Loyalty beyond me
You may be wondering:
I know we should be loyal to Israel, or at least keep our criticisms of Israel to ourselves. But I’m not sure what that means any more – let alone know how to explain it to my kids. I wish I could just tell my kids that they have to love Israel and that’s it, but I can’t. It’s more complicated than that. How do I get them to understand that you can bitch about a country that’s so important to you?
The conversation you may hold with your child:
- Who is your best friend? What makes them your best friend?
- In what way are they your best friend because of what they think of you, and in what way are they your best friend because of what you think of them?
- In what way are they your best friend because of the way they behave to you, and in what way are they your best friend because of the way you behave to them?
- If your best friend were to do something you thought was wrong, would you tell them? (For example, if your friend were to do something unkind to someone who didn’t deserve such treatment.)
- Would you stop them before they did it, or would you tell them afterwards?
- Would you tell them in private, or in front of others? Why? Why not?
Perhaps leading to:
An analogy has been established. We now have a complex example to draw on, where the particularly adult concept of “critical loyalty” lives in your child’s frame of reference. Now begins the real work, of helping your kid become friends with this country that may occasionally upset him/her…
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Why do all the examples come from a negative place about Israel?
In my experience, the initial negativity will stick and the message that we are conveying is about Israel’s faults. What is the source of all this negativity? The media? A good teacher can analyze the media and show where and how it is distorting the facts about Israel. Why do we need to teach our kids that a parallel narrative to Israel’s founding is the Naqba – unless we show it as their propaganda, to try to explain why they started a genocidal war in 1948 to eliminate Israel?. Otherwise, we are doing their work for them. They are proud Arabs and Muslims, delegitimizing our narrative and our Jewish/Israeli pride and we are not proud Jews. So our children will not be proud Jews. What we need are proud Jewish teachers – not right right wingers – who will teacher the story of Israel like every other subject is taught in school, from the history and the facts, which are completely consistent with our being proud Jews. Is Israeli society different from ours? Certainly! So are all the European societies in many ways. Are the orthodox in charge of Jewish life? Yes. We can’t have and do everything we would like, but this is true in many aspects of our lives. If we put the problems in perspective, our kids will also.
Maybe, we are a big part of the problem that we need to look into, before we come up with new systems of teaching our kids what we have not been able to come to grips with. Maybe we have come to believe too much of the poison that the media has been feeding us all these years about Israel.
Would the lead person on these programs kindly contact me?
Thanks,
Nan
we are at makom [at] jafi [dot] org, Nancy. Looking forward to hearing from you.