How Israel Became Passé

This article was originally published at PresenTense.org.

I looked sheepishly at the speaker who dragged out to Waltham to speak to our Israel advocacy group. We felt rather awkward when only six people showed up to the training session, the latest in a series of pro-Israel educational events on campus.  Five of the six people were on my club’s board.

In my freshman year of college, I became president of an Israel advocacy club.  I was excited to lead a group of people in a cause that I believed in.  I learned quickly how to plan events, and advertise them so hundreds of people would show up.  But I also learned quickly that our club was not really serving our campus community, or the Jewish people, or Israel.  We were just a bunch of tools for large Jewish organizations that wanted to push their ideas on our campus.

I began college towards the end of the second intifada.  The intifada years yielded half a dozen national organizations working to defend Israel’s image.  And they did this by creating pre-fabricated programs in the form of speakers, videos, and exhibits that could be sent to campuses across the United States.

Each semester, professionals from these national organizations would invite me to meetings to talk about their available programs.  As a student club-leader, all I had to do was advertise the speaker or workshop they created.

It was a simple formula:  Established organization creates program, student on campus books the room and brings other students to the program, and presto, we were fulfilling our mission to defend Israel on campus.  The organizations measured our success by the number of people that showed up to the event.

Though the intifada ended and its news-value faded, the organizations continued to push the same programs.  We started another semester by looking through lists of pre-packaged speakers and events.  It was like ordering food at an à la carte restaurant: we’ll take one Itamar Marcus, one Wallid Shoebat, and one StandWithUs meeting with a side of the “Israel Inspires” exhibit.

We booked the rooms, we advertised.  But fewer and fewer students showed up.  And it seemed, fewer people cared about the message of these pre-fab speakers and programs.  Some students even joined with the students who would work to demonize Israel.

I soon left my post as head of the Israel advocacy club.  I stopped going to most of the Israel events on campus. I found other ways to spend my time, and other ways to connect to Israel.

But I’m left with some valuable lessons from my experience:

Firstly, when you work so hard to polish Israel’s image, the unspoken message is that Israel has something to hide. I don’t think Israel should hide anything. To the contrary, the less we hide, the faster we can fix the problems.

Can’t we think about a better way for Jews to relate to Israel than the superficial exercises funded by the established Israel advocacy organizations? If the only way we can connect to Israel is through press releases and newspaper clippings and propaganda-style speakers, something is lost.  Something huge.  We have become the make-up artists who care for nothing that is more than skin-deep.  Our superficial relationship is all about appearances.

Presented with only a shallow connection to Israel, many students stop caring altogether.  Or alternatively, they join the ranks of those who work to discredit Israel.  In turn, the Israel advocacy establishment casts the disenchanted students as the enemy. They urge the students that remain in the pro-Israel camp to work even harder to polish Israel’s image.  And the downward spiral continues.

We need a new model for Jewish campus leadership.  The pre-fab programs that I brought to campus were empty.  If there are Jewish organizations that want to get people involved with Israel on campus, why can’t they focus their efforts on training student leaders to think creatively about programming, and how best to get their fellow students involved?

Moreover, I think we need a new paradigm for our relationship to Israel.

I suggest the project paradigm: Israel is the project of the Jewish people.  It is our place, with all of its good, and all of its bad.  As much as we need to celebrate its successes, we need to accept and recognize its failures.  We should embrace those who point out Israel’s failures as the diagnosticians of our project, directing us to search for solutions. We need to support the stakeholders of our project by listening to their ideas, and giving them room to be creative rather than declaring edicts from on high. This will give meaning to people’s connection to Israel, rather than allow the relationship to corrode by focusing on the superficial.  We need our organizations to foster discussion and creativity, rather than train people to squash discussion and micromanage the message.  When we see Israel as our project, everyone’s voice is important.  We won’t just improve Israel’s image.  We will improve Israel.