1,500 Israeli soldiers will attend Jewish summer camps in North America this year — we must oppose this normalization of genocide

 

This summer, 1,500 Israeli soldiers will attend Jewish summer camps across North America. They will act as ambassadors for Israel as it carries out ethnic cleansing across Palestine. The Jewish community must reject this normalization of genocide.

It’s June, which means a similar scene is playing out at tens of thousands of Jewish houses across the continent. Duffel bags dug up from basements. Toiletries laid out on carpeted floors, emergency trips to the drug store for one final item. Last-minute clothing decisions. Bags of carefully curated candy. Tearful midnight goodbyes to school friends. For so many of us Jewish North Americans, the summers of our younger years mean one thing: sleepover camp. Unfortunately, it’s not just Jewish kids, teenagers, and twenty-somethings getting ready to go to one of the hundreds of Jewish camps in North America. At a not insubstantial number of these camps, Israeli soldiers will also soon be in attendance, sleeping in cabins, giving guitar lessons, and telling their rapt, doe-eyed campers stories of heroic daring and the importance of maintaining Jewish power at all costs.

Called shlichim, the more Zionist camps on the Jewish camp spectrum—because, to be clear, this is far from all summer camps, some of which are proudly progressive, others just secular and not interested—invite these Israeli soldiers (or Israelis who have just finished in the IDF, a very thin distinction) to act as ambassadors to Israel, and to further the ideological bonds between diaspora and ethnic nation-state. According to The Jewish Agency for Israel, the organization responsible for recruiting and placing Israeli soldiers at the camps, in 2023 around 1,500 shlichim worked at 158 camps. As Jacob Gurvis explains in an April 2024 article in the Times of Israel, “While the number of roles has remained steady, the Jewish Agency for Israel, which runs emissary placement, says more Israelis applied to work at camps this summer [the summer after October 7] than in any previous year.”  An article in The Canadian Jewish News from July 2024 states plainly that some of the Israeli soldiers arriving at Camp Northland B’Nai Brith in Ontario, Canada, were “on a navy warship or in Gaza only two weeks before starting camp.”

What’s so shocking about all this is how proud the Jewish Agency and the Jewish media are of this mutated version of the deadly exchange, how out in the open it all is to anybody willing to do a Google search. What is a meaningful moment of cultural transmission and Zionist-diaspora outreach for some is, for the rest of us, an unfathomable crime: fifteen hundred IDF soldiers spread over 158 camps across Turtle Island. How many of these fifteen hundred were on the ground in Gaza? How many demolished universities and schools and hospitals as they yelped with glee? How many sniped children in the head from afar? How many paraded on their tanks in pilfered women’s lingerie? How many danced in destroyed and looted houses with a Torah? How many dropped bombs from airplanes? How many controlled drones from a Tel Aviv office building, raining down fire and death and leaving shredded bodies and lifeless Palestinian corpses in their wake?  (more...)

1,500 Israeli soldiers will attend Jewish summer camps in North America this year — we must oppose this normalization of genocide