Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) recently posted a video of a meeting with young Jewish constituents who came to lobby him in support of H.R. 3045, the West Bank Violence Prevention Act. I watched it twice. Not because I was interested in the bill—I already knew what it was—but because of the kids.
They were poised. Articulate. Passionate. They quoted Torah. They shared personal stories about visiting Israel. And they asked their congressman to sanction Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria, whom they repeatedly called terrorists. Each of them read from papers they held in their laps. These weren’t kids thinking out loud. They were delivering lines someone had written for them.
The visit was organized by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism as part of its L’Taken advocacy program, which brings teens to lobby on the movement’s legislative priorities. Which means the talking points these kids delivered weren’t their own conclusions. They were the institutional policy positions of the organization that sent them.
A congressman with 2028 presidential ambitions was happy to receive them; after all, Jewish youth showing up to validate anti-Israel legislation is political gold. But I’m not interested in Khanna’s career strategy. I’m interested in what happened to these kids before they walked into that room.
Because somebody taught them this. And that’s the part that should keep us up at night.
Let’s go through what they actually said.
One speaker opened with Deuteronomy 10:19—“Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”—and used it to argue that Jewish ethical tradition essentially prohibits Israel’s presence in the West Bank.
But this is not what that text means. The commandment to love the stranger is about individual ethical conduct within a just society. It has never—in any serious tradition of Jewish learning—been read as a prohibition on Jewish national self-defense or sovereignty. What this teen was doing, whether they knew it or not, is called proof-texting: pulling a verse out of context to dress up a political position as religious wisdom. It’s a technique. Someone taught them to do it.
Another teenager described Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria as people who are “brutally murdering innocent Palestinian families” and said this behavior is “overlooked or even ignored by the Israeli government.” They identified themselves as “reform Zionists” and declared that “by settling in the West Bank and terrorizing innocent civilians, we are contradicting our own morals.”
Let’s start with the language itself because it’s a tell. These kids used the word “settlers” as if it were a neutral descriptor. It’s not. The word “settler” is a framing device, one that casts Jews living in the heartland of their own civilization as colonial interlopers on someone else’s land.
You don’t “settle” a place your ancestors lived in for three thousand years. Jews didn’t arrive in Hebron, Shiloh and Jerusalem on a ship named the Mayflower. These are the places where Jewish civilization was born—where Abraham purchased a burial plot, where Joshua entered the land, where David ruled and Solomon built.
The word “settler” erases all of that. It makes Jewish presence sound temporary, illegitimate, and reversible. And once you’ve accepted that word, you’ve already conceded half the argument—because you’ve adopted the vocabulary of people who believe Jews don’t belong there at all. The fact that these Jewish teens used this language fluently, without hesitation or qualification, tells you everything about what they were taught.
Or more precisely, what they weren’t.
Roughly 500,000 Israelis live in Judea and Samaria. The vast majority are families who moved there for affordable housing, religious connection and community. To label these communities as a terrorist enterprise is not moral clarity. It is defamation, and it’s the exact language used by organizations whose goal is to delegitimize Israel’s existence.
Are there instances of violence by extremists among the residents of Judea and Samaria? Yes.
They are real, they are wrong, and Israel’s own security agency, Shin Bet, has investigated and warned about them. But the framing these kids were given—that this violence is systematic, government-sanctioned, and the primary obstacle to peace—is not analysis. It’s a prefabricated narrative.
And it requires something very specific: the complete erasure of Palestinian terrorism from the story.
Which is exactly what happened in that room. Not one of the youths mentioned Palestinian violence. Not once. They didn’t name Hamas. They didn’t name Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Lion’s Den or any of the armed groups operating out of Jenin and Nablus (Shechem). They didn’t mention the Palestinian Authority’s pay-for-slay program, which is a policy that financially rewards families of terrorists who murder Jews.
They didn’t mention Oct. 7 as anything other than a date after which “tension escalated.” The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is reduced to a timestamp. A contextual footnote. Something that apparently made violence by Israeli extremists worse, rather than something that revealed the genocidal intent of Israel’s enemies.
And then, there was the young man who described hearing missile alarms in Jerusalem—missiles fired by Hamas and PIJ from Gaza—and feeling the terror of running to a shelter. The Iron Dome intercepted those missiles. The Israel Defense Forces saved that child’s life. The teen’s own mother whispered, “Don’t worry, they are only used in defense.” And the mother was right. But by the end of the video, this same speaker had recast the IDF as complicit in terrorism. The army that stopped the missiles that would have killed them is now the villain in their story.
I want to be very clear: I don’t blame these kids. They’re doing what they were taught to do. They absorbed a narrative, and they’re performing it with sincerity. That’s what makes it so effective for someone like Khanna—and so devastating for the Jewish community.
The narrative they absorbed has a very specific structure. Jewish power is suspect. Jewish presence on contested land is inherently violent. Israel’s primary moral obligation is not to defend its people but to restrain itself—endlessly, unconditionally—in the face of enemies who seek its destruction. And the highest expression of Jewish values? Advocating for sanctions against other Jews.
That is not Jewish ethics. That’s an ideology. And these kids didn’t come up with it on their own.
The bill itself—H.R. 3045—is worth a brief look through this lens. It was introduced explicitly in response to Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the United States. It has zero Republican co-sponsors. The one Palestinian entity sanctioned under the predecessor executive order, the Lion’s Den, is an amorphous group with no legal identity, no bank accounts and no assets to freeze. That sanction had zero practical effect.
Meanwhile, Israeli citizens had their bank accounts frozen without due process, without being charged with any crime and without any mechanism to defend themselves. This is what these Jewish teens were lobbying for. This is what their education prepared them to champion.
I run Club Z, a Jewish teen education and advocacy organization. Our students learn the same ethical texts that were quoted in that video—Deuteronomy, Leviticus, the whole canon. But they also learn context. They learn that Torah doesn’t exist in a vacuum—that the same tradition commanding love of the stranger also commands the Jewish people to settle and defend their land.
They learn the history of Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, which predates the modern State of Israel by 3,000 years. They learn about Palestinian rejectionism—the offers of statehood that were refused, the institutionalized incitement in Palestinian textbooks, the glorification of terrorists in public squares named after them. They learn to ask the question that was never asked in Khanna’s office: If the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is the obstacle to peace, why was there no peace before a single Jewish community existed there?
Our students would never walk into a congressional office and call their fellow Jews terrorists. Not because they’re uncritical—they’re fierce debaters, and they challenge me regularly—but because they know the difference between self-criticism and self-destruction. Jewish tradition has always made room for vigorous internal debate, for questioning authority, for holding our own to account. What it has never made room for is bearing false witness against your own people to serve someone else’s political agenda.
The Jewish community spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on education. We should be asking what that investment is producing. If the output is young Jews who walk into a congressman’s office, call their fellow Jews terrorists, say nothing about Hamas, say nothing about pay-for-slay, say nothing about the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the land, then the inputs are the problem. We’re not educating but indoctrinating. And the program is running exactly as designed, just not in our interest.
Khanna got what he wanted from that meeting: Jewish young people validating a bill that singles out Israel. The question for the rest of us is whether we’re going to keep producing that validation—or whether we’re finally ready to look at what we’re teaching our children and ask ourselves why.
