Zionism and the Miseducation of Educated People

I was recently talking with a friend, a physician in her mid-forties. She is sharp, well read, and politically far from me. When the conversation turned to Zohran Mamdani, she told me he has no problem with Jews, only with the Israeli government and Zionism.

I asked her what Zionism means. She paused and admitted she didn’t know. When I asked what she thought it meant, she described something close to the exclusion or rejection of other cultures.

Zionism has a documented meaning. In 1897 Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, where the movement declared its aim: to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law. It grew from two thousand years of Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and from the failure of European emancipation to protect Jews from antisemitism. Zionism is the movement for Jewish self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland, and it achieved its central goal in 1948.

My friend’s profession depends on investigation. A good physician takes a history, orders the right tests, and resists a diagnosis that merely sounds right. On this subject, though, she had adopted a moral position built on a term she couldn’t define, using a definition supplied by its opponents. She absorbed it the way most of us absorb political vocabulary, through headlines, campus slogans, and conversations among people who already agreed.

This is how educated people become miseducated. A smart person assumes that anything they feel confident about was learned properly at some point. A word repeated often enough in a certain tone takes on the tone as its meaning, and the person repeating it experiences it as knowledge. That confidence makes miseducation harder to correct than ignorance, because someone who believes the studying already happened has no reason to look again.

The scrutiny is also uneven. Israeli self-defense is routinely judged through the conduct of whichever government is in power, while the ideology of those attacking Israel goes largely unread. Hamas’s 1988 charter opens by quoting Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna predicting that Islam will obliterate Israel, and Article 7 invokes a religious tradition about killing Jews. Its 2017 revision still called for the “full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” and still refused to recognize Israel. On October 7, 2023, Hamas showed what that program means in practice.

Examining this requires precision. Islam is a religion practiced by well over a billion people. Islamism is a political ideology that seeks to organize state and society according to its interpretation of Islamic law, and violent Islamist movements such as Hamas pursue those goals through terror. Conflating the two is an error. Refusing to examine Islamist ideology for fear of seeming bigoted produces the same ignorance, because people stop studying what these movements declare and what they repeatedly do.

This is the environment in which voters met Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York. His clearest positions on Israel come from before he needed a citywide majority. At Bowdoin College he co-founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and backed the 2014 American Studies Association boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As an assemblyman he led BDS chants at a 2021 rally. In May 2023 he introduced the “Not on our dime!” bill, which would have let the state attorney general pursue New York charities that support Israeli settlement activity. That September he told a Democratic Socialists of America convention that when the NYPD’s boot is on your neck, “it’s been laced by the IDF.” The day after the October 7 massacre, his first statement mourned those killed “across Israel and Palestine.”

When the IDF line resurfaced during the campaign, he said he had meant joint training exercises. I can’t know any politician’s private beliefs. His earlier record shows what he argued publicly before a broad electorate became his audience, and that record is the more revealing one. To a voter who believes Zionism means exclusion, a career spent opposing it looks like a stand against prejudice.

In self-defense, I teach people to read what is in front of them. Good profiling in self-defense is disciplined attention to relevant information: behavior, positioning, language, context, and the patterns these form. Identity alone tells you little, and judging people by their group points attention at the wrong signals. The more common failure is the student who notices something real and overrides it because acting on it feels judgmental. Real situational awareness requires looking honestly at what you perceive, even when the conclusion is uncomfortable.

Political judgment follows the same discipline. Stated goals, published documents, years of public statements, and repeated actions are meaningful information. Refusing to study them because the subject is sensitive leaves a person as exposed as the commuter who ignores the man pacing the platform because noticing him felt rude.

My friend would never treat a patient’s symptom based on something she had heard in passing. Politics deserves the same standard, and educated people carry particular weight there because others assume they did the work. I keep returning to the moment she paused. A single question showed her she couldn’t say what a long-held conviction rested on. I doubt she is unusual. Many of us defend political beliefs built from words we absorbed and never examined, with the certainty of people who think the learning already took place.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh