Loving Israel Without Lying About It: Diaspora Jewish schools celebrate the dream of Israel. They rarely teach about the expensive slums, unpaid wages, discrimination, and daily humiliations many olim actually face.

By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

Today we celebrate Israel’s 78th birthday all over the world. Jewish day school children will be going to community marches and celebrations wearing the Israeli flag and singing Israeli songs. There will be ceremonies, music, blue and white everywhere, and the familiar language of miracle, pride, homeland, and peoplehood.

But do they really know what it is like in Israel to live there?

Are we teaching what Israel really is in the Jewish day school curriculum?

Before I made aliyah, I was in the middle of an MA in Jewish education and was focusing on Israel education. Yes, we discussed Ahavat Israel as the curricular viewpoint in schools and the problem with teaching Israel through idealized love alone, arguing that it did not account for political complexities. That critique is true as far as it goes. But after living in Israel, becoming a citizen there, and trying to build an actual life there, I would say politics is the least of the problems with Israel education.

Diaspora Jewish day schools do not teach the complexities of daily life. And I do not mean war, terror, sirens, military service, or the conflict that dominates headlines. Those things are documented enough. They are dramatic, visible, and easy to explain from abroad. What is not taught is the grinding reality of ordinary life. What is not taught is what happens when the Zionist dream becomes rent, work, landlords, bureaucracy, illness, wages, and survival. What is not taught is that loving Israel and living in Israel are not the same thing.

I learned that the hard way.

I did not come to Israel as a tourist, a teenager on a gap year, or someone looking for a decorative Jewish identity. I came as an adult, with a professional life behind me, with grief behind me, with serious ambitions in Jewish education, writing, and art, and with the hope that aliyah would allow me to build a real life rooted in Jewish time, Jewish space, Jewish continuity, and practical belonging. In my memoir, My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted, I wrote that what I lived “was not compartmentalized”: the apartments did not stay in the apartments, the cold entered the body, the body entered the school, and the lack of pay entered everything else.

That is the Israel Jewish day schools do not teach.

They do not teach the Israel where you can pay around $2,000 USD a month for an apartment with no hot water, or the same kind of outrageous sum for an apartment full of mold. These are not small sums. By North American standards, that kind of rent does not read as poverty. It suggests at minimum basic livability, ordinary dignity, and some degree of comfort. Instead, I was living in expensive slums.

They do not teach the Israel where landlords literally tell you how to live in those homes. You are charged like a tenant but treated like an unwelcome guest. You are paying an exorbitant amount for a place you are never really allowed to inhabit freely. You do not feel like someone with rights. You feel like someone being tolerated for a fee.

They do not teach the Israel where the laws are a wild west when it comes to tenants and landlords and how a lawyer can tell you when your previous landlord decided to make up a check for damages that you never gave them that it does not matter about the evidence: he is a dentist or doctor, you are not, he is reputable because of his profession; you are a single woman, a teacher, a new immigrant, and no matter what you will not be believed.

That is not some isolated misunderstanding. That is discrimination.

It is discrimination against fellow Jews. Discrimination against women. Discrimination against the single person versus the married one. Discrimination against the economically vulnerable. Discrimination against the immigrant. Discrimination against the person with illness or disability whose need for stability is treated as weakness rather than reality. These are forms of discrimination we could never stand for in North America. We would not stand for a woman paying $2,000 a month to live with mold or no hot water. We would not stand for a landlord policing how a tenant lives in her own home. We would not stand for someone being treated as inherently less credible because she is single, female, foreign, and without social protection. Yet in Israel too often this is normalized, excused, or brushed aside as if the real offense is not the exploitation but objecting to it.

They do not teach the Israel where another landlord tried to stab me with a screwdriver when I moved out, and the reason for her rage was that I had a small five-pound dog. They do not teach the Israel where daily life can become a series of humiliations that would sound unbelievable if people were not living them every day.

And Facebook groups make one thing very clear: my story is not isolated. It is widespread. It is happening especially to olim. The housing exploitation, the labor exploitation, the social contempt for vulnerability, the way people get trapped between idealism and predation, these are not one woman’s strange anecdote. They are part of a pattern.

That pattern matters because it is absent from the way Israel is taught.

They also do not teach the Israel of economic humiliation.

I want my story about teaching in the school and not being paid but 4,800 NIS, the equivalent of about $1,600 USD, for nearly six months, while the public school ghosts you and refuses to give you the rest of your pay, which was low enough even in full, around $7,500 USD. I want people to understand what it means when institutions use your labor, need your work, observe you, judge you, and then vanish when it is time to pay what they owe. In my memoir I wrote about how “real work became administrative ambiguity,” and how institutional language shrank what was actually happening.

That is another Israel not taught in Jewish day schools.

Not the Israel of Start-Up Nation. Not the Israel of innovation and ingenuity and beaches and brunches and clever slogans. The Israel where labor can simply be extracted from a vulnerable person and then reclassified as confusion. The Israel where support becomes surveillance, where bureaucracy becomes evasion, and where real obligations are dissolved into silence. The Israel where instability at home enters the classroom and then the institution pretends the resulting strain is your character flaw. The memoir is explicit that the lack of pay entered the mind, the meal, the bus ride, the doctor’s visit, the ability to move, and the ability to think beyond the next immediate problem.

Again, this is not politics in the way diaspora schools usually mean politics. This is labor. This is class. This is housing. This is illness. This is gender. This is disability. This is economic inequality more blatant than anywhere else in the Western world.

And that inequality has to be talked about honestly.

Because yes, there is beauty in Israel. There is the beauty of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the streets, the light, the beach in Tel Aviv, the walkability, the intensity of Jewish time, the joy of living a life in Jewish rhythm, the fact that Shabbat is not a private eccentricity but part of the atmosphere of the place. There are communities that can be welcoming. There is a kind of Jewish belonging that is real and powerful. In the memoir I wrote about loving Jerusalem, its walkability, the beauty of German Colony, the rhythm before Shabbat, and the “fragile promise of ordinary belonging.”

But beauty does not cancel brutality.

And this is where I am not harsh enough if I do not say plainly what needs to be said about the pundits and writers who preach Israel to the diaspora.

There are oleh writers and pundits who speak about Israel while living how the other half lives. They can afford their own homes. They have significant savings. They work American-paying jobs or have family support or social insulation. Their aliyah experience is different from someone who is single, renting, working there, and living without a safety net. In Israel, you can literally live across a very narrow street from someone and live two completely different lives. One life is buffered by property, savings, and security. The other is shaped by rent, precarity, indignity, mold, missing hot water, and the constant instability of not fully controlling the place you are paying so much to live in. Yet when they write about Israel, they write as if their protected reality is the national reality.

What is unforgivable is when those living the protected life still present themselves as interpreters of Israel to the diaspora. When people who call themselves Zionists, who understand basic standards of decency, and who know how badly others are being treated are still not appalled, what they offer is not insight. It is delusion dressed up as moral authority. Israel would be a better country if more of its defenders stepped up for those being mistreated rather than preaching love of country from a place of insulation.

Too many of these diaspora-facing pundits are preaching a version of Israel that is not just incomplete but delusional. Some are so insulated that they genuinely do not know the real Israel anymore. Others know enough and choose not to say it because the fantasy sells better. What they feed the diaspora is not the real Israel. It is an airbrushed theology of aliyah. It is sentiment in place of truth. It is myth presented as witness.

When these people tell you to eat ice cream for breakfast to celebrate Israel, wave a flag, enjoy the beach, or luxuriate in the emotional joy of Jewish sovereignty, they should also tell the truth about the real Israel. They should tell the truth about the tiny overpriced apartments, the mold, the lack of hot water, the predatory landlords, the labor exploitation, the open discrimination, the contempt toward the single woman, the way a married life with family backing and property protection is not the same country as the one experienced by the vulnerable renter.

Otherwise they are perpetuating the same idealistic Ahavat Israel that is taught in diaspora Jewish day schools.

And that is exactly the problem.

I could not continue that degree in Jewish education because it did not represent reality. I could not teach it that way anymore. I could not participate in an Israel education that asks for devotion while refusing honesty. The problem is not simply that Ahavat Israel leaves out political complexities. The problem is that it leaves out the moral, economic, and social realities of life. It leaves out what Jews do to other Jews in Israel on a daily basis when power, class, gender, and bureaucracy are allowed to operate without conscience.

Real Israel education should include the beauty of the cities, the streets, the beach in Tel Aviv, the tourist element, the intensity of Jewish time, the miracle of Jewish sovereignty, and the fact that communities can be welcoming. But it should also include the ugly realities that happen Jew between Jew on a daily basis there. It should include the tiny apartments rented at obscene prices, the mold, the cold, the missing hot water, the landlord domination, the unpaid wages, the blatant economic inequality, the exploitation of olim, and the discrimination directed toward women, single people, the disabled, the poor, and the unprotected.

It should teach that aliyah is not only spiritually meaningful. It can also be materially punishing.

It should teach that one of the ugliest realities in Israel is not only what enemies do to Jews, but what Jews can do to one another.

That is not anti-Israel. That is the most serious pro-Israel argument there is.

Because the point of loving Israel should not be to preserve a fantasy. It should be to make the country better for the Jews who actually live there, and especially for new idealistic olim who come believing they are joining not just a state but a people.

So on Yom Ha’atzmaut, yes, we can celebrate Israel’s existence. We should celebrate its existence. But we should also teach and be aware of the ugly realities. We should teach the truth about the real Israel. We should demand that Israel do better for all Jews, and especially for the idealistic olim who arrive with hope and discover instead exploitation, contempt, and conditions they would never have accepted in North America.

Let the children wear blue and white. Let them sing the songs. Let them celebrate. But let us stop lying to them.

Israel is not only the dream. It is also the rent, the mold, the hot water that does not come, the landlord who tells you how to live, the check someone can make up and still be believed over you, the paycheck that never arrives, the loneliness of the single olah, the discrimination fellow Jews can inflict on fellow Jews, and the demand that a Jewish state do better by its own.

That would be a real Yom Ha’atzmaut education.

That would be honest.

And that would be an Israel worth loving in truth rather than delusion.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)