IDF team urges 5 Towns: Teach your children well

A key to the fight against the rise of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses may be sitting at the Shabbos tables of America’s Orthodox Zionist families. That’s the gist of a warning voiced on Sunday by IDF Sgt. Benjamin Anthony to an attentive audience at the Young Israel of Woodmere.

Sgt. Anthony said that graduates of Jewish high schools were generally unprepared to advocate for Israel when confronted by determined Palestinian supporters.

In Jewish high schools throughout the United States, “there is next to no Israeli history curriculum as part of the required teaching,” he said. “There is Jewish history [and] limudei kodesh,which is important, but Israel history is not taught with the rigor” brought to other subjects.

As a result, when Zionist students face the “Palestinian narrative” on campus, they often cannot counter it, he said. “They either turn against the story of Israel, or they are rendered silent.”

Regrettably, he said, the “most powerful voice condemning the state of Israel on campuses today is the Jewish voice.”

“If we don’t educate ourselves, someone is going to do it in our stead,” he warned.

Sgt. Anthony was joined by Israeli journalists Yaakov Lappin and Amir Tibon, at Sunday’s YIW event  that was sponsored by Five Towns area’s shuls and schools to discuss how to refute anti-Israel bias in the media and on campus.

Sgt. Anthony’s group, Our Soldiers Speak, has visited more than 370 campuses to defend the legality and morality of the IDF defense of Israel. Its speakers generally do not present their arguments at Hillels and Chabad Houses, but instead appear on neutral ground and “invite pro-, anti- and undecided” elements to participate, he said.

He called on his audience to speak out on Israel’s behalf even more forcefully than they’ve already done, warning that today’s students are tomorrow’s American policy-makers and pointing out that it’s vital to Israel’s defense that a cooperative relationship with the United States be sustained.