Time for an educational homecoming

Israel education has spent decades fighting rearguard actions. It is time to advance.

The story we teach our children and the world should not begin with the Holocaust. It should begin with the fact that, after 2,000 years of exile, Jews once again walk as sovereigns on the land of their ancestors.

Our return is not a footnote to tragedy. It is the central, astonishing event of modern Jewish history. Education that treats the State of Israel primarily as a necessary refuge from annihilation turns a miracle into a medical prescription. We need the opposite: an education of pride, of homecoming, of the simple, radical truth that we are back.

This is not a call to forget the Holocaust. It is a call to stop letting the Holocaust set the emotional temperature of every conversation about Israel. “Never again” is a moral imperative born of catastrophe. It is not a positive vision of Jewish life. A people that defines itself mainly by what it refuses to suffer again remains trapped in the psychology of the victim. Zionism was never only about safety. From its earliest thinkers, it was about agency, about the recovery of a national personality that exile had eroded.

Zionist founder Theodor Herzl understood this. In his book The Jewish State, he did not merely describe a shelter; he described the reconstitution of a people that had been scattered and diminished.

Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am went further. He insisted that a Jewish state without a living Hebrew culture and a renewed spiritual center would be a hollow political achievement.

Religious Zionist leader Abraham Isaac Kook saw the return to the land as the beginning of a national and religious renaissance, not a defensive maneuver against antisemites.

Even Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, often caricatured as a pure realist, spoke of an “iron wall” as a temporary necessity so that the Jews could build something permanent and proud on the other side of it.

These were not men writing from the posture of perpetual apology. They wrote from the conviction that Jewish history was unfinished and that the unfinished business was the reclamation of the land and of national will.

That reclamation is the point. For nearly two millennia, the Jewish people lived as guests, sometimes tolerated, often persecuted, always contingent. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 C.E. did not end the Jewish presence in the land, only Jewish sovereignty. What followed was the long, grinding reality of diaspora, including legal disabilities, expulsions, blood libels, forced conversions and, eventually, industrial murder.

Against that background, the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in 1948 is not merely another chapter in a long story of survival. It is a rupture. It is the first time in almost 2,000 years that Jews possess the means, the territory and the legitimacy under international law to determine their own fate in their ancestral homeland.

To teach Zionism and Israel as a defensive necessity is to miss its grandeur. The proper educational posture is wonder. Indeed, how remarkable it is that a people dispersed across continents, speaking dozens of languages, still retained the memory of a specific landscape, a specific language and a specific claim. How remarkable it is that the same people who were told for centuries that they belonged nowhere succeeded in building a functioning democracy, a modern economy and a Hebrew-speaking society under conditions of continuous war.

That is not a story that needs to be justified by the horrors that preceded it. It is a story that stands on its own.

The accusation that Zionism is racism similarly ignores the historical record. The Jewish national movement arose in the same era as other national movements—Greek, Italian, Polish, Czech—that sought self-determination for peoples long denied it. That the Jews succeeded where many others failed does not make their success illegitimate. It makes it rare. Continuous Jewish presence in the land, archaeological continuity, linguistic revival and the explicit recognition of the Jewish people’s right to a national home in the League of Nations Mandate all stand against the claim that the Zionist enterprise was a late European invention imposed on an empty or exclusively Arab landscape.

None of this requires denying the complexities of the conflict. It requires refusing to accept a framing in which the Jewish return is treated as the original sin from which all subsequent problems flow. An education that begins with Jewish guilt will never produce confident Jews. An education that begins with the fact and pride of return, with the recovery of language, land and political responsibility will inspire the proudest Jews in centuries.

The practical implications are straightforward: Curricula, campus programs and communal messaging should lead with an affirmative story. This story is about the restoration of Jewish sovereignty, the cultural and spiritual renaissance that accompanied it, and the Jewish people regaining their dignity by living in their own homeland after centuries of residing in the lands of others.

The defensive arguments—security needs, the right to self-defense, the unique threats faced by the only Jewish state—remain necessary, but they should not set the tone. Preemptive education means planting the positive narrative first so that later attacks land on prepared ground rather than empty space.

This shift is not cosmetic. It changes the emotional register of Jewish identity. A generation raised to see Israel as the place where Jews finally came home will defend it differently from a generation raised to see it as the last available shelter. The former understands that something precious was achieved. The latter understands only that something terrible must not be repeated. Both motives can produce courage, but only the first produces joy.

Two thousand years of exile have ended. That is the fact that should dominate education on Israel. Everything else—the wars, the diplomacy, the moral debates—takes its proper place once that fact is allowed to stand at the center of the story. We are back, and we are proud. The education we offer should reflect that.