Some of my Israeli friends who live abroad have been giving me flak about my lack of ability to change Israel’s government  policies – “Why aren’t you demonstrated more? Why are you allowing the government to condemn Aiman Odeh, for example?”  And here is my answer to them –  “Where are you? Why didn’t you come back here to vote? ”  In the last elections I begged my  Israeli friends to come back to vote, and their answer was they weren’t living here so they didn’t really have the right to affect Israeli policy.  Now they must see that Israeli policy affects them wherever they are.  The fact that so many of my friends who left this country before the elections were in the opposition and left in protest of the government’s policies – has come back to bite them as well as me.  I hate to use this page to criticize people or politics, but I really miss all the people who left me – I miss their energies and their ideals – energies and ideals that have been buried and lost around the world.