Our kids are let down over Israel

The refusal to allow any critical voices leads to students not having the tools to defend Israel

JEWISH SCHOOLS in the UK are failing to properly educate students about the Israel / Palestine conflict. It’s vital that this issue is addressed so the next generation of students are prepared for conversations on campus. Many Jewish schools refuse to talk about or even acknowledge the Palestinian narrative in any meaningful way. This is a huge disservice to students, not only depriving them of a basic understanding of history but limiting their effectiveness as pro-Israel activists.

I can only speak from personal experience, but frankly the ‘Israel education’ I received (if I can even call it an education) was appalling. In Year 12 we watched Entebbe the movie, had one lecture on the War of Independence and another on Theodore Herzl. Armed with our ‘mythbusting’ propaganda booklets, we were told that we were now ready to defend Israel from the thousands of antisemites and anti-Zionists lurking on UK campuses.

Considering how much time we spent talking about Zionism at school, the amount of money invested in schlepping 90 students around Israel for three weeks and the number of hours we spent belting out the Hatikvah in school assemblies, the least one would expect to leave a Jewish school with is a half-decent understanding of the conflict. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The lack of education students receive on the conflict is not an accident. When I emailed my school and tried to get Solutions Not Sides to give a talk to the Sixth Form, my school refused, stringing together some excuse about the syllabus on Israel being planned months in advance.

Petitions have been circulated by parents trying to ban Yachad (a Zionist anti-occupation movement) from Jewish secondary schools. The claim made by those that started the petition is that “Yachad is hostile to Israel”.

You may not agree with Yachad or the work it does, but it represents a significant chunk of the conversation people are having about Israel on campus and in the real world. Refusing to listen to Yachad’s opinion doesn’t make it go away, and it’s important that students learn about the merits and the drawbacks of what these organisations are saying.

As someone who chaired my school’s debating society, I learnt early on that sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “la, la, la” at your opponent is not an effective way of convincing people that you are right. Yet this what many Jewish schools are doing. They are having conversations about the Israeli war of independence without mentioning the Palestinian view, the Nakba. They’re having conversations about Judea and Samaria without talking about occupation. They’re having conversations about the IDF without talking about the impact that checkpoints have on Palestinians.

By not allowing our children to think about the complexity of the conflict, we harm our activists more than we help them.

It certainly harmed me when I first tried to speak out in defence of Israel, against the incessant and unfair barrage of abuse it gets. Not engaging with Israel-sceptic organisations from an early age didn’t make me a better activist. It made me naive.

How am I meant to have coherent conversations about Israeli settlements if I don’t know what a settlement is? How am I meant to fight BDS if I’ve never been allowed to talk about it? How am I meant to talk about life for Arabs in Israel if I’ve never spoken to an Arab?

Letting our children listen to criticism of Israel won’t make them hate it. Surely we can trust them to understand nuance and complexity without worrying that they’re going to become dogmatic BDS activists.

And if we don’t give them the chance to hear the other side of the story, it will cause so much more harm.

I’ve seen too many university students, frustrated with the mainstream community’s approach to Israel, abandon Zionism entirely. Acknowledging that Israel has its flaws does not make me less of a Zionist. It hasn’t stopped me standing up for Israel on campus and fighting antisemitism.

My sympathy for the Palestinian people didn’t make me less effective as I protested against Corbyn, or helped get the University of Bristol to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, or helped organise a “falafel and a fact” stall in response to “Israel apartheid week”.

Our young Israel activists deserve better. I promise you: we young people are smart and can cope with reality, complexity and nuance.

Now give us the education we deserve, so we can start taking more informed opinions to campus and use them to defend our beautiful homeland.

How am I meant to fight BDS if I’ve never been allowed to talk about it?