My colleague Dana Goldstein has a thoughtful Passover essay exploring the tensions between the artificial certainty that Hebrew schools frequently pair with zionism and the relentless questioning that's been the hallmark of Diaspora Judaism:
Hebrew School taught me that Israel was the Jewish people's answer to the Holocaust, and that its open immigration policies for Jews would prevent the occurrence of another genocide. In medieval and early-modern Europe, laws often prohibited Jews from owning weapons or serving in the military. One teacher told us that Jewish men were regularly forced to stand by, idly, as Gentile brutes raped their wives and daughters. But in Israel, the Jewish people would no longer be weak, effeminate, or intellectualized. In Israel, we became sabres, or prickly pears -- still sweet and loving internally, but proudly tough and dangerous on the outside. In Israel, we would carry machine guns. So we teach Jewish children about Hannah Senesh, the brave Zionist poet who parachuted behind German lines to warn Jews about the death camps, but not about Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political philosopher who declared herself in complete "opposition" to post-war Zionist politics. "Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbors," Arendt wrote of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, which was enabled by Great Britain and the United States.
Read the whole piece. And if you haven't, read Phillip Roth's Operation Shylock
, which brilliantly explores many of the same issues.