Zionist education must teach students to understand, not fear, Zionism - opinion

Zionism has become a word many Jewish educators handle with great caution. Opponents of Zionism have spent decades loading it with meanings it never carried such as racism, and colonialism. Too many classrooms have responded by softening the term, hiding it, or reducing it to a set of approved talking points. The result is a generation that can recite defensive arguments, yet cannot say, with quiet certainty, what the movement actually is. A people that recovered their sovereignty after two thousand years of exile cannot afford an education built on discomfort with this history.

Students need to be introduced to the perspective that the Jewish people are a nation with a unique homeland, that their return to it was neither accident nor crime, and that the work of keeping a Jewish state strong did not end when the flag went up. Without that foundation, every new accusation arrives as a shock. With it, the same accusation becomes one more chapter in a story they already understand.

Young Zionists today are being asked to defend a word their teachers often treat like a liability. Some of my best students will research, write, and record voice-overs for educational materials. In some cases, they will not put their faces on camera. They worry a future employer will see “Zionist” and close the file. I never heard that fear from students a decade ago. We allowed our opponents to redefine the term, then we flinched. The remedy is not better slogans. It is better teaching.

It is legitimate to believe that Zionism did not begin in Basel in 1897. Religious Jews believe that it began when God promised Abraham the land. The Jewish people are a nation, not a denomination that happens to have a country. Judaism without the land is only one part of the story. Neturei Karta and certain progressives make the same mistake from opposite directions: they treat peoplehood as optional. Yet for a great many Jews, it is not. The covenant, the exile, the longing, the return are all one continuous claim. Modern political Zionism gave Jews the organization and the will to act on a right that was already part of Jewish tradition. We do not need to reactively justify our presence. We need to understand it.

The state alone was never treated as the finish line. Herzl did not dream of a flag and a seat at the UN so we could declare the project complete. Zionism exists also to keep the Jewish state strong, secure, and growing. Survival is not automatic. Complacency after victory is the quiet threat. Students should leave a classroom knowing that 1948 answered one question yet opened another: what kind of Jewish society will we build, and how will we protect it in a region that has often been hostile?

That requires history, not headlines. A briefing on last week’s rocket fire is not enough to educate young Zionists. Students need the larger arc, biblical kingdoms, two thousand years of exile, the First Zionist Congress, the Yishuv, the wars, the absorption of refugees, the arguments among Labor and Revisionists and religious Zionists. History gives current events their weight. Without it, young people become reactive. They do not understand the entire situation. They become consumers of news rather than participants in a living story.

There is a difference between deep education and advocacy, and we have blurred it. Real education tells the truth, the astonishing success and the missteps, the moral clarity of self-defense and the ethical strain of prolonged conflict. Advocacy tries to win the argument. Both have a place. Education must come first. Students given only polished talking points feel betrayed the first time they meet an unfiltered accusation. Students who have wrestled with complexity stand firmer. Their attachment is honest.

To explain Zionism you also have to tell the story of the Palestinians. Not grant their maximal claims, but see why the conflict persists. Early Zionists accepted partition. Israeli governments made offers. The other side answered with rejection and a political culture that has too often treated violence as virtue. Many believe it is not the job of Zionists to satisfy political demands that require Jews to surrender what they see as the heartland of their own country. Understanding the opposing narrative is necessary so students can answer it. Conceding the premise is not.

Religious importance of the land

Judea and Samaria are not an afterthought. For religious Zionists, they are the biblical core. Hebron, Shechem, and Beit El are all the hills Abraham and King David knew. Jewish communities there are not a bargaining chip invented after 1967. They are the return to places Jews never stopped naming in prayer. Applying a standard of “illegality” only to Jews is a double standard. Zionist students need to know why it can be criticized and be able to counter it.

Jewish sovereignty, security, and national success should come first when they collide with abstract universal slogans. Zionism did not arise against justice or human dignity. It arose so Jews could live those values from a position of strength instead of powerlessness. A people without a state can afford cosmopolitan theory. A people with enemies who reject its existence cannot. Particularism is not always the enemy of ethics. It can be the condition that makes Jewish ethics possible in the real world.

The movement’s original nerve was imagination. “If you will it, it is no dream.” Shrinking the vision to whatever the international community currently finds convenient contradicts that tenacity. Practical arrangements matter.

We should also stop teaching the false narratives. Zionism is not a late European invention disconnected from Torah and peoplehood nor is it settler-colonialism. Within religious Zionism, Jews are indigenous returnees, not foreign planters. The two-state formula is a policy debate, not a sacred Zionist obligation that requires abandoning the historic heartland. 

Archaeology can inspire but it cannot carry the claim by itself. Artifacts are interpreted not facts. Texts, memory, and continuous connection are the foundation. And we should stop presenting current-events panic or fear of antisemitism as the main reason to care about Israel. A relationship built only on siege eventually exhausts the spirit.

I teach students who will serve in the army, raise children here, or advocate from abroad. They do not need another layer of messaging. They need knowledge that connects them to the land and an explanation of why the state must remain Jewish and capable, and why the work is unfinished. When they know the complexities, they do not panic when they meet them. That is the education Zionism actually requires. Anything less leaves the next generation arguing about a word they were never properly taught to own.

The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published a new book, Zionism Today.