I’ll admit it: defending Israel can be exhausting—emotionally draining, intellectually disorienting, and at times, profoundly lonely. That fatigue is part of why I love being in Israel. Not because Israelis uniformly agree with me—they don’t—but because they don’t have the luxury of indifference. Their children, not ours, serve on the front lines. Their grandchildren don’t theorize about the ethics of sovereignty from a seminar room. They bear the burden of defending our homeland. They have skin in the game.
Once, Israel’s most existential threats came from its neighbors. Today, we are in a different era. Syria is in ruins. Lebanon is held hostage by Hezbollah. Even Saudi Arabia, quietly, sees normalization on the horizon. They’ve come to terms with a geopolitical fact: Israel is not going anywhere, and its strengths—technological, military, and moral—outweigh its vulnerabilities.
Try explaining to your kids how you can fly over Iraq and Iran and land in Abu Dhabi, then glide past the mountains of Saudi Arabia, and arrive in Tel Aviv. That surreal arc of diplomacy was once inconceivable. But for my children, Naama and Leor, it is a lived experience. And yet, paradoxically, even as hostility from the Arab world diminishes, the most vicious critiques of Israel now come from Western capitals and university campuses—from the very Jews for whom the State of Israel was built.
This is why Zionist education matters—not just historical literacy, but moral clarity. Our children must understand that to be a Zionist is not to love every Israeli government or policy. It is to love the people of Israel, the land of Israel, and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. You can disagree with policy and still raise the flag. Americans do it all the time. That is the privilege of a sovereign people. And yes—“privilege” is the right word, even in the parlance of the progressive world.
But here’s the double standard: No one demands that Russians disavow their national identity because of Putin, or that Egyptians renounce patriotism because of Sisi. Yet Jews are expected to withdraw from Zionism because they disapprove of Netanyahu. Yes, he’s corrupt and cynical. But since when does the moral legitimacy of a nation depend on the likability of its current leader?
We are often told that Israel needs better PR. I’ve never bought that. This isn’t a messaging failure—it’s a moral one. What campaign could sway those who already hate us? Would they soften if we reminded them of Auschwitz? Of six million dead? Of the 1,200 Israelis murdered, raped, and taken hostage on October 7? What brochure would win over those who deny our right to exist? We’re not fighting a misunderstanding. We’re fighting a refusal to recognize our humanity.
That’s why we must return to first principles—to Herzl and Jabotinsky, who knew that Jews needed power not to dominate, but to survive. To Ben-Gurion, who understood that Jewish idealism meant nothing without Jewish sovereignty. The State of Israel was never promised to us by the nations of the world. It was built by Jews who refused to wait for permission to live.
So what do we do?
We make Israel proximate. Not just a concept, not just a cause, but a place our children feel in their bones. We teach them the stories of exile and return, of loss and revival. We walk the land. We wrestle with its imperfections. And we love it anyway.
I’m tired of the willful naïveté—of educated Jews pretending they’ve just now discovered that the West Bank is complicated, or that the founding of a modern nation-state involved messy compromises. As if America’s founding was clean. As if any birth of any state was unmarred by violence, tragedy, and moral ambiguity.
We live in an age of infinite information and selective outrage. Our phones give us access to the full record of Jewish history, but we scroll past it for algorithmic snippets. We have PhDs and MDs, but no time for context. No one lied to you about Israel—you just chose to care about other things.
I pray that my children, Leor and Naama, grow up to love Israel—not because it’s perfect, but because it’s ours. Because loving flawed things is the essence of covenantal life. No person is perfect. No state is perfect. Zionism is not a utopian dream—it’s a Jewish responsibility.
So we come to Israel. We listen to the Muslim call to prayer echo through Jerusalem’s hills. We walk the corridors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We stand at the Kotel and remember who we are. A people returned. A people not erased. A people who built, defended, and dreamed.
To raise the next generation of Zionists, we must give them three things: memory, complexity, and commitment. Memory of who we are and where we come from. Complexity to understand the world we live in. And commitment to a future we have the power to shape.
Zionism isn’t about defending Israel’s every decision. It’s about defending the Jewish people’s right to make decisions. And that’s a legacy worth passing on.