around me.  

But then that was the principle of this diary in the first place – that my individual identity is connected to my environment.

I don’t know if I felt like this in the past.  But it is the case – my life has been determined by my family, my schooling, my rebellion, my acquiescence, etc.  

But the situation in recent times is one of enforced identity. Because I spend so much time reading about a Jew whose existence was determined by his Jewishness, his desire to identify with his German self, and ended because of his success as well as his failure, I keep thinking about that idea of socially enforced identity.

Today my examples center around Arabs who live here and have both identified with Israel and have not been understood by the society in general as suffering from the same situation, suffering from both directions.  How could I not identify with them?