This year Israel’s Ministry of Education released a new civics textbook, which has now become an object of controversy. Although it was compiled by a staff of educators and specialists, its creation was in part a response to right-wing criticism of the 2000 edition. Peter Berkowitz examines the Israeli left’s complaints about the new textbook, and similar debates about civic education in the U.S.:

The 2016 To Be Citizens of Israel, according to its left-wing detractors, elevates the state’s Jewish character while blurring its democratic character. It neglects the narrative of the large Arab minority that is 20 percent of Israel’s population. And it barely acknowledges the central divide in Israeli politics: [the fate of the West Bank]. . . .

[In reality], To Be Citizens of Israel, is written in [an] old-fashioned liberal spirit. It is built around Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, in which Israel’s founders pledge to “foster the development of the country for the good of all its inhabitants”; to safeguard “freedom, justice, and equality as envisaged by the prophets of Israel”; and, appealing explicitly to Arab inhabitants, to provide “full and equal citizenship.” More than a third of the book is devoted to theories of democracy. More than a quarter deals with the structure of Israeli government.

The book persistently directs students’ attention to the ambiguities and strains to which Israel’s founding principles give rise. . . . The new volume bears little resemblance to the tendentious monster of its detractors’ imaginations. . . .

[In fact, it] equips students to grasp the Israeli-Arab conflict in its fullness and complexity as well as to understand the subtleties of debates about minority rights and class conflict. Not least, the textbook enhances students’ appreciation of the blending of principles out of which Israel arose and which continues to sustain it.

In the U.S., Berkowitz writes, conservative critics of California’s new civics curriculum are similarly imbued with an old-fashioned liberal spirit that “grounds the teaching of U.S. history in study of the nation’s founding principles and constructs the curriculum around the debates about those principles”—and are provoking similarly tendentious attacks from those to their left.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.