Recently, I was invited to participate in a facilitated conversation for Jewish professionals who would be teaching about Israel in different contexts. Before the discussion could even begin, the moderator opened by acknowledging that Israel is a “difficult topic.” In order to have a healthy conversation, he explained, we would need to establish ground rules. We were going to have a conversation about the conversation.

I stopped him right there.

Courtesy/Birthright Israel

Birthright Israel participants are seen in Tel Aviv.

I told him that the very premise of his framing was not my experience. I love Israel. I am American-Israeli. I hold deep pride in that identity. I love teaching about biblical Israel, the rich and layered history of the land and, most of all, the Israeli people — their resilience, creativity and extraordinary diversity. And in the undertone of the moderator’s introduction, I heard something I was not willing to accept: I was being asked to apologize for that love, for my identity, before I had said a single word.

If every conversation about Israel begins with the premise that it is inherently complicated, divisive and problematic, then it is no wonder Israel has become so hard to discuss. When I shared this with the moderator afterward, he received it openly and told me he has a deep love and appreciation for Israel himself — and that he had been so afraid of appearing biased toward Israel that he overcorrected and went the other way. 

His reaction illustrates something important: The discomfort around Israel is now so ambient that even those who feel deep attachment to it often instinctively signal distance first. That instinct is often mistaken for nuance, but in many Jewish spaces, it has become something more like a social ritual: Before expressing connection to Israel, one is expected to demonstrate sufficient unease with it.

If we are going to infuse the next generation with pride, we must chart a different way forward. 

I often hear Jews of my generation claim that when they attended Hebrew school they were taught that Israel was perfect and could do no wrong — that the complexity of Israeli politics and history was hidden from them, leaving them ill-equipped to navigate today’s conversations. I understand that frustration.

But the answer to that frustration cannot be to teach young Jews that discomfort is the price of intellectual seriousness. Israel is not defined by its borders, its politics, its government or any particular moment in its modern history. No mature love — of family, of country, of community, of faith — is dependent on pretending imperfection does not exist. 

We understand this instinctively everywhere else. Americans are not expected to preface every expression of patriotism with a recitation of national sins. Children are not asked to introduce their parents by cataloguing every familial wound before saying they love them. Yet when it comes to Israel, many Jews have internalized the belief that visible affection is permissible only after a sufficient display of unease. That is precisely what we accept when we agree that Israel can only be discussed through the framework of conflict.

And the cost of that framing is not theoretical. It teaches Jewish young people that attachment itself is unsophisticated, that love must justify itself before it can speak. Before they have encountered Israel as a people, a culture and a living civilization, they are taught to encounter it first as a problem.

But Israel is not only a conflict to be analyzed. It is also a civilization. Israel is where the Hebrew language reemerged as the everyday spoken tongue of an entire nation. Israel is where Jews from over 100 countries met one another for the first time, discovered one another’s traditions and began weaving together a civilization unlike any other. It is the place where every Jewish holiday finds its agricultural and geographical anchor — where Sukkot celebrates an actual harvest, where Tu B’Shvat marks the budding of actual almond trees, where the landscape of the Psalms is not metaphor but memory.

For me, this is not an abstract claim. As a Mizrahi Jew I know how much is erased when Israel is reduced to a single political narrative. For centuries, Jews lived throughout the Middle East and North Africa. When those communities were expelled or forced to flee in the mid-20th century — over 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews displaced in the span of a generation — most went to Israel. The young country was not a political project for them. Israel was home in the most ancient and literal sense.

This is what gets erased when Israel is discussed only as a diplomatic controversy or military headline. Instead, the Jewish story is flattened into one narrow frame, and with that flattening comes the erasure of texture — of the immense human tapestry that Israel reunited.

When we enter every conversation about Israel under a cloud of preemptive self-suspicion, we concede that Jewish attachment to the Jewish homeland is uniquely suspect, something dangerous unless properly hedged.

And it erases something essential: Israel is not a monolith. Israel is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse societies in the world — home to Jewish communities from over a hundred countries and to citizens of many religious and cultural backgrounds, including Muslims, Christians, Druze, Baháís and others, all of whom are as Israeli as anyone. These are people whose lives and identities cannot be collapsed into a single story. To reduce Israel to a single narrative is to erase them.

We should refuse that framing. Not with hostility, and not by pretending complexity doesn’t exist — it does, and honest conversation about it is valuable and necessary. But honest conversation is different from ritualized disavowal.

No one is asking us to ignore the hard questions, but hard questions should not be the first inheritance we hand our children. Before critique, there must be connection. Before complexity, there must be belonging. Israel should enter the Jewish imagination not first as a controversy to be managed, but as a homeland, a people and a story they are allowed to love without embarrassment. That story should be the foundation of every conversation, not an afterthought.

Rabbi Yael Dadoun is a rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Or in Beachwood, Ohio.