They See Israel. They Don’t Feel It.

I started with the wrong question. The question was why so many educated, comfortable American Jews, and especially their children, don’t see what I see about Israel. Put that way, I had already answered it. I’d decided they were missing something and gone looking for what. Ignorance. Ingratitude. Bad teachers.

Ask it another way and it gets interesting. What happens to a bond when the danger that made it goes away?

I spent fifty years as a clinical psychologist. Attachment is a working term in that trade, not a figure of speech. I am also the child of survivors, born in Hungary less than a year after the war ended.

It reached Hungary in eight weeks. Between the middle of May and the beginning of July 1944, more than 430,000 people were put on 147 trains. Most were killed on arrival.

Nobody in the house I grew up in had ever had anywhere to go. That was the fact under everything, and nobody had to say it.

Two kinds of bond

Attachment forms differently depending on whether you are safe.

Under danger it lives in the body. You didn’t decide it. You can’t be talked out of it, because nobody talked you into it. In safety it lives in the mind. It is built out of reasons. Justice. History. What you think is right. Anything built out of reasons can be taken apart by reasons.

Both are real. For the first kind, Israel is where you would run. For the second, Israel is what lets you feel safe being Jewish where you already are.

What actually gets handed down

Not the trauma. The research on inherited trauma is shakier than the headlines, and if you build on it someone will knock it over.

What gets handed down is a way of reading the world. Safety is temporary. The ground moves. Know where the door is. It gets taught the ordinary way: what was said at the table, what was never said, how the house went quiet when the news came on.

And it weakens at every step of kinship. If your mother lived it, you don’t have to imagine anything. If your grandmother lived it, you have her voice. A great-aunt is a story. A name in a family tree is information.

Which is why October 7 did what it did. Thousands of American Jews woke that morning and found they had someone. A cousin at the festival. A friend’s son in a unit. Proximity was manufactured in a day, and the bond switched on in people who had no idea it was in them.

The part I didn’t want to find

What my generation handed our children was not mainly a bond with Israel. It was a set of values. Justice. Protect the weak. Don’t trust power without a check on it.

The bond came in the same package, and for fifty years that worked, because the two pointed the same way and nobody had to choose.

Our children got the values. All of them. They applied them to a country we had left off the list.

That is not a failure to pass something down. It is passing it down and getting an answer nobody planned for.

What the numbers say

Among American Jews over 75, 88 percent say they feel emotionally attached to Israel. Among those 18 to 34, 57 percent.

Now look at what holds. Belief in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state runs at 98 percent among Jews 55 to 74, and 76 percent among those 18 to 34.

Young Jews are arguing about what Israel does. Their grandparents hear them arguing about whether Israel should be. Those are different arguments, and confusing them does damage in both directions.

What the camera can’t show

Israel is not in a border dispute. It is fighting people who say in writing that it should not exist. Iran armed Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades, and this year it stopped using proxies and fired on Israel itself. Hezbollah spent twenty years stacking rockets on the northern border, and tens of thousands of Israelis left their homes up there for months. The country is small.

Israel’s enemies can lose many times. Israel can lose once. A camera can do nothing with that. A doctrine is not an image. Twenty years of rockets you were never shown is not an image. What is an image is what happens when Israel acts on all of it.

So the world watched three years of visible consequence with no picture of the thing being answered. And everything Israel says in its own defense is an argument. Proportionality. Comparisons. The claim that an enemy fighting from inside a civilian population owns what follows. Arguments have to be reasoned through. A photograph just arrives.

I said at the start that they don’t see what I see. Wrong verb. They see it. They don’t feel it, because nothing in their lives ever made them.

What actually works

Not explaining harder. You can’t reason a person into an attachment. The case can be airtight and still land in the wrong place.

We have known what works for twenty years. Birthright works when it works, and the itinerary is not why. Ask them a year later and most can’t tell you more history than before they left. What they came home with was a Friday night in an apartment in Tel Aviv, a soldier their own age who turned out to be funny, a hill they stood on.

I suspect, and can’t prove, that when the images came, those young people saw them differently. Not because anyone had supplied the justification. Because the pictures landed against something. A person with a bond watches an atrocity the way family does, horrified and still inside the relationship. A person without one watches as a witness. Same image. Different room.

The bond outgrowing the fear

There is a name for this in my old trade. Gordon Allport called it functional autonomy. A motive starts out serving something, a need or a fear, then cuts loose from its origin and runs on its own power. The behavior outlives the reason for it.

For my parents, Israel was an answer to a danger, and it never stopped being that. For the people who built it, it was something else, a country of their own, wanted for its own sake long before the trains ran. That is the bond Israelis have held all along. My grandchildren cannot come to it the way my parents did, because the danger is not in the room with them.

But an attachment does not have to keep the purpose it was born with. It can come loose and stand on its own, valued for what the thing is rather than for what it saves you from. In Allport’s account that is the sturdier bond, because it no longer depends on the condition that made it.

A refuge needs a threat to stay meaningful. A country you value in its own right does not.

So, concretely

Ask your granddaughter what she thinks and let her finish the sentence. Then do one thing that isn’t an argument.

The mistake every program makes is to build the relationship around Israel. Nobody keeps a friend because of a country. People keep a friend because the friend is useful, or funny, or needs them. Start from what two people want from each other and let the country in through the side door.

A founder in Haifa wants one American customer who will take his call. A grandmother in Netanya wants to teach somebody her mother’s recipe before she forgets it. Neither needs a program. They need an introduction, and then a reason to talk next week.

That is a matching problem, and matching is the one thing this century has solved. Apps already pair strangers to practice a language, to play chess, to find a startup its first customer. What nobody has built is the version where both sides are Jewish, live on opposite sides of an ocean, and have something to trade that has nothing to do with the news. Build that and the relationship forms around the trade. Israel arrives later, as the place the other person happens to live. The danger my parents lived under did one job. It made the people in danger ours. Proximity built the bond; the danger was only how we got it, and there are other ways to get it.

If you are reading this in Israel, here is what you get. An American Jew who is neither a donor nor a protester and has not come to be reassured. A customer. A cook. Somebody who messages you the morning after a siren because she has a reason to besides the news. The diaspora stops being a line in a budget and becomes a person who owes you a recipe.

Language used to be the wall, and the wall is coming down. Real-time translation now runs both ways on an ordinary phone, well enough for a conversation about sourdough or a divorce or a kid who won’t sleep. That opens the door past one-to-one. A cooking group on Tuesdays with six people in Phoenix and six in Petah Tikva. A circle for people caring for a parent. Whatever people already gather around, gathered across the ocean instead of across town, with the machine handling the Hebrew.

The calls do most of the work. A standing Thursday call about Hebrew verbs, or the pitch deck, or whether the dough rose, is a relationship. It survives a war better than a tour does, because it was never about the war. And it does the one thing no argument can. When the next images come, including the ones made to be shared, she does not meet them as a stranger weighing a case. She meets them as someone with a friend in the frame. The image still lands. It lands on a person, and a person can hold it.

Then travel, when people want to, on terms a twenty-five-year-old will accept. Not a spare bedroom. A discounted hotel or a couch found through the same network, and the week filled with people she already knows from the screen. Run it the same way in America. An Israeli who has spent eight months in a Tuesday group with people in Phoenix lands in Phoenix with six dinner invitations, not an itinerary.

These are a psychologist’s ideas and I don’t claim they are the best ones. The Jewish Agency and the ministry that funds Birthright could stand this up in a year with money they already spend on tours, and so could any Israeli city that already has a sister city in America. Somebody reading this knows a way to put an American and an Israeli in the same room that hasn’t occurred to me. The comments are open. The test is the same: when the next pictures come, does she watch as family or as a witness?

This week’s returns make the case. Among Jewish voters under thirty-five, nearly two-thirds said that money spent to defeat Israel’s critics made them less likely to vote for the candidates it was spent on. The argument, made harder, repelled the people it was meant to reach. A person on the other end of a line has never had that effect on anybody.

Grandchildren who don’t need an escape route are not a failure of transmission. They are what the survivors were trying to produce.

Give them the country instead of the fear. The language, the argument, the unfinished experiment in what Jews do once they have power. That is worth holding on its own terms. It is the only kind of holding that doesn’t