‘How to stop arguing with your kids about Zionism: give them a hug’

Magen Inon, who frequently works with Yachad, an organisation which campaigns for a two-state solution, told an audience at Limmud: “The best thing we can do is give someone a hug. Someone can have a different opinion to me, but I still love them. I’m not going to win the argument. I’m not going to change their reality.”

Magen Inon (Photo: Yachad)[Missing Credit]

Using the story of the Garden of Eden as an analogy, with the snake representing outside influences, such as social media, and the tree representing forbidden knowledge – “information which you don’t get from parents” – he explained: “We [parents] aren’t God. We can’t force our opinion. We can only offer a way, a space, a hug and our love.”

Sharing an email he had received from a distraught parent, saying their son had become “rabidly anti-Israel” and calls all IDF soldiers “baby-killers”, Inon said that rather than trying to win him round, the parents should focus on their shared values.

“Take equality, for example. You can lean into that and say: ‘We both share these values; we both think innocent people shouldn’t be killed. We disagree on the practicalities, but we can agree on the values.’ If we go down that route, we can see that in most communities, these values are shared.”

He also said that rather than focusing on events of the past, and even the present, move the discussion to focus on a vision for the future of the Middle. “Ask your children: ‘What would you like the future to look like?’ Maybe you could find a shared idea about the future. We get hung up on certain words like ‘Zionism’, ‘baby-killers’ and ‘genocide’. Let’s put words aside for now and ask our kids: ‘What’s the change you want to see?’”

Inon, himself a father, also suggested viewing the “generational tension” as a positive development – “something I haven’t heard yet in the community”.

He said: “It’s incredibly annoying when children start to have a mind of their own, but it would be more worrying if they didn’t, even when it comes to Israel-Palestine. If children only did what their parents told them to do, they would never mature.”

Inon’s perspective provoked a lively discussion, with one participant in her 20s saying: “Jewish communal spaces hold very traditional Zionist views, so people who don’t align with them end up going the other way. Someone needs to create a space for [different opinions].”

Within her own family, she said it was her parents who were the ones “trying to win the argument. They always want to step in with : ‘But this, but that’, while I just want to have a discussion with them.”

One parent who had joined the session said that social media was the root cause for the “inherent difference” between this generation’s “teenage rebellion” and previous ones. “Before social media was around, people might rebel, but they would then come back to hold the views of their parents. But the digital world means that the chances of coming back are unlikely, due to what people are being fed digitally.”

While Inon described social media as “terrible” – saying: “If I post something which is angry, I get a lot more traction than if I post something nuanced” – he warned against using social media as a scapegoat. Instead, it was about families and communal organisations “creating those spaces where we can have discussions where we don’t agree”.

Limmud creates spaces to have these discussions. It’s about replicating them elsewhere

His views were met with scepticism by one attendee, who said familial disagreements over the Israel Gaza conflict “can’t be shoehorned into adolescent rebellion. It’s much more complicated than that.”

Another said that it wasn’t just the younger generation who felt there wasn’t a place for them to voice their views on Israel. “In every generation, people – wherever they sit politically - are struggling with knowing if they can speak out in any communal spaces.”

Carolyn Bogush, chair of Limmud, said: “Limmud creates spaces to have these discussions. It’s about replicating them elsewhere.”

In a separate session hosted by Yachad, where youth movement leaders discussed their organisations’ changing relationship with Zionism since October 7, Adam Kalechman head of programming at Zionist movement Habonim Dror, said that their members were now “very passionate about Israel. It’s very central to their being.”

Their “new challenge” was “tackling the worrying trend of lack of empathy towards Palestinians, which can bring with it Islamophobia and misogyny. This is because they get swept up in the violent rhetoric [of social media].”

He said that the way they addressed it was by taking an educational approach of “empathy first, politics second. Once people are empathetic, it’s much easier to discuss politics and facts.”

To sign up for Limmud, go to: limmud.org or click here. To sign up for livestreamed Limmud events, go to: https://limmud.org/festival/limmud-festival-2025-at-home/ or click here