Israel education, not advocacy, belongs in the classroom

I’ve dealt with all kinds of conflicts as an Israel educator during the past 25 years, and it appears steep challenges remain. According to a new survey of American Jewish voters, 22% of those asked believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and 20% younger than 40 don’t believe that Israel has a right to exist.

It’s daunting to make the classroom a safe environment for such conversations if the home and community are not. That’s why it’s important to take the stance adopted at the Center for Israel Education, which is working with several schools in the Los Angeles area and welcomed 20 teachers from Southern California to its online annual enrichment workshop on modern Israel in June.

Educators should not use their podiums to spread their political views or launch polemics. Our job is not to tell students what to think, but rather to train them how to think — an effort best accomplished by incorporating as many primary sources and diverse voices as possible.

Taking that apolitical stance and checking your biases at the classroom door comprise an empowering approach to the education about Israel for teachers and students. The educators’ job is to enable students to think critically, assess sources, understand the differences between history and narrative and between competing narratives, and to appreciate the ideals of a Jewish state and its realities, which are messy, complex and imperfect.

Israel educators should establish a tone of respectful discourse, incorporating listening and critical thinking at the beginning of the school year. It’s OK to disagree with somebody else’s opinions and ideas, as long as the discussion is based on the sources.

That’s how we teach every other subject. A literature student, for example, who wants to assert that Nietzsche or Sartre was a nihilist has to provide evidence from texts, not just cite a parent, a teacher or a social media influencer.
Educators also must help students understand the vagaries of vocabulary: What words are “loaded” and to whom? The word “occupation” means different things to different people, and there are reasons some people say Judaea and Samaria while others refer to the West Bank.

Comprehending vocabulary is a skill that needs to be taught, as are map reading and literary analysis. When we teach students these skill sets, we enable them to reach and defend conclusions based on documents and facts they’ve examined themselves.

That educational approach is far different from the advocacy model: “If you hear X, you should say Y.” My own children would have rebelled had I told them that.

We can’t engage, empower and prepare students for those tricky conversations by teaching them automatic answers or avoiding the complexities altogether. That path leads students to conclude that their teachers lied to them and to believe the worst accusations against Israel.

Instead, we must tackle those difficult topics by modeling respectful, informed conversations regardless of personal opinions about, say, whether Israel used disproportionate force in Gaza during the hostilities in May. We must provide historical context and complexity to equip our students with resilience and help them become critical consumers of information so that they can even-handedly analyze the slogans they encounter on campus and social media.

We must tackle difficult topics by modeling respectful, informed conversations regardless of personal opinions about, say, whether Israel used disproportionate force in Gaza in May.

This endeavor can’t be limited to one Judaic studies classroom; it has to be embedded into the daily consciousness and experiences of everyone in the school. It requires support from non-Jewish educators and those teaching science and math, literature and social studies. It involves school administrators, board members, rabbis and parents engaging in those same respectful, informed conversations and accepting that the best practice in Israel education is to treat it as education.
That’s how we produce thoughtful Jewish adults who can engage with difficult questions rather than drown in competing narratives.

Tal Grinfas-David is the vice president of outreach and pre-collegiate school management initiatives for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Israel Education in Atlanta and a former elementary school principal at the Epstein School in suburban Atlanta.