Overhauling “Israel Education” Begins with a Middle East Curriculum

Executive Summary

• Israel education, in the Diaspora and in Israel itself, teaches Zionism and the Holocaust while leaving out the geopolitical and theological context of Middle Eastern history.
• Existing programs prepare students to engage anti-Zionist narratives without giving them a deep understanding of the region that produced them, leaving gaps in both identity and advocacy.
• A ten-part MENA curriculum, deliverable in 10–20 hours through existing school, camp, and youth-movement infrastructure, is designed to close this gap, giving young Jews a more rooted understanding of Israel and a stronger foundation for Jewish identity.

The figures of young black-clad Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, standing during a long ovation after winning the Special Jury Prize for NAZA, a documentary accusing Israel of systematically killing Gazan civilians,¹ are an omen of the growing tendency among Jewish youth to adopt the propaganda and attitudes of Israel’s enemies.

The numbers prove this. A three-wave study of Jewish undergraduates through spring 2024 found that 10–15 percent opposed a Jewish state in Israel-Palestine and 27 percent were unsure; among self-described “very liberal” Jewish students, 34 percent opposed it outright, against 8 percent of conservatives.² Roughly a third of American Jews aged 18–34 now identify as anti- or non-Zionist,³ and British polling shows a similar generational pattern among those in their twenties.⁴

The knowledge gap extends beyond Jewish students. In a JCFA poll of 500 American adults, 40 percent, and half of those under 29, could not say whether jihadism mandates Muslim rule over non-Muslims, and only about 60 percent connected 9/11 to radical Islam.⁵ The authors, Dr. Irwin Mansdorf and Dr. Charles Jacobs, recommended integrating modern Middle Eastern history into high school and university curricula.

The Failure of “Israel Education”

The “Israel education” offered in Jewish day schools, in after-school programs, and even in Israeli schools presents Israel as a Western-style democracy while neglecting its Middle Eastern geopolitical and ideological-theological context. This inadvertently creates a double standard that judges Israel as a Western state, while it must function within its regional reality.

Conventional Israel education programs concentrate on Zionist intellectual history, state-building, and wars, and underemphasize what explains today’s headlines, from the Ottoman collapse and Pan-Arabism to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s export of jihadism. When young Jews turn to college for answers, they find Middle East courses framed in “woke” postcolonial narratives that cast Israel as a settler-colonial project, with some adopting those views.

Israel’s own school system has a parallel gap. A 2026 Haaretz investigation by Or Kashti found that the history curriculum, formally updated in 2003 to run through the mid-1990s, has in practice frozen at the 1973 Yom Kippur War: the Lebanon wars, both intifadas, the Oslo Accords, and the Rabin assassination are absent from annual guidelines and matriculation exams, as members of the ministry’s own advisory committee confirmed.⁶ Tel Aviv University education historian Avner Ben-Amos calls it “a deliberate desire to cast a screen of ignorance over the students”; committee members cite limited teaching hours. Israel’s three-year matriculation elective, “The Arab World and Islam,” draws few students because of its intense commitment: it’s seen as a specialist track, not the general familiarization all students need.

Why Zionism Isn’t Enough

The gaping hole in both Diaspora and Israeli Jewish identity is partly because of the ignorance of the half-century from the Yom Kippur War to October 7. Even commendable new efforts still focus on Zionism rather than the region. Einat Wilf’s “Zionism and Anti-Zionism” seminar, taught at Georgetown in 2021 and now a Tikvah Fund course, usefully traces anti-Zionism’s roots in Soviet propaganda, Arab nationalist manifestos, and postcolonial theory, but remains a Zionism-and-its-critics course.⁷ The Jewish Agency’s Makom lab offers Campus Ready, a 14-session modular curriculum for high-school students, now piloting with eighth graders.⁸ It candidly confronts the anti-Zionist narratives students will meet on campus. Still, its core unit, “Counternarratives,” like Wilf’s course, examines the arguments made about Israel rather than the region that produced them.

There is another way. At Akiba Yavneh Academy in Dallas, teacher Orly Fass launched a mandatory eleventh-grade course, “The Modern Middle East,” whose first five weeks cover the region’s ethnic and religious groups before introducing Israeli history, “so when we come to Israeli history, it won’t be in a vacuum.”⁹

Reframing and Balancing the Israel Curriculum

For young Jews to understand their own history, heritage, and identity, they must understand the wider Middle East and North Africa, including the Arab worldview, Islamic rejectionism of the Jewish state, and the terrorist organizations that enact it. There is a direct historical through line between the dhimmi experience of Jews in Islamic lands and Israel’s post–October 7 reality. Education that ties the state’s founding almost solely to the Holocaust leaves Zionism exposed to charges of “Holocaust inversion,” the claim that Jews now oppress Palestinians as the Nazis did Jews, and neglecting the subject of Jewish dispossession and subjugation under Muslim rule leaves unanswered the claim that Zionism “privileges the whiteness” of Ashkenazi Jews.

Without a MENA lens on Islamism and Arab nationalism, Palestinian identity is likewise treated as sui generis, divorced from the history of exclusion that denied Kurds, Copts, Assyrians, and Amazigh recognition or sovereignty. Students also need to understand the doctrine, invoked in Hamas’s founding charter, that land once under Muslim rule is an Islamic endowment (waqf) that cannot be ceded, a belief that still animates Israel’s enemies from Shiite Iran and Hizbullah to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, and Turkey.

Breaking the Educational Konseptzia

After October 7, Israeli security forces reassessed hakonseptzia, “the concept,” the assumed-sufficient deterrence doctrine. Israel’s education also needs to change its konseptzia and give young Jews a new arsenal of knowledge. Israel’s government has committed 100 million shekels to Diaspora Jewish education, mainly to raise day-school enrollment,¹⁰ but without the right curriculum, young Jews will still be unequipped to handle the assault on their identity.

A Ten-Part MENA Literacy Foundation

In this spirit, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs has run a gap-year pre-college program, mentored Diaspora interns through the Jewish Agency’s MASA program, and taught Arabic to aspiring Israeli diplomats and Israeli culture to young Arab East Jerusalemites, among other programs.

A MENA curriculum for Jewish youth should also cover the Red-Green convergence of Islamist and far-left movements, Israel’s international legal standing, and the history of the political war against it. Ten to twenty hours is enough for a functional grounding. I propose the following ten-subject core for both Diaspora and Israeli youth:

1. The Middle East and its peoples. Regional geography; Arab and non-Arab peoples; religions; minorities; languages; and the modern Middle East’s political diversity.
2. Jews as a Middle Eastern people. Jewish continuity in the Land of Israel and across the Muslim world, including Mizrahi and Sephardi experience and pre-Holocaust Zionism.
3. Islam and Islamic civilization. Core religious concepts, Sunni and Shia traditions, Islamic law, jihad, and the historical status of religious minorities.
4. The modern Middle East takes shape. Ottoman collapse, European intervention, state formation, Arab nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and Arab and Islamic Socialism.
5. Political Islam and jihadism. The Muslim Brotherhood, revolutionary Iran, jihadist movements, and the distinctions among belief, ideology, and terrorism.
6. Palestinian nationalism. The PLO, Fatah, Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, and the major turning points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
7. Israel’s strategic neighborhood. Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, and the role of Hezbollah and other non-state actors.
8. War, peace and normalization. Israel’s conflicts and peace agreements, including the Abraham Accords, and the tides of regional rivalry and diplomacy.
9. Israel and international law. The legal and diplomatic history behind sovereignty, borders, occupation, and contemporary claims against Israel.
10. Ideological and information warfare. Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, Soviet and Islamist propaganda, postcolonial ideology, and the skills to assess competing narratives.

Israel education benefits from formal educational frameworks, but it may also be delivered through monthly lectures or day seminars by visiting experts at schools, camps, and youth groups. Digital options must also be made available.

Day schools and Jewish after-school programs, youth groups and camps, Knesset education caucuses, and IDF preparatory academies should seriously consider overhauling Israel’s education curriculum. Parents, teachers, and administrators must advocate for it as an expedited priority. Societal resilience begins with historical literacy.

References

1. Ben Menachem, Yoni. “‘NAZA’ Is Only the Beginning.” Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, September 23, 2026. https://jcfa.org/naza-is-only-the-beginning/. See also “Israeli-Directed Film on Gaza Killings Wins Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival.” Haaretz, September 13, 2026. https://www.haaretz.com/life/film/2026-09-13/ty-article/.premium/israeli-directed-film-on-gaza-killings-wins-special-jury-prize-in-venice/000001a0-9793-d178-a7a8-9f9f0d170000.
2. Hersh, Eitan, and Dahlia Lyss. A Year of Campus Conflict and Growth: An Over-Time Study of the Impact of the Israel-Hamas War on U.S. College Students. Report to the Jim Joseph Foundation. Jim Joseph Foundation, September 2024. https://jimjosephfoundation.org/learning-resources/a-year-of-campus-conflict-and-growth-an-over-time-study-of-the-impact-of-the-israel-hamas-war-on-u-s-college-students/.
3. Jewish Federations of North America. “Survey of Jewish Life since October 7: Israel, Zionism, and Jewish Identity.” Survey conducted March 5–25, 2025; findings released February 2026. Jewish Data Bank. https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=1277&mediaId=bjdb%5CJFNA_Survey_4_IsraelZionismInsights.pdf.
4. Boyd, Jonathan. Two Years after the October 7 Attacks: British Jewish Views on Antisemitism, Israel and Jewish Life. London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, October 6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.64359/ocifmez9g.
5. Mansdorf, Irwin J., with Charles Jacobs. “How Americans Misread Iran, Jihadism, and the Prospects for Peace.” Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, June 21, 2026. https://jcfa.org/how-americans-misread-iran-jihadism-and-the-prospects-for-peace/.
6. Kashti, Or. “Like the Lebanon Wars or the Intifadas Never Happened: Israel’s High School History Classes Got Stuck in the ’70s.” Haaretz, February 19, 2026. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-02-19/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/no-lebanon-wars-or-intifadas-israels-history-classes-got-stuck-in-the-70s/0000019c-75c9-d618-a19d-77efa3640000.
7. Wilf, Einat, and Benjamin Kerstein. Teaching Zionism: Revelations from a Skeptical Classroom. Wicked Son, 2026. Also Wilf, Einat, and Zoé Tara Zeigherman. “Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The History of Two Opposing Ideas.” Tikvah Fund. https://ideas.tikvah.org/courses/instructors/dr-einat-wilf.
8. Makom: Israel Education Laboratory, Jewish Agency for Israel. “Campus Ready: The New Student Essentials.” Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.makomisrael.org/campus-ready.
9. Fishkoff, Sue. “Ramping up—and Rethinking—Israel Education.” Hadassah Magazine, November 2024. https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2024/10/30/ramping-up-and-rethinking-israel-education/.
10. “Israel, Jewish Federations Launch NIS 200 Million Plan to Strengthen Diaspora Jewish Education.” Jerusalem Post, June 28, 2026. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-900720.