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Israel and Zionism CommentaryBy Gil Troy
Jewish Education Winter 2002-2003
Sadly, the Jewish campus experience over the last two years has provided dramatic evidence of a massive educational
failure in the North American Jewish world. At McGill University in Montreal and elsewhere, I have seen graduates of the
best Jewish day schools in the Diaspora emotionally, intellectually, and ideologically unprepared to defend Israel or to
withstand the intense pro-Palestinian onslaught from Arabs, academics, and their fellow students. Jewish educators must
take stock of this failure, but not with the sole aim of reevaluating how we teach Israel and Zionism so that we can
produce a new, better crop of pro-Israel activists. That functionalist and all-too-often propagandistic approach is
actually part of the problem. We need true education and real ownership by our students of the facts and ideas, not a
“line” we peddle to them to pass on to others. In that spirit, we must reevaluate how we approach the entire Jewish
educational component in our schools, so that we nurture a new, more engaged, more creative, more agile, and more
committed Jewish community.
In fairness, many individuals have risen to the challenge. I have also witnessed some wonderful Jewish moments on the
McGill campus and elsewhere in the last two years. Montreal Hillel is undergoing an extraordinary revival, one that has
been in the making for about five years; it has been furthered by the birthright Israel gift to so many students and
intensified by the challenges of the Palestinian rejection of the Oslo peace process. This revival includes not just
effective Zionist activity and many student trips to Israel, individually and collectively. It also entails activities
such as a Purim party for over a thousand people that combines the sounds of a traditional Megillah (scroll)
reading with the beat of the latest dance music and the rise of what is known as “the Ghetto shul,” a mostly-student run
initiative that regularly packs over 100 traditional and non-traditional students into a second-story duplex in McGill’s
student “ghetto” for a vigorous Carlebachian Friday night tefillah (prayer) and dinner. These students understand
what too many of their peers do not, that the “fight” for Israel cannot be an end in itself, but must be part of a
broader Zionist and Jewish revival.
Alas, most students don’t “get it.” Most Jewish students enter college with a superficial and brittle understanding of
Israel and Zionism. This brittleness has negative consequences both left and right. For most, their happy-dappy, hava
nagilah, blue-and-white stereotype of Israel is so fragile that it shatters at the first hit from a questioning
roommate, let alone a hostile professor. For others, the same fragile construct leads to a smothering “Israel, right or
wrong, love it or leave it” approach that stifles dissent and helps perpetuate the popular campus stereotype of Israel
advocates and Jews as remarkably close-minded on the complex challenges facing Israel.
These “brittle” students, by the way, are usually the Israel “experts” on campus. An overwhelming majority of Jewish
students enter college without even that superficial support of Israel, with their feelings for Israel first diluted by
the ambivalent and distant approach of their parents to Zionism, then beaten down by media reports about Israeli
“oppression.” (When people ask me: “What about the students?” I always reply, “What about their parents?” The sad truth
is that ambivalence and ignorance about Israel begins – and is encouraged – at home.)
The Palestinians’ greatest propaganda victory, the culmination of a quarter-century campaign to demonize Israel and
Zionism, comes from our inability to discuss Israel or Zionism without discussing the Palestinian problem and current
events. All roads should not lead to Damascus and the other Arab capitals’ interpretation of events. Our task as
educators must begin there. Just as our feelings about the United States go ‘way beyond slavery – which was evil – and
the current president’s policies – that are always controversial – so, too, must our relationship to Israel be broad,
deep, and multi-dimensional. We also must begin with foundations – meaning the Jewish people’s deep and enduring ties to
Eretz Yisrael, (the Land of Israel) the centrality of the land in our tradition — before we get to the
“sexy” stuff, the contemporary fights that are so much more volatile and thus so much easier to teach (or at least
appear to be easy, because students can plunge into one side or another, though they pose very complicated educational
challenges).
At the end of the day, effective Israel education begins by rooting it in the right context, by rooting it in a love of
homeland, not of the fight for a homeland. We should be honest and acknowledge that Orthodox students tend to “get this”
more than secular students and that younger students tend to “get this” more than older ones. When I have traveled to
various schools in the Montreal area, I often start off by saying, “When I say ‘Israel,’ what pops into your mind?”
Religious students rooted in the centrality of Eretz Yisrael to Torah and mitzvot (commandments) and young
students engaged with “Eretz Yisrael ha-yaffa” (the beautiful land of Israel) and not the headlines, are
more likely to associate Israel with God, Torah, Jerusalem, peace, and King David than with bombs, Palestinians, pain,
and terror.
Along with context comes balance. By rooting our identification with Israel in our broader Jewish identity, we achieve a
more constructive equilibrium in two ways. First, we balance out the constant mentions in our own schools, shuls,
and homes of the oketz, the sting of modern Israeli life, with some of the dvash, the honey. How many Yom
Ha’atzmaut speeches and programs last year were about “the matzav,” the situation in Israel, and how many took
the time to celebrate some of the other headlines – the Israeli astronaut preparing to launch, the amazing medical
breakthroughs being developed daily – or, even more important, all the everyday miracles that don’t make headlines of
Jews living rich, modern Jewish lives in their altneuland, their old new homeland? We must challenge ourselves as
educators by creating imaginary scales wherein we make sure that we have two, three, four, ten, one hundred positive
mentions of Israel and Zionism for every negative one – when, at the present, it is probably the reverse.
The second type of balance comes not from evening the scales, but from ballast. We need a Jewish identity anchored in
Israel, anchored in the fact that you cannot tell the story of the Jewish people without Israel and that even when we
haven’t been in total control of the land, we kept our ties to it. By defining ourselves as “exiled,” we defined
ourselves in relation to that land. If we get beyond the artificial divide of Zionism versus Judaism and see Zionism as
another dimension of Judaism, an emphasis on the national aspects of Judaism that doesn’t preclude the religious
dimension, we end up teaching Israel and Zionism in many different parts of the curriculum. From this perspective,
Hebrew becomes not just lashon hakodesh (the holy language), or, as is too often the case, the mystery code you must
crack in order to sing your Haftorah (portion of the Old Testament to be read in Shul) and get your Bar Mitzvah
presents, but also an entry point into the Israel of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our goal should be to raise a
modern Jewish community that can host Israelis in the language of the Jewish people, not force Israelis to speak English
when they come visit us here. With this understanding, Jewish history is not something sterile and distant, seemingly
“irrelevant” because not only does it have nothing to do with a future career, but also because it does not even tell
the story of where we live. Rather, Jewish history becomes the key to understanding who we are today, what we are doing
here, and what some of the challenges in Israel and in the Diaspora are. North American Jews tend to view their arrival
on that continent as the culmination of history, the high point. Perhaps we need to think about it as, if not an
historical mistake, certainly an historical anomaly, a twist of fate that was not foreordained. With this approach, the
hagim (holidays), the songs, and the tefillot (prayers) become transcendent moments wherein we blur yesterday
and today, Israel and the galut (Diaspora), and see how interconnected all these things are in Judaism. We have
become too compartmentalized and too polarized in our approaches; we need to see where the secular and the Orthodox, the
religious and the national, the Jewish and the Zionist, overlap and not just where they diverge.
By having a broad, deep, intense identification with Israel, students can learn how to be “pro-Israel” without agreeing
with every Israeli move, just as we are U.S. patriots without approving every mistake or misstep. By having a rich,
balanced understanding of the relationship between Israel and the Jewish people, we can disprove the ever-more-popular
slur that Zionism is colonialism and assert our rights as an “indigenous people,” people with a 4000-year-old link to a
land that is consecrated by our history, by our theology, and by our identity. By studying Israel in context and with
balance, our students will emerge with a robust Jewish and Zionist identity, one that can tolerate dissent and
ambiguities, one that can sustain assault and doubt, one that can be dynamic and open rather than static and defensive.
With this in mind, the Bronfman Jewish Education Centre in Montreal, under the direction of Shlomo Shimon, appointed
a committee led by a BJEC professional, Dr. Karen Gazith, to improve the Israel education in Montreal’s day schools. The
first step was coming up with seven guidelines and six goals to get the conversation rolling and to challenge the
schools to rethink their approach to Israel and to the current conflict. The BJEC then hosted a special day-long seminar
with teachers from across the religious spectrum to brainstorm about how to implement these principles in the classroom
– and within the peculiarities of the Quebec curriculum. As the teachers and administrators applied these guidelines in
the day schools, the BJEC also hosted parents’ nights to engage parents as critical partners in this process.
The guidelines, provided below, are no panacea. But, they are a start for a complicated process, with no easy answers,
wherein we try to make our ties to Israel as parents, students, and educators more fun, more meaningful, more complex,
and more lasting. The best Hasbara (explanation, propaganda, information) is good, authentic, integrated
education.
Guidelines: A Statement of Principles Re: Israel and the Current Israeli-Arab Conflict:
Ultimately we want our students to have developed the following understanding and knowledge.
Activities by grade level will be developed to support the schools as they continue to develop student competencies
in this area.
Endnotes:
1. The literal meaning of the Hebrew word hasbara is interpretation. It has also been translated as propaganda.
Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal. An American historian, he is the
author of two books about the American presidency, most recently, of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the
Challenges of Today (Bronfman Jewish Education Centre, 2001, 2002). A graduate of Young Judea, he is a monthly columnist
for The Forward and the chair of the Montreal birthright Israel task force.
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