‘You’re Literally Brainwashed’: Jewish-School Students Speak Out

Guslits, who told me she had wanted to join the Israeli military as early as elementary school, though she never did so, said, “We were definitely taught to love Israel, to admire the IDF, to want to join it.” Schwebel said, “I do definitely remember being pretty heavily incentivized to join the army straight out of high school.” Dooley said, “It was certainly valorized to move to Israel and fight for the country.” Lippman said, “It was presented as almost a fact of life. Like, if you are Jewish, and if you care about Israel, [joining the Israeli military] is what you do.”

Smith added: “The narrative I’d been raised on was, everybody hated us, and we needed to defend ourselves. And so it does feel like you’re taking one on for the benefit of our culture, and the nation that represents our culture and our religion.”

Amir Fleischmann, meanwhile, knows multiple students who joined the Israeli military after high school. In one case, he said the student, a former friend, had been heavily influenced by the War on Terror culture at the time to want to join an army in general. But the school was “probably a determining factor” in the choice to join the Israeli military in specific, he said: “The sense they give you is that the IDF is really on the front lines. The IDF is dealing with this stuff every day, and the IDF is keeping you as a Jewish person safe in a way that it doesn’t necessarily feel like the Canadian military, which is pretty far removed from day to day life, does.”

Guslits, who also knows several students that joined the Israeli military, said something similar: “I don’t know anyone from my Jewish community who ever joined or thought of joining the Canadian Army.” She added, “They get this idea in their head that joining the IDF is the most noble thing they can do. And then they count down the four years in high school until they can go and do that.”

Amir Fleischmann added, “If you joined the IDF, you were applauded by the school, and at graduation they would specifically call out the people.” Noam Fleischmann, Amir’s brother, added that he remembers the prospective soldiers receiving standing ovations.

Several of the former students recalled that Israeli military apparel, such as t-shirts and hoodies, was trendy in high school.

They also remembered Israeli soldiers on leave or that had recently finished their service coming in to speak to students. Amir Fleischmann recalled that in 2006, a soldier who had recently fought in Lebanon spoke to his elementary school class and showed them a video of his unit bombing what was described as a “guerrilla,” which at least one student mistakenly understood to be a “gorilla.”

The former students added, however, that while schools play a significant role in Jewish Canadian youth joining the Israeli military, they aren’t the only factor.

Schwebel said, “Every Jewish institution that I was part of did this.” Appel added, “The Jewish day schools are part of a broader constellation of Jewish institutions that support what Israel is doing, and normalize it, and normalize feeling this really personal attachment to it.” He pointed to Jewish summer camps as another key component, as many others did.

Dooley, meanwhile, told me, “The Zionist education system is one big piece of a broader isolationist propaganda mode of ensuring that children end up as Zionists [...] They don’t have a point of entry into the real world until they’re 18 or something, at which point it’s so ingrained in people.”

Noam Fleischmann added: “It’s institutional Judaism. That’s what it is. This entire thing is all just built to keep Zionism alive, and this sort of Spartan military cult alive.”

---

After Graduation

---

The former students I spoke with now identify as anti-Zionists, and have come to oppose much of what they were taught at their schools. As a result, they often find themselves isolated from the vast majority of former classmates, who failed to break out of what several referred to as “the bubble.” I asked how they feel about these sorts of former classmates, and their responses included anger, embarrassment, sympathy, and sadness.

One former student told me: “The thing that I think about most is actually how traumatized these individuals are, how much they’ve absorbed and not processed the inter-generational trauma that makes it so that this is their behaviour in the face of a televised genocide.” But they added, “If you taught an entire generation of people about a genocide and those people can’t recognize another one, literally, what the fuck is hope for anything? [...] I look at my own family — Holocaust survivor grandparents, my mom, who’s their descendant — and all of them are genocidal and they can’t see it.”

Guslits said, “What really horrifies me is that if I know people who have served in the IDF, then almost certainly I know people who have terrorized Palestinian homes in the West Bank.” Amir Fleischmann told me, “I don’t have a lot of respect for them, to be honest. These people are not in my life at this point.” Dooley said, “We all have the ability to read books. It was on them a long time ago.” She added, though, that she gives a bit more leeway to teens than those her age.

Lichtman said, “The project of introducing Israel with no critique at all from like three, four years old, that’ll do it for most people, you know what I mean? You’re literally brainwashed from a young age.” She added that even when students graduate, “It’s just so much easier to stay a Zionist and stay in this very incredibly privileged vacuum of a community that there’s no real incentive for people to leave that.”

Schwebel told me she has mixed feelings: “If they’re Zionist, and they believe in that and they promote it, they do bear responsibility the same way anyone else would.” But, she added, she’s aware of the “decades-long, extremely well-funded project of propaganda that has gone into insulating these people from other realities.”

Appel, meanwhile, told me that the consequences of students attending these schools end up manifesting later on in life in shared environments where they’re exposed to non-Jews: “You see this a lot with the discourse about antisemitism on campus and Jews feeling safe on campus, and what does it come down to? It’s hearing perspectives that were withheld from you growing up and not being able to reconcile that with what you were told was the truth, and that we’re inherently victims.”

Levitan, who attended Jewish elementary school and then public high school, recalled something similar, stating: “I remember in grade nine, my math teacher didn’t grade me in the way that I thought I should have been graded, as in my math skills were not as good as I thought they were. And I attributed that to her being antisemitic. This is sick thinking, right?”

The former students I spoke with who are now parents told me they’d never send their children to these schools. The parent of the younger student said they eventually pulled their child out, and wouldn’t have sent them in the first place had they known what was to come.

When asked about whether the schools could be reformed in some way, most of the former students told me they didn’t think so. The Zionism, they said, was the point, and so stripping Zionism from the schools would not only go against what the vast majority of parents who send their kids there want, but perhaps more importantly what attracts those who help fund the schools.

The former students, nearly all of whom have been out of the schools for at least a decade, now have considerably varying relations with Judaism.

Some told me their activism is not only compatible with Judaism but motivated by it. Zaitzow, for example, said, “It’s because of my Judaism that I do my activism, for sure.”

Lippman, who described a more religious school experience than others, said, “What has saved Judaism for me is all the sort of non-Zionist stuff that I learned in school. I learned about Jewish values, I learned about how and why Jews care about social justice, why they care about reclaiming the world or repairing the world. And so I think since breaking with Zionism, my Judaism has really become more of an ethic, a way of living that isn’t centred on a place or a nation, but is centred on living the values of Judaism and really enacting them in my everyday life.”

Another former student told me: “My Judaism, my relationship with my ancestors and my own spirituality and relationship with divinity fuels my resistance work [...] I don’t know how you live through this kind of fascism without any connection to something higher.”

Others, however, feel differently.

(continues in next comment)