The issue here is education. In our Hebrew and day schools, we teach a one-sided history of Israel. There is a fear that if we teach kids about all the bad things Israel has done, they’ll come out anti-Zionists. So we hide the hypocrisies. We discuss the triumph of the Six-Day War while failing to mention the countless political blunders that preceded the Yom Kippur War. We rush through the 1980s, ignoring the Sabra and Shatila massacres and skipping to the First Intifada and the peace agreements of the 1990s that Yassir Arafat ruined in 2001.
It’s the easy way out. To teach Zionism as we wish it could be taught. But these kids show that doesn’t work. The end result seems to be we end up sending Jewish youth to Israel to get drunk and (apparently) learn nothing. There is another side to this, and maybe if we at least recognized it in our education, we wouldn’t come off as ignorant fanatics. More importantly, we’d be better soldiers for Zionism and Israel. You can’t expect the Arabs to |
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