Oct. 7 marks the anniversary of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, an action that resulted in the deaths of some 1,200 Israelis and provoked a ferocious Israeli response that has produced thousands of casualties in Gaza.
Over the past year, some Americans have sought to celebrate this atrocity. We’ve seen numerous demonstrations demonizing Israel and demanding the destruction of both Israel and the United States. One extraordinary element of these demonstrations is that they have been joined by thousands of American college students who have no connection to the Middle East and know little or nothing about the region.
These students are entitled to their opinions. The problem is that their opinions are usually not based on knowledge. When it came to those students shouting “from the river to the sea,” for example, more than half could name neither the river nor the sea when asked to identify those locations in 2023. The particular foolishness of college groups, such as “Queers for Palestine,” a place where LGBTQ persons likely would be murdered by the locals, hardly needs discussion.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the naivete of our college students. American students are taught little about the history of their own country, much less the history of far-away places. In many of America’s public schools, history is poorly taught, and many U.S. colleges do not require a foundational course in history or government. In the classes they do take, most college students are asked to think critically and analytically. But, as every professor can attest, the average student’s capacity to think critically is hampered by a lack of knowledge. One colleague told me that his students hardly know anything about World War I or World War II other than which came first because they’re numbered.
Absent facts, students rely upon their feelings. This decoupling of opinion from knowledge is sometimes said to be characteristic of our contemporary “post-truth” polity, in which many citizens are no longer concerned with objective facts but simply accept what they believe or feel as true. A feeling requires no evidentiary foundation but, rather, creates its own reality.
What are the feelings students learn in America’s schools?
A recent report issued by the American Historical Association helps provide some answers to this question. Based upon a survey of 3,000 middle and high school teachers in nine states, the report found that curricular materials from left-liberal organizations were widely used in the nation’s classrooms. Forty-two percent of the respondents had used materials from “Learning for Justice,” produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. About 25% had used materials from the Zinn Education Project, an organization that valorizes leftist activism, and 17% used materials provided by the 1619 Project (see below). Only a small percentage reported ever having used materials from two of the more prominent conservative sources, the Ashbrook Center and Hillsdale College. The AHA report warned that some left-leaning school districts exhibited a trend of offering “moralistic cues … that seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an emotional manner, as a string of injustices.”
About 4,500 school systems have adopted the “1619 Project Curriculum,” material adapted from a series of New York Times Magazine essays designed to replace the conventional American historical narrative with one that places slavery at the center of the American story. According to this new history, the true date of America’s founding is 1619, when slavery was introduced in Virginia, rather than 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written. Crafted mainly to justify demands for the payment of reparations to the descendants of enslaved persons, the 1619 essays properly call attention to the role of slavery in American history. An untutored reader, however, namely a young student, might reach the rather erroneous conclusion that slavery was the actual centerpiece and driving force of American political and institutional development.
Such an interpretation, of course, delegitimates the U.S. as a nation. It transforms America from “the land of opportunity” into the “state of slavery.” The more widespread this belief, the more disruptive it is to Americans’ sense of identification with their nation.
“In extinguishing a kingdom of men,” observed 19th century Chinese poet Gong Zizhen, “the first step is to remove its history.”
It appears that at least some teachers view their mission as removing America’s history by presenting students, under the rubric of critical thinking, with an unfavorable view of their nation, its history, and its policies. Many of the same educators teach their students to equate Zionism with bigotry and racism. Negative feelings about Israel and the U.S. often go hand in hand precisely because they emanate from the same set of educational institutions.
In the interest of promoting a more knowledgeable discussion of the events that transpired on Oct. 7, 2023, I offer a few facts that might serve as counterweights to hostile feelings toward Israel:
Feeling 1: Israel is an ‘ethnostate’ in which the Jews monopolize political power
Fact: For better or worse, most of the world’s states, including all the Muslim states of the Middle East, are ethnostates. In most Muslim states, non-Muslims, if tolerated at all, face numerous handicaps. Israel, the so-called “Jewish state,” is quite multiethnic and multicultural. Israeli society includes Christians, Druze, Arabs, and others. Israel’s Muslim political party wields power in the parliament. Members of the Druze, an ancient Mideastern sect, hold prominent positions in the Israeli military and, as a result, exercise considerable influence over Israeli security policy.
Feeling 2: Israel is an illegitimate product of ‘settler colonialism’
Fact: The concept of settler colonialism has no real significance because it cannot distinguish one state from another. All states are products of settler colonialism. Every square inch of territory on the face of the earth previously belonged to someone else. When Europeans arrived in North America, they settled on land belonging to Native American nations that previously had seized the land from other Native American nations. Many of today’s Europeans are descendants of tribes that conquered pieces of Roman territory that the Romans, themselves, had stolen from the Etruscans, Dacians, Illyrians, and others. At worst, the Israelis are no different from anyone else.
The archeological record, moreover, suggests the Jews have a powerful historical claim to the land. The Temple of Solomon may have been built as long ago as the 10th century B.C., and the Second Temple was built in the 6th century B.C. Jews worshiped there continuously for the next 500 years. Muhammad was not born until 500 years after the destruction of the Second Temple. The Jews’ claim to what became modern-day Israel was recognized by the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. In fact, modern Israel was not created by conquest but by the U.N.
Feeling 3: Israel is guilty of brutality and oppression
Fact: Every government is capable of brutal and repressive conduct. Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century nihilist philosopher and social critic, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, had Zarathustra call the state “the coldest of all cold monsters.” Yet, if we were to rank states on the dimension of cruelty, Israel would rank well behind nearly all the states in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, where women are again being deprived of all rights.
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By failing to teach history and political affairs in our schools, we have turned our children into what the Soviets used to call “polezniye durakie,” meaning useful idiots, unwitting stooges used by political activists to further their causes.
This is why American students can be trained to chant their demands for the destruction of not only Israel but the U.S. as well. The fault is not that of the credulous students. We are to blame for allowing this to happen.
Benjamin Ginsberg, research fellow at the Independent Institute, Oakland, CA, is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, the Right, and the Jews (Independent Institute, 2024).