How an insular Jewish school shapes an uncritical Israel-first worldview

I was taught a fictionalised story about Israel, and cut off from non-Jewish life

The primary intention of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was to surface the lived experiences of antisemitism in Australia. What we’ve mostly seen, however, is the astonishing display of a Zionist community that seems incapable of seeing what the rest of us can see – that Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide. It instead shrouds itself in a cloak of self-victimisation.

To this community, Israel is the only home that matters. To describe it as their spiritual home understates the reality of it. It’s their sun around which everything constellates. It’s their frame of reference for living. It’s what drives parents, even those who struggle to afford it, to sacrifice a great deal to send their children to Jewish day school.

More than anything, these parents want a Jewish education for their children, both in the curriculum via daily Hebrew language or Jewish history and culture classes, and in their social interactions. In my experience, it functioned like a walled city where outside influences were barred at the gate, with no exposure to anything beyond a conservative, pro-Israel perspective. Ultimately, it’s the crucible in which young people’s single-minded support for Israel is continually refined to develop new strains to match its ever-evolving obscenity.

I went to a Jewish school for 12 years. I’ve attended every 10-year reunion since, and I receive the regular school newsletter available to all alumni. And every now and then there’s a wedding or bar mitzvah I go to and it’s clear that the sentiment hasn’t changed in all that time. There were only two unspoken but clearly understood KPIs for the school – telling the uncritical Zionist story and academic achievement. Each of them reinforced the other in their impact on the insularity of the institution.

No one will doubt the history of the persecution of Jews in Europe down through the centuries – well, most won’t anyway. That history has, sadly, entrenched a victim narrative in the psyche of many Jewish people that remains in large measure undiluted.

While it’s understandable, it’s been used in recent history to justify Israel’s most egregious, reprehensible and immoral behaviour, all in the name of the ‘never again’ catch cry. It’s that sentiment that’s informed the development of the guiding principles of Jewish day schools, narrowing the focus of the students to an Israel-first pinpoint.

I was raised on a diet of a sanitised, concocted history of modern Israel, both at home and reinforced through my school years by Hebrew and Religious Instruction teachers. At the heart of the fiction is the seemingly simple story that land for settlers in Palestine was purchased with funds that were raised through the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an entity established in the late-19th/early 20th-century for that specific purpose.

The intent of this version of history was to make impressionable minds believe that the acquisition of land by European Jews was an utterly benign and equitable endeavour. When the inconvenient issue was raised of the conflict after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the war of independence – known to Palestinians as the Nakba or Catastrophe – we were told that those Palestinians, living on land the JNF ‘legitimately purchased’, refused to leave.

To exercise their believed rightful claim to the land, we were told paramilitary groups had no choice but to evict them. And we were assured that those Zionist paramilitary groups, the Irgun and the Haganah, were honourable, heroic militias who served and protected the Israeli population, rather than the brutal, heartless thugs they were.

What we were never told is that the land was purchased from absentee landlords who had little to no interest in the patchwork of desert, swamp and rocky hills – land on which indigenous Palestinians had an unbroken bond for millennia. Or that only 6 per cent of the land was under private Jewish ownership in 1948. Instead, we were given to believe that the Palestinians were just intransigent for not relinquishing the land that generations of their families had owned and worked on for centuries.

The biblical version of history and its precepts is the cornerstone of the Zionist claim to the land, and that’s just how my school presented it. That this, at the time, seemed reasonable to me says a great deal about the power of the insular nature of the school environment, even though my connection to Judaism was casual at best and certainly not religious.

In the absence of any engagement with non-Jewish life or society during those formative years, one’s worldview becomes linear and single-tracked. That’s how I came to see it in my latter years at school. And that’s how the school parents wanted it.

Years later, it became an article of faith as a parent that this would not be my children’s school experience. My attachment to my Jewishness became tenuous at best, making the kids’ exposure to their Jewish heritage limited.

For us, their worldview and their encounters with life had to be more expansive. So, they went to public schools where they mixed with students from diverse socioeconomic, ethnic and religious backgrounds, with equally diverse interests and lifestyles. Three of the four of them are fluent in another language and have partners not born in Australia.

One, who lives in Germany, called me in deep distress when Israel began their murderous campaign in Gaza, not knowing what to think about his Jewish heritage when that slaughter was ostensibly being carried out in his name. We’d never talked about his Jewishness, ever, but here we were, talking about it, critically.

I’ve wondered how the conversation might have gone – if at all – had he gone to a Jewish school.

There are estimates that there are 18,000 to 19,000 Jewish school-age kids in Australia and that about half of them attend Jewish day schools. Taking those numbers as accurate, that’s a significant proportion of malleable young people who will grow up in the same sheltered environment, with the same harmful and unchallenged prejudices that will only lead another generation down a path of ignorance and hate.

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