Re: How well are we preparing students?

I’m with those who question whether Israel-advocacy training is either necessary or possible, a position I think best expressed by Jay Goldmintz. I’d like to examine a couple of points in a little more depth, though.

First, I think we should distinguish between imparting debating skills, which in the best case would allow our kids to hold campus anti-Zionists up to public ridicule and cause bystanders to throng to the Zionist cause, and imparting a solid Zionist education, which would somehow prevent them from themselves being swayed by attacks on Israel. I have nothing to suggest regarding the former – I can’t remember the last time I convinced anyone of anything, and while I’m sure that others are more talented, I rather suspect that it’s a difficult thing to teach and to practice.

Regarding the latter, I’m just plain confused, because I have no idea why anything more than a cursory knowledge of Israel should be necessary. How many of the kids don’t know that the Jews have historical ties to the land? How many of them don’t know that the surrounding Arab states declared war on Israel from the very start, and that the dispossession of the Palestinians overwhelmingly occurred in the context of that ongoing war. How many don’t know that Israel is a Western-style democracy? How many don’t know that the Arab governments, including the PA, are not? How many believe that Israel sends its soldiers to wantonly murder Arab civilians? How many don’t believe that the Arabs send their soldiers to wantonly murder Israeli civilians – in fact, civilians of all kinds?

These are the kind of basic facts that even the New York Times can’t obscure completely. They’re not jingoistic; they don’t foreclose on the possibility of making concessions to the Arabs; they don’t refer to – and therefore don’t deny – the problems of keeping a hostile Arab populace in check with minimal interference in their lives. They don’t deny the difficulty of Israel’s surviving without having made peace with its neighbors – if anything, they highlight it.

They should, however, incline any normal person hearing that Israel should be subjected to a boycott to say “Excuse me?” All these kids have enough information to know that anybody claiming that Gaza is a big concentration camp is either evil, stupid or nuts (I would not discount the possibility of more than one). They have enough information, in general, to realize who are the Good Guys in this story, which should cause them to wonder about those people on campus making them out to be the Bad Guys.

Therefore, it seems to me that if the kids are actually being swayed by anti-Zionist rhetoric, it’s evidence of a problem more fundamental than not knowing Jewish History or not being emotionally tied to Israel. Deal with that problem – whatever it is – and Israel advocacy will take care of itself.

By-the-way, I think it equally weird that there are kids who hit campus thinking that Israel is a “city on a hill” and then do an about-face on finding that it’s not true. It’s weird they should think that in the first place, and even more weird that once their eyes have been opened they think the anti-Zionists make sense. Maybe it’s like Chesterton’s statement that when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing – he believes in anything.

Michael Berkowitz