Since October 7, I’ve lived in a strange place. Not a physical place, but a condition: a limbo between two worlds that both say “You don’t belong here.”In Israel, I’m hated for opposing a war that many say they don’t support but still fight in, defend, or explain away as necessary. Abroad, I’m no longer welcome among those who say that all Israelis are colonizers. I’m too Israeli to be a victim and too resistant to be a patriot. I’m in exile, even when I’m at home.I’ve spoken publicly against this war from the very beginning. As a theater director, I’ve staged plays too politically charged to be performed in Israel, as well as the English-language premiere of a play about the siege of Gaza. I refused to serve in the army and have advocated against the occupation for years.None of that seems to matter. I am Israeli, and that has become a verdict.At a Shavuot dinner with my extended family, a relative complained about Arab food-delivery drivers. “These Arabs only know how to do two things with packages,” she said. “Steal them or blow them up.”I told her that she sounded like a racist.The whole table erupted into a debate about the war—one that everyone claimed to be against, even though one family member is a combat medic and another is enlisting. “What are you even doing here?” the host said to me. “What right do you have to speak? You didn’t serve.”My father tried to defend me: “My son is a citizen. A pacifist. His views are sometimes hard for me to hear, but I respect them. This is a democracy. He has a right to speak.”“If this was at your house,” the host snapped, “I’d get up and leave. But it’s my house.”In other words: You leave.The car ride home from Jerusalem was more than an hour. None of us spoke—not me, not my mother, not my father. The silence sat in the back seat, holding everything we didn’t know how to say.A few days later, one of those family members texted me and said that with the views I hold, I should relinquish my Israeli citizenship.I find it hard to judge this family member. He feels trapped in an impossible position: He is the father of a soldier fighting a war he himself doesn’t support; he is traumatized by the events of October 7. His anger is not abstract—it’s personal, protective, real.A week later, I went to a concert in Tel Aviv with my father. An all-female group called Ha’Ivriot—the Hebrew Women—performed the songs I grew up on, the songs my father grew up on. The entire audience sang along. So did I. And then, in the middle of a verse, I started crying. What will become of this language? I wondered. What will become of this culture? We’ve managed to ruin it all.In early spring, I attended a conference in Europe for cultural leaders from around the world. Forty participants had come together to imagine a common future. I arrived hopeful. I left hollowed.Three participants never spoke with me, never made eye contact. My resistance to the war, artistic track record, activism—none of it seemed to factor in. Then, on the second-to-last day, one of them spoke during a public session about feeling psychologically unsafe at the gathering because, in their words, “the killer is in the room.” I understood instantly. The killer was me.I didn’t respond. What was there to say? That I’m “one of the good ones”? There is no sentence that can soften a person’s decision to see you as irredeemable. Any response will only deepen the charge.[Read: The problem with boycotting Israel]A few days later, I flew to Athens to help my girlfriend—also Israeli—set up her new life. She’d left Israel, unable to live with what our country had become. I joined her for a stretch, staying in her new neighborhood, trying to build something resembling a rhythm.A Greek friend who runs an NGO invited me to a picnic in the park. I sat on a blanket next to a young artist from Cairo. We talked about Athens, about art. I liked him. And then he asked where I live.“In between Israel and the U.S.,” I answered.He stood up, without a word, and walked away.Later that same evening, a Greek theater director said to me, “I’m sorry, but I’m very upset by the situation in your country. By your genocide.”I told him that I, too, was very upset. That my girlfriend had left Israel because of it. That I’ve spoken out, and stood against it.He blinked. I could see the machinery of his assumptions short-circuiting. He seemed not to know what to do with the three-dimensionality of the person in front of him.Each morning, walking my girlfriend’s dog, I tried to feel ordinary. But graffiti was everywhere. Some of it called for a free Palestine—which I wholeheartedly support. But other messages stopped me cold: Save a life. Kill a Zionist. And, When an Israeli asks for coffee, serve him a coffee, beside a stencil of a scalding cup hitting a face. There was no room in those slogans for someone like me. Even the walls had made up their mind.I understand the rage. The atrocities we’re witnessing—livestreamed, unrelenting—make empathy almost impossible. In a world of such suffering, simplification can feel like survival.[Read: Israel plunges into darkness]So I ask myself: Where should I go, as an Israeli pacifist?My own relatives question whether I belong in Israel, because I criticize the troops in Gaza for the killing and starvation of Palestinians. Abroad, a theater colleague once told me to “go back to where you came from”—that I don’t belong in the land where I was born but in the lands where my ancestors faced pogroms and the Holocaust. Nuance has no currency in a world addicted to absolutes.Of course, there are far greater tragedies than mine. Palestinians are being killed in Gaza, and Israeli hostages are still in captivity. I carry the weight of those horrors daily. I’m not comparing my suffering with theirs. But I do believe that if we want a different future, we need space to speak from wherever we are—even from the uncomfortable middle.If both home and abroad demand allegiance over inquiry, and purity over complexity, what space is left for someone who stands for the right of both Palestinians and Israelis to live on the land?When dissent is silenced as betrayal in one place and dismissed as irredeemable in another, who is allowed to imagine something other than perpetual war?