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Source: https://jcfa.org/overhauling-israel-education-begins-with-a-middle-east-curriculum/
A New Approach to "Israel Education"
(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Tirza Shorr - A third of American Jews aged 18-34 now identify as anti- or non-Zionist, according to the "Survey of Jewish Life since October 7" conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America in 2025. For young Jews to understand their own history, heritage, and identity, they must understand the wider Middle East, including the Arab worldview, Islamic rejectionism of the Jewish state, and the terrorist organizations that enact it. 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 lens on Islamism and Arab nationalism, Palestinian identity is treated as 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 that cannot be ceded, a belief that still animates Israel's enemies. A new curriculum for Jewish youth should cover Jews as a Middle Eastern people, including Jewish continuity in the Land of Israel and across the Muslim world, along with the Mizrahi and Sephardi experience and pre-Holocaust Zionism. Other topics should include Islamic law, jihad, and the historical status of religious minorities; political Islam; Palestinian nationalism; war, peace and normalization; and the skills to assess ideological and information warfare. The writer is a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center.